Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021. xii, 227 pp. US$30.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-295-74850-4.
Outcaste Bombay: City Making and the Politics of the Poor documents the social history of Mumbai, India’s financial capital, between 1896 and 1984. Labour historian Juned Shaikh achieves this feat in his debut monograph by offering a moving account of the symbiosis of caste and capitalism in the city, then known as Bombay. He situates this symbiosis against the backdrop of Bombay’s transforming housing policies and the eruption of revolutionary literature among the city’s Dalit communities, an overwhelming majority of whom were precariously employed in its mills and inhabited its sprawling slums. Historically oppressed across India’s villages as “outcastes,” members of various Dalit communities migrated to cities like Bombay in search of a dignified life unencumbered by caste-based discrimination; instead, they remained haunted by their caste identities. Shaikh’s account illustrates the ways in which they fought back against the conjoined oppression wrought by caste and class to imagine new social worlds.
Shaikh clarifies, at the very outset, the analytical concepts of caste and class that structure his study. He productively harnesses the debate spawned by the universal thrust of capitalism in South Asia by recognizing that “both caste and class were etched into the built form and were evident in slums/ jhopadis/ bastis of cities in the region in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries” (17). Chapter 1 illustrates this dynamic by noting the ways in which the city’s colonial administration respected the demands of the privileged castes to ensure that housing was segregated along caste lines. This policy, in addition to low wages, exacerbated the housing shortage in the city: in the author’s eloquent words, “housing and built environment became the material referent for caste in the city” (45).
The remaining four chapters build on the materiality of caste described in chapter 1 to reflect on the ways in which language, literature, and cultural politics become a battleground for the urban Dalit poor. Chapter 2 takes readers through a journey of the literary world they inhabited, describing the novels they read, the plays they wrote, and the vocabularies they deployed to appropriate Marxism. Chapter 3 reflects on the imbrications of urban planning and cultural politics while chapter 4 delineates the intellectual history of postcolonial Dalit literature. Chapter 5 situates the works of Namdeo Dhasal and Baburao Bagul within the broader tensions of Marathi literature to discuss the sexual politics in/of the city and its slums. The short conclusion serves as an epilogue to the politics of the Dalit poor in the aftermath of the collapse of Bombay’s textile mills.
Outcaste Bombay enriches the growing scholarship on the “politics of the poor,” which exposes the myth that poverty spawns passivity. These works provoke reflections on the ways in which poor people in the burgeoning cities of the Global South assert their right to housing and to the city. How do they constitute themselves, and demand to be recognized as ethical-political subjects? How do they generate new political horizons? Shaikh’s craftmanship in Outcaste Bombay reminds us of the universalist hopes harboured by the poor despite the particularistic vocabularies they might appear to deploy.
Shaikh’s analysis invites reflections on the category of “the poor.” Defining the poor as an administrative category is a notoriously tricky exercise as generations of official surveys in India and elsewhere have shown. As a politicized category, the term is even more contentious. However, it remains undefined in Outcaste Bombay: while the links between caste are clear and nicely explored through a thoughtful synthesis of the vast literature on the subject, the intersections between caste, class, and poverty would have enriched the work even further. As someone who has struggled with understanding the linkages between status, labour, and poverty in my own work, I would have appreciated any leads that Shaikh might have had to offer.
The hopefulness that informs Outcaste Bombay might appear quaint, even hopelessly naïve, to many observers. As fear, anxiety, hatred, and disappointment threaten to engulf us, it is easy to lose sight of the possibilities offered by hope. And yet, as I have argued elsewhere (for example, Indrajit Roy, “Ordering hope: Reimagining the future of citizenship,” IGDC Working Paper 3, 2023, https://www.york.ac.uk/media/igdc/papers/Ordering%20hope.pdf), hope remains stubbornly persistent, defying hatred and fear, renewing imaginations of democratic citizenship. Shaikh offers us a useful reminder of the social origins of such hope against the conjugated oppression suffered by Bombay’s Dalit poor. It is of a piece with the recent trend towards “anthropologies of the good” reacting against what Sherry Ortner (“Dark Anthropology and Its Others: Theory Since the Eighties,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 1 [2016]: 47–73) has called “dark anthropology,” which appears so attractive to social scientists. This is of course only one reason for it to be widely read, debated, and celebrated.
Indrajit Roy
University of York, York