By Juned Shaikh

Juned Shaikh’s richly researched and perceptively argued monograph, Outcaste Bombay: City Making and the Politics of the Poor, subverts the idea that the various processes of modernity, including urbanization and industrial capitalism, would eventually diminish caste hierarchies and engender new social dynamics. As Shaikh shows, such modernist hopes remained unfulfilled in the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial center of Bombay. Instead, “caste hid in plain sight in the city” (5). It not only sustained the growth and expansion of capitalism by facilitating industrial investments through caste and kinship credit networks but was also vital for the recruitment, disciplining, and housing of the city’s labor force. The book examines this “symbiotic relationship” between caste and capitalism by focusing on the built environment—housing policies and urban planning—and the language of Bombay’s Marxist and Dalit literature. In existing social histories of capitalism and labor in Bombay, questions of caste appear as inconsequential. Shaikh rightly points out that in the historical narrative of modern Bombay “Dalits are a marginal presence because they appear fleetingly in [official] sources like the Labour Gazette” (35). Shaikh has addressed this gap by exploring an impressive Marathi language archive and by incorporating the insights of Dalit studies into his excellent work.

Read the full book here.