Remembering Jim Masselos, a Historian With a Unique Sensibility

The Wire

4 hours ago

History
An urban sociologist reminisces on her 40-year friendship with the Australian who contributed to understanding the urban cultures that organised early and mid-20th century Bombay/Mumbai.
Jim Masselos (1940-2025) passed away in a Sydney hospital on Tuesday, June 24, 2025.
I knew that the end was near; I had talked to him twice in April and realised that his energy was fading and he was taking longer to converse and yet it is difficult to believe that he is no more.
In April, we talked about the terror attack in Pahalgam, the changing geopolitics in the world and US president Donald Trump's attack on academia. He was also sad about what was happening to South Asian scholarship in Australia and yet hopeful that the tide would soon turn as young people realise how important it is to do academic work and research on South Asia.
I first met Jim in the early 1980s but knew of him before through a childhood friend Navaz Patuck : the Patuck family home in Pali Hill being an open house to so many passing foreigners who came to Bombay.
I distinctly remember our first encounter at Samovar, the iconic restaurant at Jehangir Art Gallery. I was doing a doctorate on Ahmedabad's early history and its textile industry and wanted to discuss the parallel trends between the two cities of Bombay and Ahmedabad, both being framed by this industry.
Our conversations soon drifted elsewhere because M.F. Hussain was sitting somewhere nearby (for long Samovar was Hussain's haunt). It allowed Jim to start talking about Bombay's culture and the contribution of the progressive movement in art to its history. Did this happen in Ahmedabad and if not, why not, he asked?
Since then, we met almost every time he came to India and our paths criss-crossed either in Mumbai or Delhi and sometimes in Kolkata and Hyderabad. Our meetings increased because by then we had a mutual friend in Alice Thorner, another constant visitor and a lover of the city of Mumbai. Our conversations (sometimes with Alice) always drifted towards comprehending the history of the city, Bombay's cultural scene, its immersion in its version of modernity and its cosmopolitan ambience, together with vigilante politics and unplanned urban growth. What did these trends have to do with post-colonial nationalism, we wondered.
High tide at Girgaon Chowpatty in Mumbai, Friday, June 27, 2025. Photo: PTI.
Jim arrived in India as part of the Colombo Plan which gave scholarships to those who wanted to study in the newly independent countries of Asia – he was one of the first Australians who took this opportunity, travelled to Bombay and completed a doctorate at Bombay University on nationalist ideas in Bombay. He stayed at the Bombay University's hostel at B. Road, Churchgate and met up with many who were studying at that time in Bombay university. Most of these students became his friends and he kept in touch with them over the next four decades as they traversed their own careers as Bombay's and India's politicians, lawyers and intellectuals – part of the newly mobile group educating themselves under the Nehruvian project of the making of modern India. Over time, I met some of them because Jim had a great gift for keeping relationships and learning the current history of India through their eyes.
During his early years in Bombay, Jim would walk around the city and discover its nooks and corners and the various neighbourhood settlements of distinct communities living in the city. As we know, this cultivated gaze impacted his historical work (which he later analysed as the intersections between space, identity and community) and allowed him to give us, the readers an insight into urban neighbourhood cultures.
Also read: Remembering Jim Masselos, the Australian Scholar of Bombay's Social History
In a recent assessment, Prashant Kidambi (2019) has suggested that Jim's distinctive contribution to Bombay's historiography can be understood at four levels. Not only did he document ways in which urban communities were historically reconstituted in the modern city but emphasised how they used their own tools of modernity to do so. Second, Jim highlighted significance of urban space in understanding the city and third, focused on how diverse forms of power have structured social relations in the city. And finally, he has also been concerned with how one form of power – nationalism – sought to acquire and exercise hegemony in the city, sometimes to its detriment.
But Jim, through these travels across the city, also became a collector of old books and that of old and new art as it was being in fashioned in Bombay. He learnt not only to become an archivist but also an art historian and a curator of art exhibitions.
In the course of his walks across south Mumbai, he started collecting old books sold on the pavements of Flora Fountain and over time accumulated publications not only of late 19th and early 20th century British and Indian authors but also official government reports on the history of the city and on India.
When I visited him in Sydney for the first time in the mid-90s, I realised that he had collected colonial documents which included almost all the Royal Commission Reports published by the British. His home had become a make-shift archive and in case anyone wanted to navigate around the rooms in his house, one had to skip and jump over these piles of books lying on the floor and find a comfortable sofa/chair that was empty of such publications. That being difficult, we would end up sitting in his kitchen or conversing at a southeast Asian restaurant at the corner of the street. (Jim was trying to donate this collection of books to a library in Sydney. However, this seemed to be the wrong time – not only was South Asian history/studies not popular in Australia but with a lack of physical space and ongoing digitalisation, no library-administrator was interested in accepting these late 19th century and early 20th century primary sources on India).
But most significantly, what was important was the art he collected as he visited the galleries sponsoring the progressive painters in the city and which he collated as he travelled around the country. He had Catholic tastes and his collection included Kutchi embroidery, pichwai, miniature paintings, a dancing Nataraj and the artwork of the Bombay progressive artist Tyeb Mehta, for example. This artwork was depicted prominently across all the available wall space in his home. Thus, in addition to being an archive, his home had become an art gallery! (Later he also collected some Australian Indigenous paintings and hung them up with the Indian paintings).
'Dancing to the Flute - Music and Dance in Indian Art'.
Jim had an exhibition of the art in his collection at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in the mid-90s. The catalogue was called Dancing to the Flute: Music and Dance in the Art of India. (In the last decade, he has donated some of these paintings to the NSW gallery, but these lie in the basement!) During this exhibition, he also organised a seminar on four decades of social science scholarship on India, giving us a lens on how he combined art and social sciences in one persona. It is then that I came to realise that Jim was also an enthusiastic art curator and his understanding of Indian art led him to collaborate with the journal Marg and the noted art historian B. N. Goswamy. In the late 2000s he brought groups of Australians to introduce them to India's art heritage and his understanding of it.
For the conference in the mid-1990s, he pushed me to write an essay on M.N. Srinivas's contribution to Indian sociology. This was what started me on my project to study the disciplinary history of sociology in India, which still continues.
During this Sydney visit, I also discovered that Jim was a brilliant photographer. I had noticed him taking photographs earlier, but when I saw the photographs on his computer, I realised that he had brought his unique historical sensibility to his photographs. Since then, Jim has brought out two volumes on photographs combining company photographs with his own current ones in a then and now text: Bombay Then and Now and Beato's Delhi (text written with Delhi historian Narayani Gupta).
In the early 1990s, Alice brought to me a project to put together a conference on Bombay. The idea, she said, came from Jim who during a breakfast conversation at Delhi's India International Centre, asked how an urban historian should write about contemporary Bombay. This led to the organisation of a conference on Bombay in December 1992 and the publication of two volumes – Bombay: Mosaic of Modern Culture and Bombay: Metaphor of Modern India. Jim wrote a paper for the second volume. But even as we were preparing the two books for publication, we (Alice, Jim and I) knew that Bombay had changed fundamentally after the 1992-93 riots and that we needed to capture the recent changes. With Alice passing away, Jim and I put together a third volume titled Bombay and Mumbai: The City in Transition. Recently, when the published fourth volume reached him, Jim stated that he had not realised that his innocent question of what it means to write on contemporary Bombay as an urban historian would lead to four volumes on the city.
Jim's contribution to scholarship was quiet but significant. Never to brag about himself, he was a soft and gentle scholar/person full of generosity for others. After Rachel Dwyer, Prashant Kidambi and Manjiri Kamat put together a Festschrift, a volume on his honour ('Bombay before Mumbai' in 2019) and Robert Aldrich organised a conference around his scholarship in Sydney in February 2020, I saw a satisfied expression on his face and in his body language, a sense of pride and fulfilment that his colleagues had honoured him and acknowledged his contributions. Characteristically, he gave a sheepish smile and silently accepted the accolades that they bestowed upon him. That was Jim.
Urban sociologist Sujata Patel retired as Professor of Sociology from the University of Hyderabad in 2018. Patel and Masselos collaborated to edit a volume on Bombay, one of four volumes that Patel has co-edited on the city.
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