'All the essays in the volume are alive with Chandavarkar's voice; his gentle intellectual power and soft revolutionary influence. They issue a timely challenge to South-Asianists of all stripes as well as a new generation of scholars to think across ossifying disciplinary boundaries and thought-clogging accepted intellectual discourses to reanimate the study of South Asian society.' The Journal of Asian Studies
1. Introduction; 2. Bombay's perennial modernities; 3. Sewers; 4. Peasants and proletarians in Bombay City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; 5. State and society in colonial India; 6. Religion and nationalism in India; 7. From neighbourhood to nation: the rise and fall of the left in Bombay's Girangaon in the twentieth century; 8. Historians and the nation; 9. Urban history and urban anthropology in South Asia; 10. Aspects of the historiography of labour in India; 11. Post-script; 12. Bibliography.