Title House, but no garden : apartment living in Bombay's suburbs, 1898-1964 / Nikhil Rao

Published Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2013]

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Description 1 online resource (ix, 300 pages) : illustrations, maps Contents An Indian Suburb -- Peopling the Suburbs -- The Rise of the Bombay Flat -- The Spread of Apartment Living -- From Southern Indians to "South Indians" -- Toward Greater Mumbai Summary "Between the well-documented development of colonial Bombay and sprawling contemporary Mumbai, a profound shift in the city's fabric occurred: the emergence of the first suburbs and their distinctive pattern of apartment living. In House, but No Garden Nikhil Rao considers this phenomenon and its significance for South Asian urban life. It is the first book to explore an organization of the middle-class neighborhood that became ubiquitous in the mid-twentieth-century city and that has spread throughout the subcontinent. Rao examines how the challenge of converting lands from agrarian to urban use created new relations between the state, landholders, and other residents of the city. At the level of dwellings, apartment living in self-contained flats represented a novel form of urban life, one that expressed a compromise between the caste and class identities of suburban residents who are upper caste but belong to the lower-middle or middle class. Living in such a built environment, under the often conflicting imperatives of maintaining the exclusivity of caste and subcaste while assembling residential groupings large enough to be economically viable, led suburban residents to combine caste with class, type of work, and residence to forge new metacaste practices of community identity. As it links the colonial and postcolonial city--both visually and analytically--Rao's work traces the appearance of new spatial and cultural configurations in the middle decades of the twentieth century in Bombay. In doing so, it expands our understanding of how built environments and urban identities are constitutive of one another."-- Provided by publisher Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 277-286) and index Notes English Print version record Subject Architecture and society -- India -- Mumbai Suburban Area -- History -- 20th century Suburban homes -- India -- Mumbai Suburban Area Apartment houses -- India -- Mumbai Suburban Area Apartment dwellers -- India -- Mumbai Suburban Area ARCHITECTURE -- History -- General. HISTORY -- Asia -- India & South Asia. SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Sociology -- Urban. Apartment dwellers Apartment houses Architecture and society Suburban homes India -- Mumbai Suburban Area Genre/Form History Form Electronic book LC no. 2012043822 ISBN 9780816682102 0816682100 9781452948034 1452948038

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