Mumbai: For a city like Mumbai whose layout keeps changing with regular frequency, it can be difficult to document its evolution.
Researcher Divya Ravindranath, who works at the intersection of informal labour, gender and urban health, posits that literature has already laid this groundwork – through the pre-partition world of sex workers and migrants in Saadat Hasan Manto’s short stories, to the chaotic, intrusive chawl life of Kiran Nagarkar’s Raavan and Eddy (1995), to the bleak opium of Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis (2012). Submerged Bombay, or the evocative poetic juxtaposition in Jerry Pinto’s coming-of-age novel, The Education of Yuri (2022) – all the sights and sounds once common, but now vanishing from the city’s consciousness. Reading fiction based on Indian cities, she was able to understand the major demographic shifts, socio-cultural changes and even the changing ecology of these places. For them, these books, through imagined realities, served as important record-keepers.
This inspired him to bring “fiction as a pedagogical tool into the classroom.” “We usually think of imagination only in literature classes, but it can be used in many different subjects,” says Bengaluru-based Rabindranath. “For example, if I want to talk about housing in Mumbai, I can discuss it through Amrita Mahale’s novel Milk Teeth, which traces the problems faced by residents of a rent-controlled apartment in Matunga in the late 1990s.”
Rabindranath’s classroom project got a new life in September 2023, when Apoorva Saini, one of his students at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, helped him set up Cities in Fiction, a public digital archive that serves as a database tracing the literary landscape of India and South Asia. The ongoing project has since mapped hundreds of fictional texts from the region, the majority of which – 84 books – originate from Mumbai, serving as a resource pool for teachers and learners. “It’s for anyone wanting to discover somewhere new or see a familiar city from a different perspective,” says Saini, adding, “I didn’t grow up in Mumbai, but I know that even if I read five random books about it, I’d still learn a lot about its history.”
Saini and Rabindranath are not alone in reimagining how the city is explored and understood. There is a growing breed of researchers, historians and artists leading dynamic archival projects that are uncovering new ways of interpreting Mumbai’s past and present.
City of Myths and Stories
Over the past year, researchers Arundhati Dasgupta Singhal and Utkarsh Patel have been focusing on old texts and gazetteers, as well as exploring the city and its suburbs for any oral accounts about Bombay’s origin story.
His work is an extension of The Mythology Project, a center for the study of ancient stories and storytelling traditions, which he co-founded in 2021. Supported by the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), the pair are now working on a book that will tell the history of the city through its myths and legends.
“When we think about the history of Bombay, we often get stuck at the point in the timeline when the Portuguese gave it to Britain as dowry (during the marriage alliance between King Charles II of England and the King of Portugal’s sister Catherine of Braganza in 1661). And then everything moves on from there. But before that there was a place and a people,” says Singhal. Mythology, which Patel says looks “to a time before time”, is not bound by the rigid academic pursuits of objectivity and chronology.
For example, local legend links the history of the region to Ravana. He gave land on the Konkan coast to a group of musicians, who settled here and played Sarangi of their own making. A subgroup of the agricultural community, the Dhola Agris, still believe that they are descendants of Ravana’s musicians.
Patel says, “These are living traditions that come from memory and personal history. As researchers, we know we are walking a tight rope between myth and the real or even the religious.” But, this kind of practice requires one to have an open mind.
Katyayani Aggarwal, convener of INTACH Mumbai, says the research is a pilot project and “moves away from their traditional approach of looking at the built heritage of cities and focuses on the intangible”. “If successful, we plan to replicate it in other cities as well.”
protest, an act of protection
In 2019, when the indigenous Koli tribes, who are proud to be the original inhabitants of Mumbai, were being displaced by a rush of infrastructure projects, artist couple Parag and Kadambari Koli-Tandel were thinking of ways the community could establish itself. “Our identity was being lost because of this displacement,” recalls Kadambari. “We were being taken further away from the shore.” The two launched the Tyndall Fund of Archives (TFA) that year, named after the 14th-century Tyndall Fund, created to protect the families of men at sea. “It was our silent protest against what was happening around us.”
As part of the collection, she began to write down songs sung by dhawalarins, women who traditionally performed marriages, recorded traditional recipes that used ingredients from the land, and local customs that were facing erasure. The documents have been published as books and distributed in pop-up museums within the villages. Last year, they released the Koli Language Collection, a dictionary project contributed by community members and containing words from the Koli language – an obscure language that is primarily vocalized and transmitted orally for daily communication.
“In Chendani Koliwada, Thane, where Parag and I come from, the language is almost extinct. It all started here with the first train line (in the 1800s). Our ancestors gave up their land to build tracks. People started coming to the city, and getting jobs there,” she says, explaining why this ongoing project, which already has a strong list of 1,120 words, is important.
The purpose of conservation is not just to hold on to something. Writer Shormishtha Mukherjee believes that it is also about understanding oneself better. “How will we build the future of the city if we don’t know our past?” she asks. Mukherjee, whose inaugural volume Pudding: The Memory Keepers of Bandra describes the lives of Bandra locals, is now working on her next book, in which she documents “the last businesses of their kind” in the city. The seed of the idea was sown when his friend Gary Karzai introduced him to Bandra’s famous jazz and brass trumpeter Joe Wessokar, who plays at funerals. “Joe lives on Bazaar Road. He diligently walks out of his house every day, sitting among the vegetable and fruit vendors, to practice his trumpet. The fact that one can walk down the street and hear someone playing jazz music is a gift. Bandra will never get anyone like Joe again,” she says.
Mukherjee is on a mission to collect similar stories of people across the city – he has unearthed a man at Alfred Talkies who still hand-paints film posters, and another man, known as Munna Bhai from Kamathipura, who repairs brass instruments. She wants people to see the extraordinary in these “ordinary lives”. “There is a lot of power in knowing. It makes us more tolerant and empathetic.”
remapping neighborhoods
Some of these collection projects have been able to reveal the geography of the old city, overturning many long-held assumptions.
Architect-urban researcher Isa Shaikh’s archival project, Contractors of Bombay, highlighted the lesser-known Indian engineers and contractors who built some of the city’s iconic structures, helping her see the neighborhood of Kamathipura in a new light. This area, mostly remembered as the city’s red-light district, was once the center of the city’s labor economy. Shaikh, who plans to find out as part of his doctoral studies, says when he was mapping the areas from where these contractors came, he discovered that most of them had their offices in Kamathipura. “They were from the Telugu-speaking community of present-day Andhra Pradesh and Telangana,” he says. As he dug deeper, he discovered that many of them belonged to the Munnurwar community, former farmers from the area who moved to Bombay for work, and were employed as construction labourers. Eventually other communities also moved here.
Through his project, Shaikh, who teaches at the NMIMS Balwant Sheth School of Architecture, is hoping to study how these clusters affected the environment of the region—Kamatipura was one of the first planned towns for labourers. He also played an important role in the fight against caste discrimination and reform movements. “When Jyotirao Phule came to Bombay, he stayed here.”
Sheikh now wants to connect the dots of change in the neighborhood’s story. “Like the rest of the city, this area is also changing at a very fast pace. In the hustle and bustle of this redevelopment, we are going to lose this history of Kamathipura.” He hopes that records like his will help people remember accurately. “There are so many layers to a city, and all those layers are connected to a bigger story of the country.”
They fear that if we forget this, we may forget everything.
