A place of spectacle and ruin, Mumbai exemplifies the cosmopolitan metropolis. Millions from India and beyond, of different ethnicities. languages and religions have washed up on its shores, bringing with them their desires and ambitions. Mumbai Fables explores the mythic inner life of this legendary city as visualized by its inhabitants, journalists, planners, writers, artists, filmmakers, and political activists.

Starting from the catastrophic floods and terrorist attacks of recent years, Prakash reaches back to the sixteenth-century Portuguese conquest to reveal the stories behind Mumbai's historic journey. He looks at Mumbai's nineteenth-century development under British rule and its twentieth-century avator as a fabled city on the seo to examine its emergence as a symbol of opportunity and reinvention. Different loyers of urbon experience come to light as he recounts the nonavati murder trial and the rise and foll of the tabloid Blitz, and Mumbai's transformation from the red city of trade unions and communists into the saffron city of the Hindu nationalist Shiv Seno. Storry-eyed planners and elite visionaries, cynical leaders and violent politicians of the street, landshorks and underworld dons jostle with ordinary citizens and poor immigrants as the city copes with the dashed dreams of postcolonial urban life and lurches into the seductions of globalization.