On a warm February day, my research assistant Srushti Karale and I visited an apartment under renovation in the Mumbai neighborhood of Andheri West. The apartment takes up one entire floor of a five-story stucco building from the 1980s. Amid the sawdust and noise, we could make out signs of luxury: Italian marble floors, French paneling, built-in cupboards, and a custom powder-room sink. As we scrambled among hanging wires and tried not to get in the workers’ way, we noticed something missing: the balconies. The contractor explained that his men had extended the walls to enclose the balconies, replacing them with strips of windows.

As we left, Srushti pithily summarized these renovations: the house had been “interiorized.” “I think the only outdoor space was for the A/C units!” she remarked. Five air conditioning condensers were perched on the eaves outside. Their refrigerant lines ran into the house to mini-split units in each room through ducts concealed above a false ceiling, creating the effect of central air conditioning at less cost.

The rise of the interiorized home is striking in a country where verandas, courtyards, rooftops, stoops, curtained doorways, and balconies have all historically enabled residents to regulate temperature. Even for those who have electricity, such liminal spaces have allowed the use of natural sources of energy—wind and sun—for household tasks, from drying laundry to growing herbs and vegetables. Even multi-story buildings like this one were originally apportioned with individual balconies for each apartment, so that their residents had access to air and light.

Functionally, enclosing the balconies provides the family in Andheri West with more space. Indeed, we estimated that the owners had added five hundred square feet of living space—bigger than an entire apartment elsewhere in Mumbai. Home interiorization has accelerated as climate change and pollution make Mumbai’s air more dangerous, as traffic noise increases, and as pigeon populations grow. But the desire for an interiorized space is as much about class and caste relations as it is about comfort or health. Put another way, climate, comfort, and status are intertwined in urban India. The interiorized home blends a climate-induced desire for insulation from heat and dust with an enduring effort to keep caste and class division intact and safely out of view.

In South Asia, the inside, Dipesh Chakrabarty writes, is “produced by symbolic enclosure for the purposes of protection,” while the outside is “where one comes across and deals with strangers.”¹ An outside is any space marked by social mixing, like a street or bazaar. Inside/outside boundaries change with time of day and activity. Outside spaces can be made more inside-like through dress, cleaning, or religious symbols—or through social exclusion along class and caste lines. Today, traveling by air-conditioned car rather than public transport, frequenting malls and clubs with security guards, or attending events with ticketed entry are all strategies for remaining inside—in socially purified spaces—even outside the home.²

Socially, then, balconies are thresholds. They allow for what architect Bernardo Zacka calls “reserved sociability.”³ A balcony allows one to see the comings and goings on the street below, while distancing oneself from social mixing. Of course, balconies also allow for neighborhood surveillance. But in interiorized homes, instead of regulating social relations through the liminal space of the balcony, residents turn to their A/C units.

Early twentieth-century migrants to Bombay (as the city was then known) lived in chawls, multi-story buildings with a single room for each family. Verandas, used for laundry and other household tasks, stretched the length of the building; they were above the street, but they were shared and thus outside spaces. By contrast, in the early 1930s, builders began constructing apartments for middle-class families with private balconies and bathrooms. Separate entrances allowed low-caste servants to enter the apartments to clean the toilets without crossing into living areas. Even as these new upper-caste, middle-class domestic spaces were partially enclosed, the envelope of enclosure was fluid. Servants slept in stairwells, vendors traversed the low boundary walls at the edge of each compound, and families mixed through open doors and shared domestic tasks.⁴ Mumbai’s newest apartments lack the permeability of Bombay’s 1930’s-era buildings. Today, subtle marketing and sales techniques restrict many apartment complexes to upper-class, upper-caste, Hindu residents.

IndiaBulls Blu is a high-end housing complex in Lower Parel completed in 2019. Lower Parel was once the hub of textile manufacturing in the city. The textile mills and the chawls that surrounded them have been redeveloped into fifty-story towers, encased in meticulous grids of blue glass squares. From her living room on the twentieth floor, Payal, a woman in her early 50s who moved into the development in 2021 with her husband, explained that a few of these blue squares were operable windows. She cranked one out six inches to demonstrate, but she made it clear that she didn’t think it was safe to open the windows. Pointing to apartments in the adjacent tower with windows pushed wide open, she worried that a strong wind could tear the windows off and crash them down below. In these new enclosed tower blocks, what was once valued as a cooling ocean breeze has become a dangerous force.

Because Payal’s apartment is interiorized, electric appliances are indispensable for climate control and household tasks. Instead of drying clothes on an open balcony, Payal uses a discreetly positioned “utility room” with an electric dryer stacked over the washing machine. “It’s the first time in Bombay that I haven’t had a drying balcony,” Payal said as she showed it to me, so “everything goes in the dryer.”

Without liminal spaces, social purification strategies have become elaborate and regimented, including high boundary walls and complex entry procedures. The Mathurs, for example, live in a recently completed housing complex in Goregaon with large sliding windows over a waist-high grille—like a balcony flattened to two dimensions. These windows let air and light into the apartment, but they don’t allow for spatial transgression. Unlike the balconies on older buildings, which connected residents to the street, this non-balcony, high on the fifteenth floor, encourages a view off into the distance. It transforms the apartment’s surroundings into a two-dimensional panorama.

Mrs. Mathur told me that “from a health and wellness perspective” it was preferable to live in what she called a “fully contained society.” Instead of being outside, the Mathurs were content with a view of it: “This kind of view, you will just not get anywhere,” she told me. I remarked that the apartment’s cheery white and blue interior reminded me of the Greek islands. Mr. Mathur explained:

We don’t feel we are in Mumbai. Our desire for traveling or for going for holidays has actually gone down a bit, because we literally feel like we are in a holiday home. If you walk around the campus, you’ll see two swimming pools, squash courts, tennis courts. So it’s literally like being in a Four Seasons, or being in the Westin, or just a nice resort property every day.

Mr. Mathur is not alone in comparing his home to the Four Seasons. Hotels have become key reference points for India’s cosmopolitan elite. Before economic liberalization in the early 1990s, some imported goods were only available at five-star hotels. After liberalization, travel abroad has become commonplace for Indian elites, and familiarity with resort locations is a key marker of cultural capital. Interior designers who work in new tower blocks told me that residents commonly show them pictures of hotel rooms as inspirations for interior renovations.

As Payal and I walked around IndiaBulls Blu on a rubberized running/walking track, we passed indoor and outdoor tennis courts, a cricket practice pitch, basketball courts, a fenced dog park, a party hall, and the club (with a salon, café, and pools). These places provide leisure experiences without the need to interact with social Others. Payal explained that these amenities helped convince her and her husband to move here from Bandra (a posh neighborhood north of Mumbai’s city center). At IndiaBulls Blu, Payal explained, “it’s not just the home, but the whole place is an extension of the home.” In this gated community, “we don’t struggle with the outside world. You stay in your bubble.” The “bubble” is not just a climatic interior. It is an enclosed social sphere.

Just as such bubbles obscure migrant labor in Qatar (see Chang and Pandian, this issue), the residential bubbles of contemporary Mumbai obscure the work of social reproduction. To see a housing complex as an enclosed leisure space, one must ignore the workers who come daily to maintain it: the numerous uniform-clad employees who cut the lawns, water the plants, and staff the elevators, café, and salon. Paid domestic workers—and the social tensions their presence may create for middle-class and elite Indians—are not new in South Asia. In these new residences, however, their erasure is striking. The Mathurs both work from home, so they have renovated their apartment with two study-work spaces. By interiorizing their own work, they enhance its immaterial status, and distinguish themselves further from the workers who maintain their resort-like compound manually.

The value of these elite homes comes in part from the way they insulate residents from rising heat, relentless air pollution, and the dangers of unpredictable weather. Yet interiorization is not just a straightforward response to climate change—especially as these homes contribute to climate change through electricity use and heat generation. Interiorization is also a means for elites to re-establish class and caste barriers, and to systematically obscure the continued presence of social Others in their midst. Rather than simply reproducing climate change denial, the interiorized space is one of climate disavowal, a space where caste and class—and the labor that maintains these divisions—are replaced by a stunning two-dimensional view of the horizon. ⦿

1. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Open Space/Public Place: Garbage, Modernity, and India,” South Asia 14, no. 1 (1991): 15–31, https://doi.org/10.1080/00856409108723146.
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2. Kathinka Frøystad, “Anonymous Encounters: Class Categorization and Social Distancing in Public Spaces,” in The Meaning of the Local: Politics of Place in Urban India, ed. Geert de Neve and Henrike Donner (Routledge 2006), 159–81.
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3. Bernardo Zacka, “What’s in a Balcony? The In-Between as Public Good,” in Political Theory and Architecture, ed. Duncan Bell and Bernardo Zacka (Bloomsbury, 2020), 81–102.
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4. Nikhil Rao, House, But No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s Suburbs, 1898–1964 (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 160–68.
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