Mumbai / Bombay: Majoritarian Neoliberalism, Informality, Resistance, and Wellbeing

Mumbai / Bombay is a quintessential urban expression which represents the questions and puzzles related to Indian urbanity. This book traces the various ways through which majoritarianism and neoliberal capitalist accumulation has reorganised Bombay or Mumbai in India.

The book assesses Mumbai’s present trajectories and processes as being embedded in its recent past. It looks at these changes by exploring work and labour; health and education; spatial planning and infrastructural development; politics and identity; and shows how financialisation, land speculation, deregulation, and informality have impacted the city’s culture and everyday living. The contributors to this volume analyse the consequences of these changes for women and men across ages, as they live their material and cultural lives; evaluate the role of the changing nature of work, urban infrastructure, and planning; determine its outcome for public health and education; and take a measure of its manifestation in the field of arts and culture. The volume explores the processes that reorient these changes, the socio-spatial and political implications of these on the inhabitants of the city, and the resistance and response to marginalisation.

This interdisciplinary volume will interest students and researchers of economics, sociology, anthropology, political science, public policy, development studies, and urban studies. It will also be useful to urban practitioners, planners, bureaucrats, activists, and general readers.

Sujata Patel is Kerstin Hesselgren Visiting Professor, Department of Sociology, Umea University, Sweden (2021–2022). She has been Distinguished Professor, Savitribai Phule Pune University; National Fellow, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, and a teacher of sociology at the Universities of Hyderabad, Pune, and SNDT Women’s University. Her interests include modernity and social theory, history of sociology/social sciences, urbanisation and city-formation, social movements, gender construction, and caste and class formation in India with a historical sensibility based on perspectives from Marxism, feminism, spatial studies, and post-structuralism. She has authored, edited, and co-edited 14 books and 70 papers/ book chapters, and has served as editor of several series. She has been associated in various capacities with the International Sociological Association and has been its first Vice President for National Associations. She was also the President of Indian Sociological Society.

D. Parthasarathy is Professor of Sociology, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India. He is also Associate Faculty at IIT Bombay's Centre for Urban Science and Engineering, the Centre for Policy Studies, and the Inter-disciplinary Program in Climate Studies. He has earlier worked or held visiting positions at the Australian National University, National University of Singapore, and Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. He held the India Value Fund Chair Professorship at IIT Bombay and has been Head of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Bombay and Convener for the IDP in Climate Studies. He is the author of Collective Violence in a Provincial City (1997), and has co-edited “Cleavage, Connection and Conflict in Rural, Urban and Contemporary Asia” (2013). His research and teaching interests are in urban studies, law and governance, gender and development, climate studies, and disaster risk andvulnerability. He has worked with civil society organisations, NGOs, environmental activists, government agencies, and international organisations on issues related to urban disasters and risks, climate vulnerability and adaptation, environmental justice, and coastal transformation. He has carried out collaborative national and international research projects sponsored by ICSSR, UGC, Belmont Forum, International Science Council, Ministry of Earth Sciences, Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, UNDP, Belmont Forum, and the European Union.

George Jose is Visiting Associate Professor of Anthropology, New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE. He researches metropolitan transformation in and of contemporary South Asia. His work explores the urban periphery as a site of culture and politics, urbanism in the global south, processes of work and consumption, and citizenship, rights, and marginalisation in the city. He has held research, teaching, and leadership positions in the academia and not-for-profit sectors. He was Dean of Jyoti Dalal School of Liberal Arts, NMIMS University, Mumbai; the inaugural Program Director for Asia Society India; Programme Executive with India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), Bengaluru; a Research Fellow at Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, and taught Sociology in Kishinchand Chellaram College, Mumbai, for several years.