India, Jan. 10 -- On Wednesday, historian Professor Gyan Prakash will be in conversation with filmmaker Anurag Kashyap and Bombaywalla Historic Works co-founder Simin Patel, discussing Mumbai Fables, the book that catapulted the Princeton professor to fame among the non-academic reading crowd when it was first published in 2010.

"It seemed unmanageable at the beginning because Bombay has so many different aspects and I took time to get used to it. I didn't want to write an outsider's account of the city. I didn't want to write a book that was addressed to a Western audience," he said.

What Prakash ended up doing was writing a book that expanded our understanding of the city's cosmopolitan nature. Thirteen years after its publication, it...