Bombay/mumbai Immersions

In Immersions Bombay/Mumbai, Priya Sarukkai Chabria weaves a narrative around the ever-pulsating and restless metropolis - India’s financial capital, accompanied by Christopher Taylor’s fascinating photographs that complements the text. She provides the readers a fresh experience of the city; with its pungent edginess, its geography, abundant human stories, evidence of ruin alongside new rooting, and its throbbing and often decomposed corporeality. The book maps several rhythms of time as the author and photographer travel round the city and is a cross genre book-a memoir, travelogue, investigation, poetic expositions-all harmoniously blended to perfection. During their tour of the city, dreamt and desired by millions, the author and her friend visited relatively unexplored precincts, high-rises and heritage villages. They encountered vivid and poignant stories on the streets and in little known trades, the city’s history and the illusory yet surreal world of Bollywood. The city’s inequality, demographics and vitality are wonderfully brought out by this stimulating, elegantly written, fabulously photographed book which is an in-depth rumination on the life of a cruel and captivating world metropolis.