Home Improvements

Housing Modern India explores how ideals of house and home provided crucial sites for the negotiation of urban modernity during the late colonial and early independence periods. Focusing on Bombay, the cosmopolitan metropolis that helped define the promise and perils of urban life on the subcontinent, Abigail McGowan places concerns about domestic space at the heart of urban history. Efforts to remake Bombay prioritized reshaping homes to advance modern ideals of sanitation, community, consumption, and national identity. The city was constructed, in other words, not just through the efforts of planning regimes and their built forms, but also through the personal tastes and material choices driving the design of domestic interiors. Housing Modern India builds urban history from the inside outward, showing how housing reformers, community leaders, state planners, and regular consumers helped create modern Bombay by designing, building, and decorating new types of Indian homes.