Mumbai: A Million Islands

Written by Sidharth Bhatia

Since the East India Company merged seven islands into Bombay (now Mumbai), change has been constant-but now it is used as a weapon for displacement, disguised as development. Slums are erased overnight to make way for luxury towers priced in tens of crores. The working class is pushed to the margins-literally-and into distant housing projects with no infrastructure, transport or sanitation. Entire communities are uprooted while a new Mumbai is built for the privileged few, behind closed gates, inside glass walls.

Sidharth Bhatia's Mumbai: A Million Islands is a piercing look at a city in the throes of relentless transformation. What is vanishing is not just space, but memory, history and the very fabric of a living city. Mumbai's famed spirit of survival is being tested like never before. Where the original seven islands had symbolized a synergy, today they're multiplying as fractures-social, spatial and economic-splitting the city into a million islands, each more isolated than the other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Nov 30, 2025
• ISBN: 9789365690781

Sidharth Bhatia

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.