Suketu Mehta - Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

Acclaim for Suketu Mehtas

MAXIMUM CITY

An Economist, Seattle Times, and San Jose Mercury-News Best Book of the Year

Dazzling and absorbing.... Because of his zest to put every byway of the Bombay underworld on the page, his high-energy evoking of characters high and low, and the way his gaze settles on the newcomers trying to make it in the great city, Mehtas eye on Bombay reminds me of no ones so much as Balzacs on Paris.

Harpers

Sprawling, epic, vibrantand more than a little scaryMaximum City does justice to its monumental subject, the city of Bombay.

People

Mehta is an urban ethnographer with an acute sensitivity to the peculiarities of his city.... This fidelity to his interlocutors, and to their detail and circumstance, as much as the intelligence and brightness of Mehtas own prose, makes Maximum City an extraordinary debuta debut that will rival Arundhati Roys in fiction.

The Nation

Stunning.

Time

Quite extraordinaryMehta writes about Bombay with an unsparing ferocity born of his love, which I share, for the old pre-Mumbai city which has now been almost destroyed by corruption, gangsterism, and neo-fascist politics, its spirit surviving in tiny moments and images which he seizes upon as proof of the survival of hope. The quality of his investigative reportage, the skill with which he persuades hoodlums and murderers to open up to him, is quite amazing. Its the best book yet written about that great, ruined metropolis, my city as well as his, and it deserves to be very widely read.

Salman Rushdie, author of Midnights Children and The Moors Last Sigh

Remarkable.... Maximum City is at once paean and lament to the megalopolis that is... Bombay.

The Village Voice

Mehta writes with a Victorian novelists genius for character, detail, and incident, but his voice is utterly modern. Like its subject, this is a sprawling banquet of a book, one of the most intimate and moving portraits of a place I have read.

Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Namesake and Interpreter of Maladies

This is compulsively readable stuff, the best non-fiction book on India in a couple of decades.... Mehtas gift is to take the equal parts of wretchedness and redemption that Mumbai offers and make poetry of it.

Financial Times

Maximum City is journalism at its best. It is journalism of a kind never seen in India before.... Mehta is able to bring away an enormous amount that is startling and entirely fresh from every encounter.

The Week

A brilliant book. [Mehta] writes fearlessly about the horror and wonder that is Bombay. One by one, he reveals its multiple personalities: maleficent Bombay, bountiful Bombay, beckoning temptress of hope, manufacturer of despaircity of dreams and nightmare city. Best of all, reading this book helps one understand why Bombay can be an addiction.

Rohinton Mistry, author of Family Matters and A Fine Balance

The passions and secrets of the throbbing megalopolis come alive as Suketu Mehta steps into its back alleys and dance bars, its fantasy factories and drawing rooms.... Every city has its chronicler... now Bombay gets its Boswell, his chronicle as sprawling and enchanting as his subject.

India Today

Suketu Mehta has done the impossible: he has captured the city of Bombay on the page, and done it in technicolor. Like Zolas Paris and the London of Dickens, it will be difficult for me to visit Bombay without thinking of Maximum City and the enormous delight I had when I inhabited its pages.

Abraham Verghese, author of My Own Country and The Tennis Partner

Along with V.S. Naipauls India: A Million Mutinies Now, Maximum City is probably the greatest non-fiction book written about India.

Akhil Sharma, author of An Obedient Father

Suketu Mehta
MAXIMUM CITY

Suketu Mehta is a fiction writer and journalist based in New York. He has won the Whiting Writers Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. Mehtas other work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, Granta, Harpers, Time, Cond Nast Traveler, and The Village Voice, and has been featured on National Public Radios All Things Considered. Mehta also cowrote Mission Kashmir, a Bollywood movie.

For my grandparents:
Shantilal Ratanlal Mehta & Sulochanaben Shantilal Mehta
Jayantilal Manilal Parikh & Kantaben Jayantilal Parikh

As for Kabir, I went to him through the Nirgunia singers of Malwa whom I heard while lying ill in Dewas. I learnt about their capacity to create vacuum which is so crucial for a Nirgunia bhajan. They use notes in a distinctly hermit-like manner so that notes are thrown at you but you dont get hurt. They sing in loneliness. In singing Kabir my attempt is to create this essential loneliness and yet also a persisting sense of community. Kabir says it himself beautifully: I am severally alone. The total identification of the interior and the exterior is Kabirs most challenging aspect.

KUMAR GANDHARYA

We are individually multiple.

KABIR MQHANTY