Old city, new view: Heritage walks across India are getting creative
Mumbai through its poets, Bengaluru before techies took over, Chennai made magical through stories. Heritage walks are exploring brave new paths
Anyone who’s been on a heritage walk in their own city knows how stories can hide in plain sight. Familiar facades become portals into history, dusty corners reveal colourful pasts, shop signage tells stories of creativity as much as commerce, everything ordinary is turned forever special.
It takes a special kind of tour guide to do this. And for more than two decades, local historians and enthusiasts have been working out new ways to join old dots. They now bring in poetry, anecdotes, surprises and memories. Some tours cost as little as ₹350 for a 90-minute amble around a neighbourhood. Others charge close to ₹6,000, for stops at cafes, bakeries and bars. Either way, organising it is no picnic. Take a look.
Saranya Subramanian, 26, a poet, writer, and city archivist, started Bombay Poetry Crawl in 2020 to share anecdotes about Mumbai via city poets such as Arun Kolatkar, Meena Kumari and Eunice de Souza. “People in a city live literary lives—they’re the protagonists or antagonists of their own worlds,” Subramanian says. “You see the same characters in these poems.”
{{/usCountry}}Saranya Subramanian, 26, a poet, writer, and city archivist, started Bombay Poetry Crawl in 2020 to share anecdotes about Mumbai via city poets such as Arun Kolatkar, Meena Kumari and Eunice de Souza. “People in a city live literary lives—they’re the protagonists or antagonists of their own worlds,” Subramanian says. “You see the same characters in these poems.”
{{/usCountry}}Subramanian charges ₹600 per person and takes participants to spots in Bandra, Worli, Lower Parel, Kamathipura, Kala Ghoda, Sassoon Docks, or even on local trains. It’s a slow walk (hence the Crawl in the title), with everyone from media students and filmmakers to general poetry lovers attending. At some spots, the participants are encouraged to recite poems and talk about what it means to them.
{{/usCountry}}Subramanian charges ₹600 per person and takes participants to spots in Bandra, Worli, Lower Parel, Kamathipura, Kala Ghoda, Sassoon Docks, or even on local trains. It’s a slow walk (hence the Crawl in the title), with everyone from media students and filmmakers to general poetry lovers attending. At some spots, the participants are encouraged to recite poems and talk about what it means to them.
{{/usCountry}}“Because we read together, and in real-life locations, it helps everyone understand the poem and the city together,” she says. Reading Eunice Dsouza’s poems, for instance, particularly those that celebrate the quirks of Mumbai’s Catholic uncles and aunties, while walking through Bandra’s Christian neighbourhoods, helps bring the words to life.
“A big part of my research is actually going to all those locations and seeing how the characters in the poems are shaped,” says Subramanian, who’s conducted 50 walks so far. She also pores over poets’ biographies and related literature to prep. “I have such a blast doing these poetry walks; it completely changes my perspective of a city I have been born and raised in.” The Namdeo Dhasal poetry crawl, which weaves through the one-time red-light district of Kamathipura, has been unexpectedly enlightening. “I found out that Dhasal’s 1986 book, G**du Bagicha, is called by that name because there’s a park in Kamathipura where homosexuals used to meet and be intimate with each other.”
In Bengaluru, travel blogger Raksha Nagaraj, 40, and engineer Divya Chandrashekhar, 34, both history enthusiasts, set up Bengaluru Prayana in 2021 to help other urban residents view their city differently. Prayana is the Kannada word for journey, and the weekend walks take groups of eight to 10 participants through lesser-known lanes.
The trail deliberately avoids tourist traps such as Cubbon Park and Bengaluru Palace. Instead, they explore the murals, old temples, tiffin houses, and long-standing buildings in the bylanes of Malleshwaram. On their Lalbagh walk, they don’t simply tour the botanical garden, they look at how the ecology of the area has been influenced by importing different varieties of plants there.
The walks, at ₹350, are relatively cheap. But they take hours of prep. Both guides conduct two trial explorations before mapping out the final route. Often, they stumble on artefacts that even locals didn’t know existed. On one exploratory walk through Lalbagh Botanical Garden in 2022, they discovered hero stones at the base of the Kempegowda tower. “The stones, which are undated but created during a war, record information such as the local deity, the people who fought the war, and the outcome of the battles,” says Chandrashekar.
Vikram Sridhar, 40, calls himself a “performance storyteller, not a historian” when he conducts walks in Chennai and Bengaluru. He weaves in personal anecdotes and tales from mythology, as he leads groups of 10 to 15 through temples along Velachery in Chennai, and the 60-metre estate of the 95-year-old Rane Motors, one of the city’s oldest businesses. Tours cost ₹250 to ₹300 but unlike most heritage walks, participants are encouraged to talk about their own experiences of the neighbourhood and growing up in the city. So, no two walks are the same.
“What I’m trying to do is create memories of a time spent in an area,” Sridhar says. “Most walks and tours look at history as dates and heritage as buildings. What if we looked at it from the viewpoint of memory?” says Sridhar, who has grown up along the same routes that he conducts the tours.
On one walk in Indiranagar, Bengaluru, last month, a woman on the tour was asked to share her memories of the area. She turned out to be a local activist, who had worked towards clearing the area’s trees of advertisements and playbills, nearly 10 years ago. It’s the kind of interactive experience that templatised tours can’t offer. “The idea is to take people on such journeys and encourage them to go back home and explore their own neighbourhoods,” says Sridhar.
