2000 – 2001: The Wilson Neighbourhood Project

The project was first initiated in Wilson College, one of Mumbai’s oldest educational institutes. It involved a series of exercises that required students to produce ethnographies and histories of their localities and neighbourhoods through narratives based on their family histories.

The idea was to explore the historical links between the college and the dense neighbourhoods around it where most of the college students reside, that mostly emerged in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. These neighbourhoods represent a vital aspect of Mumbai’s urban history and complicate its self-definition as a global modern city. The college too plays a role in the process through which its students negotiate their citizenship in different ways. Most of the students involved in the project were first generation graduates with some being first generation learners for whom English was a second language.

The project yielded a 23 minute film entitled “Aur Irani Chai” about Irani Cafes in Mumbai owned by Wilson students and ex-students, a photo exhibition on Habitats and Homes in the vicinity of Wilson College, twelve diaries written by students over a year and about a hundred essays on family histories and narratives on specific localities.

2001 – 2002: The Juhu-Together – Neighbourhood Project Partnership

During this year the project worked closely with a local voluntary civic group in the north-west neighbourhood of Juhu called “Juhu-Together”. The aim was to contribute to this civic initiative by evolving a partnership with citizens to produce narratives and visuals about the neighbourhood. Students from schools in the area were invited to do small photo-documentation projects and a number of audio/visual interviews with prominent residents from the area were conducted. The objective of this partnership was to encourage participation of citizens in civic initiatives through generating narratives of their localities based on personal histories. These personal histories were then exchanged in public spaces so that the complex economic, social and cultural histories of these localities became prominent and got integrated into the civic concerns being articulated. This project was coordinated by Aditi Varma, a student from the Juhu campus of S.N.D.T University.

2002 – 2003: The Dhirubhai Ambani International School CAS Programme – Neighbourhood Project

Twelve students worked on this project documenting habitats that were markedly different from their own. A fishing village each in Worli and Juhu and a settlement that was once a slum in Napean sea road called Asha Nagar, were the three main sites that they were engaged with. However one group worked with street - hawkers and documented how a particular locality negotiates their presence. For the first time the PUKAR Neighbourhood project engaged with younger school students. It used this opportunity to build on its pedagogic impulse and conversed with the students about the complex economic and social composition of the city and furthered a discussion about their own status as its privileged citizens. The students produced a CD-Rom on Worli Koliwada that includes a detailed photo-documentation and textual details of this fishing village, a photo essay on a Juhu fishing village and Asha Nagar and a detailed pamphlet on the “Street – Hawkers Project”.