Abstract: This dissertation examines connections between community and class identities and a new kind of built environment that emerged in late colonial Bombay. It looks at the attempt by the colonial state in the late 19th and early 20th century to create residential suburbs at the edge of the developed city of Bombay, in the area known as Dadar-Matunga-Sion. The suburbs were planned by the Bombay City Improvement Trust and the community that resulted in Matunga was the south Indian community. The residential suburb constituted a radical intervention into the social life of Bombay: the fact that they lived in a place spatially removed from the places where they worked meant that middle class Indians would recalibrate their notions of caste, class and community. By examining the building of the suburb and the community that formed there, this dissertation examines the social and cultural implications of one of the first substantial attempts at suburbanization in the south Asian context. Neither the building of the suburb nor the community that formed there followed any pre-ordained and inexorable pattern. While the concept of a residential suburb was a novel innovation in the Indian urban environment, the actual process of developing and building had to adjust to 'local conditions'—municipal politics, real estate conditions, and the cultural, social and economic preoccupations of Bombay's residents all went into determining when the suburbs finally got built, and what shape they finally took. The colonial planners' vision of the 'garden suburb' was, hence, only one factor in the equation that yielded the suburbs of Dadar-Matunga-Sion. The South Indian community that formed in Matunga was shaped by the organization of space that it encountered there. But the community was not the outcome of some simple and universal process of 'suburbanization:' specifically, enduring concerns of caste, community and family remained salient, but were recast in new forms in the context of the new built environment. The 'South Indian Community', now taken for granted in Bombay, was actually formed in the context of upper-caste migrants from southern Indian states organizing themselves into a community in Matunga.