For historian Jim Masselos (1940-2025), Mumbai was a city that was both his archive and his muse

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27-06-2025

In a seminal collection of essays published in 1978, the Cambridge historian Eric Stokes heralded the 'return of the peasant' in South Asian studies. He was particularly pleased to note that 'among students of the colonial revolution in South Asia the city slickers were at last quitting town'. With the benefit of hindsight, one might justifiably regard the eminent historian's celebration as premature. Recent years have seen a pronounced 'urban turn' in the study of modern South Asia. Indeed, of late, there has been a veritable flood of doctoral theses, journal articles and monographs on urban centres in the subcontinent.
Significantly, Bombay has loomed large in this burgeoning historiography. Regarded as a 'totem of modern India itself', the city has attracted an ever-growing number of scholars. They have explored its evolution as the dynamo of Indian capitalism; the making and unmaking of its myriad communities; the exercise of power at different levels; the political economy of its urban infrastructure; patterns of land use and the conflicts over 'heritage'; the mutual imbrication of spaces and identities; and its contentious public culture, which has spawned the competing politics of nation, caste, class, religion and region.
Yet many of these themes were first addressed by one of Stokes' younger contemporaries, who appears to have altogether ignored his pointed remarks on the future of South Asian history. For the better part of six decades, Jim Cosmas Masselos has written prolifically about Bombay, a city that has served both as his archive and his muse. In recognition of his pioneering contribution to the history of urban South Asia, the Department of History at the University of Mumbai, in association with the University of Leicester and SOAS University of London, hosted an international conference in January 2017. This volume comprises essays that were first presented on this occasion, as well as two specially commissioned contributions, by an international group of scholars whose own research has uncovered new aspects of Bombay's palimpsestic pasts.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Australia emerged as a major hub for the study of South Asia. Historians were at the forefront of this Antipodean contribution to South Asian studies. At the Australian National University in Canberra, Anthony Low supervised a new generation of doctoral students in South Asian history that included, among others, Stephen Henningham, Andrew Major, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Imran Ali. Other prominent historians of South Asia based in Australian universities included AL Basham, Hugh Owen, SN Arasaratnam, Ravinder Kumar, Richard Cashman, Peter Reeves, Ian Catanach, Michael Pearson and Marika Vicziany.
Jim Masselos was part of this constellation of scholars who played a leading role in establishing and promoting South Asian history in Australia. A graduate of the University of Sydney, he first came to Bombay in 1961 on a studentship funded by the Indian government under the Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Plan. His research, supervised by Professor William Coelho at the Heras Institute of Indian History and Culture, St Xavier's College, was submitted as a doctoral thesis to the University of Bombay in 1964. The study presented a detailed account of the origins of nationalist associations in late 19th-century Bombay and Poona. A noteworthy feature of this work was its comparative approach and the close analysis of the urban context within which nationalist politics took root. Indeed, it still remains the most detailed and authoritative account of how nationalist associations emerged and evolved in colonial India.
At this time, Masselos shared with many of his peers a scholarly interest in the institutional origins of early Indian nationalism. But in the following years, his research heralded a new kind of urban social history. In a series of essays published in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Masselos explored how 19th-century Bombay was made from below by a range of social actors. These writings traversed a range of themes: the world of the urban mohalla, crowds and popular culture, and the changing rhythms of everyday life in the city. Masselos's changing intellectual concerns were part of a global trend that saw social history emerge as the dominant framework through which historians tried to view the past.6 At the same time, he was deeply attentive to the specifically Indian constructions of the 'social' and the ways in which these were shaped by, and in turn helped fashion, urban spaces and identities.
Importantly, too, Masselos's interest in the realm of the social did not entirely displace his longstanding interest in local constructions of power. Thus, his essays on the Muslim neighbourhood in late 19th-century Bombay showed how the mohalla was 'a field in which many kinds of forces operated and with varying degrees of intensity'. This locale could be best grasped by 'first of all concentrating upon the field in its own right and then of following such contacts as there were, not upwards so much as outwards'.
By the 1980s, Masselos's interests as a historian had shifted from the realm of the neighbourhood to the Gandhian Congress's efforts towards popular mobilisation in interwar Bombay. His writings on this theme considered how the idea of the nation was forged through newly invented collective political rituals staged in urban spaces. In particular, Masselos underscored the ways in which, for the ordinary Indian residents of the city, dramatic episodes of mass protest on the streets gave a tangible identity to the nation. Importantly, too, he drew attention to the role of the urban crowd as a crystallisation of the city's protean energies.
As Bombay's modern identity seemed to dissolve with the rise of archaic visions of the social in the early 1990s, Masselos's writings turned to other visions of the political that threatened to undercut its secular fabric. Thus, shortly after the 1992–93 riots in Mumbai, he published an essay that examined the first Hindu–Muslim riots in the city a century earlier and drew attention to the ways in which the urban communal riot was an ethnically territorialised phenomenon at the micro-level of the neighbourhood.
'Bombay was always an Indian city; even in the days of the Raj Bombay was never merely a white enclave surrounded by an Asiatic universe,' Masselos observed in an essay published in 1992. It was a view that stood in stark contrast to prevailing notions of the 'colonial city', which regarded it as a largely European construct in whose fashioning Indians had little or no role. In this, as in other respects, Masselos anticipated many of the arguments associated with the 'urban turn' in South Asia.
A noteworthy feature of Masselos's historical writings on Bombay is his sharp awareness of the ambiguities, contradictions and tensions that structure the social worlds of the city. His essays draw on the empirical density of the archive to document how the messiness of everyday life in the city undercuts the formal conceptual categories of social scientists and theorists. Equally, he shows how no single concept or criterion could capture the reality of an urban entity as complex as Bombay. For instance, in an early essay on crowd behaviour in the city, he critiqued social science theories that sought to view the phenomenon in the developing world as a function of 'traditional' attributes and identi- ties. Thus, he argued that 'to see a society against the benchmark of ascribed criteria and even to relate it to overall cultural religious traditions, to place it entirely under such overarching conceptual umbrellas, is to do so at the cost of misunderstanding the range of group behaviour present in society'.
But Masselos's suspicion of overarching theoretical categories and concepts did not stem from a dogmatic empiricism. On the contrary, he consistently developed and deployed analytical frameworks that influenced scholars who followed in his wake. For instance, in his very first monograph, Masselos identified 'encapsulation and integration' as a key dynamic in Bombay's history. 'The city has many pockets and areas, each with an identity of its own, yet each is interrelated and integrated into the wider phenomenon that is Bombay,' he observed. 'The picture that emerges is not only of many groups co-existing within the broader fabric of the city's life, but also of many kinds of groups based upon qualitatively different criteria.'
In later essays, Masselos explored how Bombay has been historiographically shaped by the interplay between the formal 'defined city' and the informal 'effective city'. Indeed, he contended, 'the city defies the intentions of its masters to impose an orderly planned pattern upon it. The contrast between the habitation wishes of its population and the plans of those who formally control the shape of the city remains a constant tension in the structure of the relationships which create the urban complex.'
The interaction between the formal and the informal, Masselos suggested, also gave rise to 'two levels of identification, two ideas of the urban construct'. One construed the city as an overarching entity: 'Bombay Town, Bombay city, the urbs prima in India and also Bombay the city of commerce, the city of gold'. The other derived 'not from a defined exterior but from an experienced interior'. In this latter vision, the city was perceived as 'a series of subsets, reflecting the life and living of individuals and groups within the overall urban construct'. As they moved about the city performing their daily routines, Bombay's residents constructed the city as a series of familiar spatial milieus. This was 'accustomed space', which Masselos defined as 'a perception of urban space derived through accustomed activity and accustomed time'.
But there were times when accustomed space 'might become a foreign universe'. In his essay on the first major Hindu–Muslim riots in the city, Masselos offered a memorable illustration of how habitual quotidian spaces could be swiftly transformed by a cataclysmic event. Early in the afternoon of 11 August 1893, a Hindu clerk named Bhasker Madhow Sett made his way home from the Bombay Court of Small Causes. He soon learnt that the outbreak of violence at the Jama Masjid had resulted in the closure of his usual route home to Nagdevi Street. Therefore, he 'took a roundabout way, by tram to Girgaum and Grant Road and another tram towards Pydhoni'. But the spread of the riot forced him to disembark at Falkland Road. Fleeing from an enraged Muslim crowd, Madhow Sett took shelter in Gosavipura, a neighbourhood inhabited by scavengers. Two women, Chanda and Tara, came to his rescue and 'hid him for five hours under a charpoy'. But when their menfolk returned from work that evening they were enraged to find the Hindu clerk in their home. Sett prevailed on them to spare his life and help him secure a passage home. Eventually, at the suggestion of 'two elderly women', Sett disguised himself as a woman and made his way to the house of a Parsi friend in Khetwadi. This man, in turn, 'gave him another guise, that of a Parsi' and escorted him safely home. 'During his odyssey through the streets of Bombay,' notes the historian, 'Madhow Sett metaphorically changed his class and gender, to say nothing of taking on two different religions in as many hours. He penetrated what were for him unknown parts of the city, and explored depths that were equally strange.' Sett's accustomed space was transformed into a malevolent labyrinth in which danger lurked at every turn.
Jim Masselos's oeuvre as a historian has been marked by four recurrent themes. First, he has documented the ways in which urban communities, far from being manifestations of primordial cultural identities, were historically reconstituted in the modern city. Second, he has shown a remarkably keen and prescient awareness of the centrality of urban space and the 'templates' through which it is perceived, represented and experienced. Third, he has highlighted how diverse forms of power, operating at different scales, 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.