Immersions

In Immersions: Bombay/Mumbai, Priya Sarukkai Chabria weaves an elegant narrative around the ever-pulsating metropolis – India’s financial capital – accompanied by Christopher Taylor’s fascinating photographs that complement the text. Readers receive a fresh experience of Mumbai – layered with pungent edginess, abundant human stories, ruin versus new rooting and its throbbing – often decomposed – corporeality. The cross genre book – memoir, travelogue, investigation, poetic expositions all perfectly blended – maps several rhythms of time as the author and photographer travel round the city. Unexplored precincts, high-rises and heritage villages, poignant stories from the streets, the city’s history and the illusory yet surreal Bollywood images come to the fore, outlined by the city’s inequality, demographics and vitality in the stimulating prose and fabulous photographs – ruminating on the flow of life in a cruel yet captivating city. Contents: Introduction; Concrete to Basalt; Mosaics of Movement; Tides; Transport: Movements Seen and Unseen; Tales of Migrants; Money; South to North: From Old to New; Immersions; Mills to Malls; Holy Trinity: Bhuleshwar-Kalbadevi-Madhav Baug; Mazagaon; Dadar & Matunga: Once Bombay’s Suburbs, Now Central Mumbai; Behind Bollywood; Urban Forest; Cab ride through; Bombay/Mumbai; Notes; Select Bibliography; Acknowledgements.