Nandini Gooptu's magisterial history of the Indian urban poor represents a tour-de-force. By focusing on the role of the poor in caste, religious and national politics, the author demonstrates how they emerged as a major social factor in South Asia during the interwar period. The empirical material provides compelling insights into what it meant to be poor and how the impoverished dealt with their predicament. In this way, the book contributes to some of the most crucial debates on the nature of subaltern politics and consciousness. "...a major addition to twentieth-century Indian history. It deserves to be read widely, and its arguments for the centrality of social exclusion and economic deprivation in the formation of the political consciousness of the urban poor are deserving of greater investigation, both in the past and the present." Journal of Social History Nandini Gooptu's magisterial 2001 history of the labouring poor in India represents a tour-de-force. Used Book in Good Condition