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Mumbai
Chroniclers
A
dedicated duo bring out books on Mumbai... and also urge others to help
conserve its heritage
By Natasha
Israni
Guerilla
warfare," that's the term they use to describe their powers of
persuasion. And that's what's helped Mumbai's most devoted chroniclers,
Rahul Mehrotra and Sharada Dwivedi, to transform their books on Mumbai
into vivid accounts of a living, breathing metropolis. They manage the
skilful metamorphosis by convincing sponsors to increase the scope of
their proposals and by visualising urban projects around the literary
material. Those who've followed their careers are now watching out for
some action around the city's Western Railway line, the subject of their
latest work, Anchoring a City Line 1899 -- 1999.
This book isn't urban historian Dwivedi and architect Mehrotra's
first joint venture: they've been a team since 1989 when they met as part
of a committee for a local expo. "Our initial talks with each other
saw an amazing rapid-fire exchange of ideas and perceptions,"
Mehrotra recalls. Their mutual interests converged in a column in Mid-Day,
a Mumbai daily, through which they tried to increase awareness about the
city's heritage buildings and urge readers to get involved in conservation
work. Then came another turning point -- with a comic twist. An eminent
journalist pointed out that their column was a great source of material
for a book he was planning to do. It occurred to them that they ought to
be writing one themselves. Ten years on, the journalist's book is yet to
appear -- perhaps because they discontinued their column!
Their first and most comprehensive work, Bombay, the Cities Within (1995),
adopted a style that foresaw the onslaught of the impatient dotcom world.
Captions, anecdotes and footnotes beckon from page margins -- like they do
on websites today, to cater to busy browsers. But diligent academics are
not disappointed either. All their books (the others are Banganga, Sacred
Tank in 1996 and Fort Walks last year) have appealed to a cross-section of
readers.
Recognition sometimes comes in strange ways: Mehrotra says most Mumbai-based
websites draw heavily on their books, but they remain unconcerned about
copyright misdemeanours: "Even if our books are misused by a hundred
people, we have no problems as long as they are gaining." A group of
four architects was inspired by Fort Walks to start their own walking
society. The duo's conservation efforts have, among other things, led to
the Fort area in south Mumbai being divided into art, banking and tourism
districts. But there's plenty to be done, still: Dwivedi and Mehrotra now
plan a history of the Bombay Gymkhana; there's also a sequel to Bombay,
The Cities Within coming up. That's not all, of course.
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