An Exile’s Guide: Ernst Schaeffer’s Pictorial Bombay and the Construction of Bombay’s Touristscape

Our chapter explores the intersections of exile, urbanity and cultural production through the lens of a particular genre of publication: the guidebook. As a type of book that engages with the built environment, urban settings and cultural life, the guidebook offers a promising starting point for explorations of historical portrayals of urbanity. Often written by outsiders, guidebooks offer specific views on places as they seek to be “helpful and tactful companions” (Parsons 2007, n.p.) to tourists and other visitors. The guidebook that we focus on here, Pictorial Bombay, was authored by the exiled German journalist Ernst Schäffer, later Ernest Norbert Schaeffer and Ernest N. (Norbert/Nathan) Shaffer (1892–1978), and published in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1936.3 An unusual example of a guidebook written from an exilic perspective, Pictorial Bombay offers insights into both how Schaeffer grasped the colonial city and how he contributed to developing Bombay as a tourist destination. [...]