Mumbai’s cosmopolitan design is deeply rooted in the story of the Island City’s transformation into an economic powerhouse. It is best presented by the city’s two-hundred-year old residential precincts, each stamped with their own regional tone of architecture and adapted cultures. Archaeologist Andre Baptista presents Khotachiwadi as an ideal heritage enclave in which to explore such ideas. Within its walls are preserved documents, family heirlooms, photographs, and stories that have been handed down generations. These offer a vital insight into an everyday citizen’s role in the events that shaped the city. At our Online Talk #MappingMemories, he provides glimpses of Mumbai’s urban histories from the ground up, dealing with concepts of space & identity and object & memory at a micro level.

About the speaker

André Baptista has a doctorate in Landscape and Environmental Archaeology from the Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute, Pune, and is a lecturer and consultant in Archaeology, History and Cultural Heritage. His research interests include prehistory, man-land relationships, landscape evolution on the one hand, and colonial history, urban development and shaping of socio-cultural spaces on the other. He has represented universities as well as the Archaeological Survey of India on a number of explorations and excavations at sites ranging from the prehistoric to the early medieval. Most recently, he had co-curated with C&L Design the exhibition ‘This Ground, Plus: Khotachi Wadi in Design Context’ (23 Jul – 9 Sep 2022) at 47A Design Gallery.