Mumbai India s financial nerve centre & biggest port is a melting pot with a population of over fifteen million.Bursting at the seams, the crowded, pulsating city is not just a city of gold but also a city of dreams it is home to the Bollywood. BOMBAY: THEN Enriched with in-depth historical research and exclusive photographs, Bombay: Then documents the transformation of the once insignificant cluster of islets into one of the most exciting spots for cultural exchange in South Asia. Among other views, the book illustrates the Mankeshwar temple and the Rajabai Clock Tower wrapped in scaffolding; the construction of Victoria Dock and the opening of its massive underwater gates; a lush and sparsely populated Malabar Hill; a rare view of the interior of a Parsi fire temple; factory scenes inside the Royal Mint and the Times of India units; what the stock exchange looked like nearly a century ago; and many breath-taking aerial shots of this beautiful island-city. Bombay: Then is a sheer visual treat through extraordinary historical photographs. MUMBAI: NOW Mumbai India s financial nerve centre and biggest port is a melting pot with a population of over fifteen million. Bursting at the seams, the crowded, pulsating city is not just a city of gold but also a city of dreams it is home to the Hindi film industry, also known as Bollywood. Mumbai: Now captures the city s chaotic but spirited and robust present, and brings this shape-shifting, elusive city to you from the stories of the first Goan migrants to the lives of native Koli fishermen; from the tradition of dabbawalas to that of cutting chai; and from the potters in Dharavi to the pink flamingos in Sewri in a series of beautiful, moving pictures that capture the many moods and faces of Mumbai.

A native of Bombay, Suketu Mehta gives us an insider’s view of this stunning metropolis. He approaches the city from unexpected angles, taking us into the criminal underworld of rival Muslim and Hindu gangs, following the life of a bar dancer raised amid poverty and abuse, opening the door into the inner sanctums of Bollywood, and delving into the stories of the countless villagers who come in search of a better life and end up living on the sidewalks. As each individual story unfolds, Mehta also recounts his own efforts to make a home in Bombay after more than twenty years abroad. Candid, impassioned, funny, and heartrending, Maximum City is a revelation of an ancient and ever-changing world.

The history is told here how, within three centuries, seven west-coast islands evolved into the Bombay peninsula, then into a flourishing center for trade. It ultimately became the cosmo politan, high-rise metropolis of Mumbai.

Mumbai has been extensively photographed over the past century. Like New York, it is a city full of men and women with aspirations of making it big in life. Mumbai is also known as a dream factory because of the overwhelming presence of its film industry, one of biggest in the world. This book collects nearly three decades of work from Raghu Rai, one of Indias foremost photojournalists. The pictures encompass life in all its manifestations from the high-rise skyscrapers to the gushing waves of the Arabian sea. It shows movement and activity that almost never ceases fairs and festivities, political demonstrations, films in the making, and the advertising and modelling scene.

'City of Gold', 'Urbs Prima in Indis', 'Maximum City': no Indian metropolis has captivated the public imagination quite like Mumbai. The past decade has seen an explosion of historical writing on the city that was once Bombay. This book, featuring new essays by its finest historians, presents a rich sample of Bombay's palimpsestic pasts. It considers the making of urban communities and spaces, the workings of power and the nationalist makeover of the colonial city. In addressing these themes, the contributors to this volume engage critically with the scholarship of a distinguished historian of this frenetic metropolis. For over five decades, Jim Masselos has brought to life with skill and empathy Bombay's hidden histories. His books and essays have traversed an extraordinarily diverse range of subjects, from the actions of the city's elites to the struggles of its most humble denizens. His pioneering research has opened up new perspectives and inspired those who have followed in his wake. Bombay Before Mumbai is a fitting tribute to Masselos' enduring contribution to South Asian urban history

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. --

For readers of Jhumpa Lahiri and Rohinton Mistry, as well as Lorrie Moore and George Saunders, here are stories on the pathos and comedy of small–town migrants struggling to build a life in the big city, with the dream world of Bollywood never far away. Jayant Kaikini’s gaze takes in the people in the corners of Mumbai—a bus driver who, denied vacation time, steals the bus to travel home; a slum dweller who catches cats and sells them for pharmaceutical testing; a father at his wit’s end who takes his mischievous son to a reform institution. In this metropolis, those who seek find epiphanies in dark movie theaters, the jostle of local trains, and even in roadside keychains and lost thermos flasks. Here, in the shade of an unfinished overpass, a factory–worker and her boyfriend browse wedding invitations bearing wealthy couples’ affectations—”no presents please”—and look once more at what they own. Translated from the Kannada by Tejaswini Niranjana, these resonant stories, recently awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, take us to photo framers, flower markets, and Irani cafes, revealing a city trading in fantasies while its strivers, eating once a day and sleeping ten to a room, hold secret ambitions close.