Category: Non-fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Rights: World rights available (excluding Indian subcontinent)
Since the East India Company merged seven islands into Bombay (now Mumbai), change has been constant—but now it is used as a weapon for displacement, disguised as development. Slums are erased overnight to make way for luxury towers priced in tens of crores. The working class is pushed to the margins—literally—and into distant housing projects with no infrastructure, transport or sanitation. Entire communities are uprooted while a new Mumbai is built for the privileged few, behind closed gates, inside glass walls.
Sidharth Bhatia’s Mumbai: A Million Islands is a piercing look at a city in the throes of relentless transformation. What is vanishing is not just space, but memory, history and the very fabric of a living city. Mumbai’s famed spirit of survival is being tested like never before. Where the original seven islands had symbolized a coming together, today they’re multiplying as fractures—social, spatial and economic—splitting the city into a million islands, each more isolated than the other.
The author: Sidharth Bhatia