Bombay Before Mumbai: Essays in Honour of Jim Masselos | Author: Prashant Kidambi, Manjiri Kamat, and Rachel Dwyer (editors) | Publisher: Viking (Penguin)
When Australian historian Jim Masselos arrived in Bombay (now Mumbai) for the first time in 1961 on a Commonwealth scholarship to study for his PhD in St Xavier’s College, he was hardly any different from thousands of people who land at the airports, railways stations and beaches of the metropolis every day. “India and Southeast Asia became important locations on the world crossroads,” he writes in “Remembering Bombay”, the final essay in the book under review, “we… (did