Bombay/Mumbai: Immersions

In Bombay/Mumbai: Immersions, 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.

Priya Sarukkai Chabria

Priya Sarukkai Chabria is a poet, writer and translator. She is the recipient of the Indian Government’s Senior Fellowship to Outstanding Artists. Her books include two poetry collections, a novel and a speculative fiction narrative. Her work is in numerous international journals, websites and various anthologies in India and abroad.

Christopher Taylor

Christopher Taylor is an English photographer based in France with the vision of a poet. His black-and-white photographs have an elegiac quality that sensitively capture the misty, grey climes of Iceland, the rarely-noticed details of China’s bleak and dreary urbanscape, and the grand colonial buildings of Calcutta that had seen better days. A zoologist by training, this self-taught photographer mostly uses a cumbersome studio camera or else an ancient Rolliflex even in the busiest streets, and yet human beings are rarely sighted in his works. So, his photographs never fail to surprise. He has held critically-acclaimed exhibitions in Paris, Arles, London, Beijing, Delhi, Mumbai, and Calcutta.