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

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Nikhil Rao House, but No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898–1964 Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013, 312 pp., 2 tables, 53 b/w illus. $90 (cloth), ISBN 9780816678129; $30 (paper), ISBN 9780816678136 Of all the cities founded by the British in the colonial era, Bombay (now known as Mumbai) has most captured the imagination of writers. Over the past decade or so it has served as one of the primary subjects of a rich body of scholarship that vastly expands our understanding of the complexities of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial cities in South Asia. This scholarship shows the important role of local populations in the making, imagining, and inhabiting of the colonial city, thus not only providing compelling insights into the architecture and urbanism of this era but also adding nuance to our understanding of colonial processes that shaped the urban environment. Nikhil Rao’s House, but No Garden , which focuses on the construction and inhabitation of apartments as a new residential mode of dwelling as well as on global processes of suburbanization, is an important contribution to this emerging body of research. Rao’s book reveals that the events associated with Bombay’s suburbanization in the twentieth century are vital to our understanding of urban land management, apartment dwelling’s role in the creation of middle-class identities and meta-identities, and the contemporary city. This work is significant for several reasons. First, it spans the period from 1898 to 1964, straddling the colonial and postcolonial eras (India became independent in 1947) and thus encompassing a part of the twentieth century that is relatively understudied in Indian cities. Many urban histories end around 1918, and anthropologists and sociologists often focus on the contemporary city. Urban historians writing about colonial Bombay prior to 1918 are referring to a limited geographical area of about 22 square miles in the southern third of the island of Bombay; in that period the northern third of the island remained undeveloped. In contrast, scholars writing on the contemporary city refer to …