Princeton University Press
Mumbai Fables
Key Metrics
- Gyan Prakash
- Princeton University Press
- Paperback
- 9780691153179
- 8.8 X 5.7 X 1 inches
- 1.3 pounds
- History > Asia - India & South Asia
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
A place of spectacle and ruin, Mumbai exemplifies the cosmopolitan metropolis. It is not just a big city but also a soaring vision of modern urban life. Millions from India and beyond, of different ethnicities, languages, and religions, have washed up on its shores, bringing with them their desires and ambitions. Mumbai Fables explores the mythic inner life of this legendary city as seen by its inhabitants, journalists, planners, writers, artists, filmmakers, and political activists. In this remarkable cultural history of one of the world's most important urban centers, Gyan Prakash unearths the stories behind its fabulous history, viewing Mumbai through its turning points and kaleidoscopic ideas, comic book heroes, and famous scandals--the history behind Mumbai's stories of opportunity and oppression, of fabulous wealth and grinding poverty, of cosmopolitan desires and nativist energies.
Starting from the catastrophic floods and terrorist attacks of recent years, Prakash reaches back to the sixteenth-century Portuguese conquest to reveal the stories behind Mumbai's historic journey. Examining Mumbai's role as a symbol of opportunity and reinvention, he looks at its nineteenth-century development under British rule and its twentieth-century emergence as a fabled city on the sea. Different layers of urban experience come to light as he recounts the narratives of the Nanavati murder trial and the rise and fall of the tabloid Blitz, and Mumbai's transformation from the red city of trade unions and communists into the saffron city of Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena. Starry-eyed planners and elite visionaries, cynical leaders and violent politicians of the street, land sharks and underworld dons jostle with ordinary citizens and poor immigrants as the city copes with the dashed dreams of postcolonial urban life and lurches into the seductions of globalization.
Shedding light on the city's past and present, Mumbai Fables offers an unparalleled look at this extraordinary metropolis.
Author Bio
Gyan Prakash (born 1952) is a historian of modern India and the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. Prakash is a member of the Subaltern Studies collective. Prakash received his Bachelor of Arts degree in history from the University of Delhi in 1973, his Master's degree in history from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1975, and his doctorate in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984.
His field of research concerns urban modernity, genealogies of modernity, and problems of postcolonial thought and politics. He writes about modern South Asian history, comparative colonialism and postcolonial theory, urban history, global history, and the history of science.
Gyan Prakash is professor of modern Indian history at Princeton University and a member of the Subaltern Studies Editorial Collective.
He is the author of Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (1990), Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (1999) and Mumbai Fables (2010). Professor Prakash edited After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (1995) and Noir Urbanisms (2010), coedited The Space of the Modern City (2008) and Utopia/Dystopia (2010), and has written a number of articles on colonialism and history writing.
He has also written several books, including Mumbai Fables (2010), which was adapted into the 2015 film Bombay Velvet directed by Anurag Kashyap.
With Robert Tignor, he introduced the modern world history course at Princeton University.
Sources: W W Norton, Penguin India, and Princeton University
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