These are some of the historical anecdotes that a lecture series, which the Asiatic Society’s Mumbai Research Centre is organising, will highlight. It’s called Beyond the Fort, the title itself emphasising how much a study of the city’s past has been concentrated on what went on within and immediately around those imposing walls in SoBo. Four experts — Kaiwan Mehta, Sarover Zaidi, Ramesh Babu and Alisha Sadikot — will take participants back in time, illuminating areas of the city that seem to have fallen through the crags of historical exploration. “There isn’t a book on Byculla that you can find easily,” Sadikot tells us, adding, “It’s a story of the city told through a dense neighbourhood.”

What she means is that the evolution of Byculla — or Kalbadevi, Mazagon and Bhendi Bazaar for that matter — explains the shifts in the sands of time. Sir JJ Hospital was established in 1843. Imagine what the area around it would have been like back then. Then imagine the mills that came up around it in the 20th century. And finally, think of what the area is like today, those same mills now lying in a shuttered state, but the din of 21st-century life ringing in the air. That’s Mumbai — or Bombay, if you prefer — a constant work in progress. It’s a city that really never stops.   

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