Mumbai: A Million Islands is a piercing, emotionally charged exploration of a city that has always been in motion yet increasingly feels trapped between two irreconcilable destinies. Drawing from the historical moment when the East India Company first fused seven disparate islands into what would become Bombay, the book uses this origin story as a haunting metaphor: once created through reclamation, the city is now being unmade through erasure.
What makes the narrative compelling is its unflinching attention to the human cost of “development.” The author reveals how change—long a defining feature of Mumbai—has transformed into an instrument of displacement. As luxury towers rise overnight, slums that house generations of working-class families are razed just as swiftly, leaving residents with little more than a notice and an impossible choice. The book vividly documents how people are pushed to the geographic and social periphery, exiled to distant housing projects devoid of basic infrastructure, reliable transport, or even functioning sanitation. Through interviews, on-ground observations, and sharp sociopolitical critique, the author lays bare the widening gulf between the Mumbai that works and the Mumbai that shines.
Perhaps the book’s most powerful contribution is its portrayal of community. We meet fisherfolk whose livelihoods vanish with each new seawall, mill workers forced into cramped resettlement colonies, and informal labourers whose entire neighbourhoods disappear behind the tinted glass of gated enclaves. These stories, delivered with sensitivity and restraint, challenge the sanitized rhetoric of progress and ask who the city truly belongs to.
Mumbai: A Million Islands is not just reportage; it is a lament, a warning, and a call to reckon with an urban future built on inequality. It leaves the reader with an urgent question: if development requires the disappearance of so many, can it really be called progress at all?
Published by HarperCollins, ‘Mumbai: A Million Islands’ will be released on 21 November on SoftCover, ThePrint’s online platform for launching non-fiction books.
Sidharth Bhatia is a Mumbai-born journalist and writer. He has been in the media, print and electronic, for over four decades. He is a founding editor of The Wire. Earlier, Sidharth was of the original team that launched the Mumbai-based English daily DNA. He has written three books—Cinema Modern: The Navketan Story (2011), Amar Akbar Anthony: Masala, Madness, Manmohan Desai (2013) and India Psychedelic: The Story of a Rocking Generation (2014). Mumbai: A Million Islands (2025) is his fourth book. He tweets at @bombaywallah.
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