The Archive of Loss

<div>Mumbai's textile industry is commonly but incorrectly understood to be an extinct relic of the past. In <i>The Archive of Loss</i> Maura Finkelstein examines what it means for textile mill workers-who are assumed not to exist-to live and work during a period of deindustrialization. Finkelstein shows how mills are ethnographic archives of the city where documents artifacts and stories exist in the buildings and in the bodies of workers. Workers' pain illnesses injuries and exhaustion narrate industrial decline; the ways in which they live in tenements exist outside and resist the values expounded by modernity; and the rumors and untruths they share about textile worker strikes and a mill fire help them make sense of the industry's survival. In outlining this archive's contents Finkelstein shows how mills which she conceptualizes as lively ruins become a lens through which to challenge reimagine and alter ways of thinking about the past present and future in Mumbai and beyond.</div>