Living in Mumbai sneaks up to you. The chaos and the continuous forward-moving motion of the entire city prevents you from noticing the little things, about the streets, the buildings and its people. The next thing you know, a 100 years have passed and the city looks entirely different with mind-boggling traffic, a different populace and bits of Bombay morphing into Mumbai, while other bits become history.
In a fascinating photo project curated by The Quint, lawyer, musician and photographer Yuvraj Khanna juxtaposes the Bombay of sprawling avenues and horse-carts with the Mumbai of the kaali-peelis and afternoon siestas by the sea.
I have a penchant for history and all things old, so I’ve always been curious how cities change over the centuries. While we do see a lot of ‘before and after’ photos, there was nobody of work that in a single frame captured how the city has altered with time and therefrom, stemmed the idea of this projectYuvraj Khanna
The Photo Project
The area now is cordoned off to cars and is strictly a pedestrian zone with the addition of barricades around the gateway.
This postcard issued pre-Independence shows the building in the 1950s without the statute of Pherozeshah Mehta and sans the tasteless ventilation shafts that have been installed by the authorities right infront of the heritage structure.
This photo is an advertisement showing one such lady namely Rose Ezra, a famous actress from the 1930s, endorsing a Packard car in front of the Gateway.
Though the tram service eventually came to a halt in 1964, the authorities in Mumbai are – luckily (for us) – exploring the idea of bringing these fabled creatures of the city back on the road.
Yuvraj says the concept of horse-run tram cars was entirely unique to him where two horses would together pull a small open air tram-like structure pulling scores of people at a time!
The name lingered on much after the removal of the old statute in the 60s, luckily the black horse is now back in Mumbai and is set to preside over the famous Kala Ghoda Arts Festival next months.
Photography saves an image frozen in time and for that reason, an old photo will always give you a glimpse of the past. What I personally really like is how through a camera is how you can visually tell stories and capture not only what a place looks like, but also provide an insight to the lives of people. Archiving […] goes completely in tandem with photography, for if they weren’t any archives, if it wasn’t for the process of actually developing photos into hard copies, there would be no visual depiction to the history of photography.Yuvraj Khanna
Yuvraj is a litigation lawyer during the week and a budding musician during the weekends. He self-taught himself photography starting at the age of 16, and slowly moved to film cameras and so forth.
(You can see more photographs by him on his Instagram.)
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)