16 Best Novels Set in Mumbai, Mapped Neighbourhood by Neighbourhood

A gangster called Ganesh Gaitonde shuts himself inside a bunker in a Bombay suburb and starts talking. Sartaj Singh, a divorced inspector who is good at the job and bad at the career, is on the other side of the wall. From that setup Chandra opens out into everything: builders, film producers, informers, a godman, intelligence officers, and the arithmetic of who owns which piece of land. The Bombay Hindi runs untranslated, which irritates some readers and is the whole point for the rest of us. Netflix adapted it in 2018 and the book is considerably better.

The family is Goan Catholic, four people in a one bedroom flat in Mahim: a father the children call the Big Hoom, a mother called Em who smokes beedis, talks without stopping, and swings between electric joy and psychiatric wards, and two kids who grow up doing the arithmetic of her illness. The narrator is the son, trying as an adult to work out who his mother was before any of it started. Pinto writes mental illness with no varnish and no pity, and the book is far funnier than that description makes it sound.

Ravan is Maratha Hindu, Eddie is Goan Catholic, and they live in the same government chawl in central Bombay, separated by one floor and a death that happens on the first page. Nagarkar follows them from childhood into adolescence through Hindi film obsession, the neighbourhood gym, altar boy duty, bad first jobs and worse first attempts at girls. Between chapters he breaks off into short essays on the chawl as a machine for living and on the Bombay film song. It is the funniest Indian novel I have read, and all of the comedy runs on real poverty.

Gustad Noble is a bank clerk with a bad hip, a son who refuses the future planned for him, and a daughter who falls ill. Then a parcel arrives from a friend who moved into government work, and Gustad's carefully held life begins to leak. Around him the compound wall is being used as a public urinal until a pavement artist starts painting gods along it, and the country slides into the 1971 war. Mistry writes ordinary decency under pressure better than almost anybody, and the Parsi Bombay he describes was already thinning out when he wrote it.

Vishram Society is a respectable, crumbling co operative near the airport, full of people who have known each other for thirty years. A developer arrives with an offer that would change every family in it, on the single condition that everyone signs. Masterji, a retired schoolteacher, will not. Adiga then does something quietly brutal: he keeps the neighbours reasonable, sympathetic and steadily more desperate, and lets you watch a decent community talk itself into something terrible. I do not know a better novel about what property prices do to ordinary people.

Manto worked in the Bombay film industry through the 1930s and 1940s and wrote short stories about the people that industry used and threw away. Sex workers who turn out to be the most honest characters on the page, screenwriters waiting on a cheque, landlords, drifters, men who mistake pity for love. He never sentimentalises anybody and never sneers either, which is much harder than it looks. The stories themselves are from before independence; this English selection gathering the Bombay ones appeared in 2012, and it is the closest thing we have to a photograph of the city between the wars.

The book opens with a prologue that runs as a single long sentence and sets the terms: this is a novel that wants to sound like the drug it is about. Most of it happens in and around Rashid's opium khana off Shuklaji Street, with Dimple, who prepares the pipes and is the best character in the book, at the centre. Time drifts, the seventies turn into the eighties, cheap heroin arrives and the old ritual dies with it. Thayil was an addict for years, and the book carries the authority of a man describing his own former address.

Ayyan Mani lives in a one room chawl in Worli and works as personal assistant to a Brahmin astronomer who is busy with a theory about life falling from the sky. Bored, humiliated by his position and much cleverer than anybody around him admits, Ayyan starts feeding the world the story that his ten year old son is a prodigy. Joseph writes caste, ambition and male vanity with a comic cruelty that spares nobody, the scientists least of all. Netflix made a film of it in 2020 and the novel is sharper.

Moraes Zogoiby, called the Moor, narrates his family from a Portuguese Jewish and Christian line in Cochin to a house on Malabar Hill. He has a deformed hand and a body running at double speed, so a whole life gets compressed into half of one. His mother is a great painter, his father is in businesses nobody names at dinner, and the last third becomes a fight with a Bombay politician assembled out of the city's Hindu right. Rushdie is at his most playful here and also at his angriest about what happened to Bombay in the nineties.

Nariman Vakeel is seventy nine, a retired professor with Parkinson's and a past he was never allowed to choose. When he breaks an ankle, his stepchildren decide he should recover at his daughter's place, a two room flat already holding four people. What follows is not melodrama, it is arithmetic: who bathes him, who pays for the nappies, who gives up work, who sleeps where. Mistry sets it in the Bombay of the nineties, with the Shiv Sena in power and small corruptions working their way into every household decision.

A retired bureaucrat named Subramaniam holds court in a Bombay bar and tells stories to a younger crowd who half believe him. There is a ghost story attached to an army officer's house, a police story whose inspector later grew into Sacred Games, one about new software money colliding with old money, and one about a mother trying to find out what her son actually does for a living. The frame lets Chandra move between social worlds without forcing them into a single plot, and each story is the right length for a commute.

Vishnu sleeps on the landing between the ground and first floors of a Bombay apartment building, does odd jobs for the families upstairs, and is now dying there in front of all of them. Suri builds the novel as a climb: the Asranis and the Pathaks fighting over a shared kitchen on the first floor, a grieving widower higher up, a teenage elopement running through the middle of it, and Vishnu's own drifting memories underneath. The building becomes a small model of the city, and the joke is that nobody has time to look down at the stairs.

Sera is a middle class Parsi widow in a good building. Bhima has worked in her kitchen for years, sits on the floor, drinks from a separate glass, and goes home to a slum where her granddaughter is the family's one chance at something better. Umrigar writes the real affection between the two women honestly, then keeps showing you the trapdoor underneath it, which opens the moment an actual crisis arrives. The book is direct rather than subtle, and it hurts exactly because everyone in it believes they are being kind.

Perveen Mistry is a Parsi solicitor in 1921 Bombay, working in her father's firm because no court will let her argue in it. An estate crosses her desk: three widows of the same man, living in seclusion, all three signing away their inheritance in suspiciously similar handwriting. Because she is a woman she can walk into the part of the house no male lawyer can enter. Massey builds a proper mystery on top of real legal history, and the period detail is the real pleasure here: trams, Fort offices, hostel rooms, the small daily rules that governed women's lives.

Hugo Baumgartner leaves Germany in the thirties, lands in Calcutta, and is promptly locked up by the British because his passport makes him an enemy alien, which is the joke the century plays on him twice over. He ends up in Bombay with no country, no language fully his own, a rented room in Colaba and a bag of scraps for the neighbourhood cats. Desai writes exile as a physical condition rather than a theme, and her Bombay is the one foreigners fall into and never leave. Short, cold, exactly observed, and much sadder than the cats suggest.

Roberts escaped an Australian prison, reached Bombay on a false passport, lived in a slum, learned Marathi, worked around the underworld, and turned those years into a very long novel sold as more or less his own life. The first three hundred pages are why people love it: Prabaker as a guide, the slum clinic, a city that keeps handing an outsider a place in it. Then it becomes a mafia saga with a detour into Afghanistan and long stretches of philosophy from a gangster mentor. It became a global hit and Apple turned it into a television series.