For historian Jim Masselos (1940-2025), Mumbai was a city that was both his archive and his muse

In a seminal collection of essays published in 1978, the Cambridge historian Eric Stokes heralded the “return of the peasant” in South Asian studies. He was particularly pleased to note that “among students of the colonial revolution in South Asia the city slickers were at last quitting town”. With the benefit of hindsight, one might justifiably regard the eminent historian’s celebration as premature. Recent years have seen a pronounced “urban turn” in the study of modern South Asia. Indeed, of late, there has been a veritable flood of doctoral theses, journal articles and monographs on urban centres in the subcontinent.

Significantly, Bombay has loomed large in this burgeoning historiography. Regarded as a “totem of modern India itself”, the city has attracted an ever-growing number of scholars. They have explored its evolution as the dynamo of Indian capitalism; the making and unmaking of its myriad communities; the exercise of power at different levels; the political economy of its urban infrastructure; patterns of land use and the conflicts over “heritage”; the mutual imbrication of spaces and identities; and its contentious public culture, which has spawned the competing politics of nation, caste, class, religion and region.

Yet many of these themes were first addressed by one of...

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