Galleries of Life boldly opens a space for more studies of the wide and porous continuum of housing practices in Mumbai, which include chawls, flats, wadis, slums, and coastal villages (see Housing Typologies in Mumbai). If urban housing has subjectivity, then a genealogy of chawls has as much to tell us about social mobility and spatial practices.
So asks Shekhar Krishnan, in a recent review of The Chawls of Mumbai: Galleries of Life, edited by Neera Adarkar. While the book does practice what Krishnan calls a "“strategic essentialism" it fundamentally, opens up new horizons in the study of urban housing in Mumbai and India.
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