Mumbai

In Mumbai: A Million Islands, Sidharth Bhatia delivers a powerful and unsettling portrait of a city caught in the grip of relentless transformation. Since the East India Company merged seven islands into Bombay, change has been a constant—but today, it often serves as a tool of displacement masked as development. Slums vanish overnight to make way for luxury towers, while the working class is pushed to the city’s margins, relocated to distant housing projects lacking basic infrastructure. Entire communities are uprooted as a new Mumbai rises—exclusive, gated, and disconnected. Bhatia’s narrative explores the erosion not just of physical space, but of memory, history, and the essence of a living city. The famed resilience of Mumbai is under siege, and the original unity of its seven islands has splintered into countless social, spatial, and economic fractures. A veteran journalist and founding editor of The Wire, Sidharth Bhatia brings decades of media experience to this piercing account. He previously helped launch the English daily DNA and has authored three books on Indian cinema and culture. Mumbai: A Million Islands is his fourth, and he continues to share his insights on Twitter as @bombaywallah.