Mumbai in Fact & Fiction: Walking with Words

Name: Mumbai in Fact & Fiction: Walking with Words
Start: 2025-09-12T16:30:00+05:30
End: 2025-09-12T18:30:00+05:30
Location: Gateway of India

Schedule

Fri Sep 12 2025 at 04:30 pm to 06:30 pm

UTC+05:30

Location

Gateway of India | Mumbai, MH

On this walk through Mumbai’s celebrated historic centre, we move through distinct layers in the city’s built environment and back to its earliest history as a lonely island acquired by the East India Co. We follow its journey from a struggling, fortified, trading outpost soon transformed by Opium and a daring process of land reclamation into a grand, celebrated colonial core - built in an audacious bid to declare the town then known as Bombay a global powerhouse and the ‘first city’ of India.
We leave this showcase city devastated by the Bubonic Plague at the end of the 19th century to bask in the later optimism of a modernising city on the verge of Indian Independence. On the way, we meet and hear from diarists, novelists and poets who share their experiences of the city now known as Mumbai, in their own voice, as only they can!
From Eunice D'souza to Rudyard Kipling, Salman Rushdie to Arun Kolatkar, Kala Ghoda’s triangle to the Bombay crow, Bombay then to Mumbai now, walk with me and the many words written on, and in, this city by the sea.
Walk curated by Alisha Sadikot