Mumbai: A Million Islands

'Takes us to places that don't register in our everyday lives - a critical piece of work for future historians.'- Rahul Mehrotra, architect and professor, Harvard Graduate School of Design

'A timely book that brings slum dwellers into the public eye - as luxury apartments rise, millions remain invisible to policymakers.' - Shabana Azmi, actor and housing rights activist

'Reads like a tender love letter to a disappearing city - an important contribution to understanding our planet's complex urban future.' - James Crabtree, author of The Billionaire Raj, former Mumbai bureau chief, Financial Times

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 synergy, today they're multiplying as fractures-social, spatial and economic-splitting the city into a million islands, each more isolated than the other.