Mumbai is the current site of ongoing climate emergencies. The city is also the product of prolonged land reclamation from the sea that began as part of the British and East India Company's colonial vision of contiguous territory that could legitimize their presence in India. My book-length research excavates the history of reclaimed lands and reclamation in nineteenth-century Bombay (renamed Mumbai in 1995) to trace the radical environmental, territorial, urban, and economic transformations that went into making the island city. Shallow seas in an archipelago first became wastelands, then agricultural land, and eventually developable urban plots and property. Reclamation activities were laborious, risky, and capital-intensive, as they involved local laborers moving soil, mud, stone, and water while battling rough seas and monsoons for long periods. Reclaimed land could sink, investments could run out, and land prices could fall. These risks made it imperative for the colonial Bombay government that the newly made land remain a profitable commodity with potential “value-in-waiting.” Land was no longer a finite asset in Bombay, as it could be made from the sea, as needed. Through my four chapters, I will examine the labor, infrastructural processes, agricultural commodities, legislative devices, indigenous entrepreneurship, financial innovations, and speculative land schemes that emerged as part of the long history of land reclamation.

​

The book manuscript is in-progress.

​

The project won the Graham Foundation Grant for Research and the New Faculty Research Grant at the University of Houston in 2023. Excerpts of this research appeared in Instituting Worlds: Architecture and Islands (published by Routledge and edited by Marko Jobst and Catherina Gabrielsson, 2024). Parts of the research have been presented at many venues and conferences. I presented at the Center for South Asia, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison (2025), Buell Center at Columbia University for the "Made Land" set of talks (2023), Annual Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) conference in Montreal (2023), and the Annual Urban History Association (UHA) Conference in Pittsburgh (2023). In the next few weeks, I will be presenting a part of this research at the University of Pennsylvania in March 2026 at the Coastal Worlds: A Conference & Exhibition.