New Delhi, Aug. 9 -- A Personal History of India's Forgotten Company Town opens with a claim that is sure to give the discerning reader pause. Bata, she writes, was a "multinational corporation with global operations" that people "across the world identified with". This is generous even by the standards of jacket-copy hyperbole. Sure, Bata in the 1930s was a fast-growing Czech shoemaker with ambitions, but it was certainly not a household name. The exaggeration sums up a book that reaches for scale and significance but fails in the attempt, and in doing so, buries a genuinely interesting subject under too much of the mundane.

That subject is the company town, a form of urban paternalism that early Indian industrial capital, and later pos...