Bombay's cotton mills and their relation to the city's emergence over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as India's prime metropolis have been extensively studied from various perspectives, and this is a wide and ever-expanding area of critical scholarship. Within this rich corpus of literature, the development of public education in the city of Bombay and its place in the wider imagination of the emerging industrial city remain a virtually uncharted area. The diverse historical trajectories of state-funded education in the city point to how education discursively constructed the ‘public’ in Bombay in the early part of the twentieth century.

This chapter attempts to trace these developments in the mill district of colonial Bombay (now Mumbai). It provides a descriptive and thematic account of the expansion of education through the implementation of free and compulsory primary education (FCPE) in Girangaon, literally ‘the village of the mills’. The wards that make up the Girangaon area were selectively chosen for the FCPE when it became operational in the city in 1925. Girangaon covers the administrative wards of F and G, as well as parts of E ward, although this was not included in the initial scheme. With the caveat that the archive we have had to work with is largely limited to official records,1 we look at debates on FCPE in the city and attempt to chart the contexts within which policies on primary education in the Girangaon area were being discussed and enacted. The chapter aims to move away from colonial and nationalist narratives of well-known elite educational institutions in Bombay to interrogating the contexts within which children of the working classes were intended to be educated.