Art Deco Mumbai

Art Deco Mumbai: Writings on a Modern City is the first definitive, book-length scholarly study of a moment in a city’s life that produced an architecture as prolific as Miami’s. Researchers, historians and scholars of Mumbai’s development have contributed essays here that extend scholarship and fill long-standing gaps on the city’s Art Deco architecture and design. They draw on primary sources ranging from architectural journals and film magazines to archival drawings and oral histories.
These essays show how, even two decades before Indian independence, Mumbai’s (then Bombay’s) architects and patrons chose an international language of design over both colonial ideologies and an ‘authentic Indian’ idiom, creating a modern urbanity that was cosmopolitan and egalitarian.
Mumbai’s Art Deco is explored here in all its texture, material and contradiction. Moving beyond popular imagination, the essayists examine the style’s emergence, its presence in popular culture, and its expressions in furniture, interiors, product design and cinema, as well as its role in middle-class life. In Mumbai, Art Deco belonged to all, and was never solely the province of the elite.
As the first such publication following Mumbai’s 2018 UNESCO recognition for its Art Deco ensembles, this book is a manifesto for preserving a fragile heritage.