House, but No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898–1964 by Nikhil Rao (review)

Suburbanization in India has received scant attention in the scholarly literature: it remains an exceptional subject, inadequately historicized.¹ Most of the scholarship on peripheral urban formations in Indian cities either focuses on slums or assumes that suburban development in India has followed the pattern of Anglo-American suburbia. Contemporary popular discourse in newspapers, magazines, and real estate advertisements, as well as the professional discourse among planners and architects, appear oblivious to the fact that suburbanization in Indian cities, far from being a recent development, has a long and peculiar history that is not easily assimilated within the logic of Anglo-American suburbia as bourgeois utopia. Nikhil Rao’s House, but No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898–1964 serves as an important corrective to these misapprehensions.

By focusing on the development of the suburbs of Dadar-Matunga-Sion under the aegis of the Bombay Improvement Trust (BIT) in the first half of the twentieth century, Rao demonstrates that the suburb and apartment living in the suburbs were meaningful categories for the colonial state, the residents and property owners who invested in suburbia, and the postindependence Bombay Municipal Corporation that incorporated these suburbs to form Greater Bombay in 1957. If we wish to understand the transformation of Bombay from a colonial city of about twenty-two square miles into the megacity of Greater Mumbai encompassing roughly 186 square miles, we must understand the impetus to plan suburbs in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Initially a response to the 1896 plague epidemic, planning suburbia on the outer edges of the existing city entailed a complicated process of land acquisition. The original BIT vision was that of an upper-middle-class suburb populated with single-family dwellings. This vision eventually changed due to the exigencies of the economic depression of the 1920s and the mass migration from south India—Kerala, Tamilnadu, Andhra Pradesh—to the colonial city. Five features make these suburbs categorically different from their Anglo-American brethren: (1) these suburban developments were not accompanied by an evisceration of the city center; (2) the development took place entirely within existing city limits; (3) the primary goal was to solve the housing problem for the lower middle class who were engaged in clerical jobs in the city; (4) the class predicament of this constituency was distinctly modulated by caste and ethnic-linguistic identity; and (5) rather than single-family dwellings, the building type that came to dominate this landscape was a form of low- and mid-rise apartment or flat (initially a three-story building with six flats) designed specifically to mediate between aspirations of modern living and higher-caste mores. Not only was the dominant form of suburban housing in Bombay the low- and mid-rise apartment, Rao argues, but this building form traveled “back into the city” to become the principal form of habitation for all classes: “The suburban apartment building was thus constitutive of the city” (2).

Rao’s argument proceeds along three axes: the political economy of land that produced this suburbia, the creation and adoption of a new building type that was neither tenement nor villa, and the formation of a suburban ethnic identity that was inextricable from the built form. The chapters follow a roughly chronological thread.

Chapter 1 examines BIT’s negotiation of a variety of existing land tenures to acquire agricultural land for urban use at great cost. The process of alienation of land rights was intended to create an abstract space that could then be fragmented and disposed off to a new host of long-term lessees. Such a process of abstraction, however, would not proceed uncontested. Old ethnic and religious attachments would leave traces on the land, and new ones would shape it as another ethnic community. Rao...