Bombay as Archive and Muse

Bombay/Mumbai, which is now a metropolitan region, has always been versatile and fluid enough to lend itself to a limitless range of history writing, non-fiction studies and fictional works. So layered is its past that when writing on personalities who have lived in Mumbai, biographers are impelled to mention the impact of the city on their subjects and their works. For example, Saadat Hasan Manto is hailed as standing at the beginning of an important Indian literary tradition, the “Bombay fiction” (Reeck and Ahmad 2014).

Scholars and journalists have produced works on almost every aspect of the city from the colonial to the present. It is to the credit of the book under review that it manages to offer insightful perspectives, analysis and even hitherto unknown nuggets of information, apart from the available works.