Not just grand buildings: A new book illustrates the living heritage along Mumbai Metro’s Aqua line

A string of pearls. That’s how a heritage specialist at Sweden’s transport planning authority referred to one of the country’s newest train tunnels. I was speaking to her in the context of my PhD research on heritage conservation. It’s not every day that such a dainty phrase is used to describe a massive transport project lurching through a historic city. My interest was instantly aroused.

In 2019, I started working on my PhD trying to understand the various approaches to managing heritage in urban planning. I wanted to understand how planners, heritage professionals and architects responded when large transport projects were inserted in old cities.

My comparative study looked at the cases of the West Link train tunnel in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second-largest city, and the Aqua Line of the Mumbai Metro in India. The answers I found from the two cases turned out to be wildly different.

In the Swedish case, practitioners tried to minimise damage to heritage, as one would expect. But that wasn’t all. They were also legally mandated to use the train route to illuminate the history of the sites on its path. For instance, close to the city’s 17th century fortification remains, they planned to install sign boards, look-out points, and artistic re-creations of the former portals to the old city.

Around the early 19th century farmland, they planned to display the pipes, coins, porcelain pieces, and other bits and bobs excavated during tunnelling. In effect, the historical sites that the tunnel powered through became springboards from which the history of Gothenburg could be made accessible.

In contrast, practitioners in the Mumbai case largely focused on trying to protect the physical integrity of the facades and foundations of the heritage-listed buildings in the metro’s path. Scaffolding, safety nets, and vibration control measures were deployed to protect the buildings. Where heritage became an ally in the Swedish case, it became a burden to work around in the Mumbai case.

Comparing these two cases offered a window into the possibilities for more meaningful heritage conservation where development and conservation went hand in hand. If a large project like the metro – intended to decongest the city and make commuting convenient and sustainable – was inevitable, could the Aqua Line be transformed from a train ripping through the urban fabric into a gentle joyride through history?

I was born and raised in Mumbai and am intimately familiar with the city. While I love old buildings and am prone to nostalgia myself, too often the dominant discourse around heritage centres on grand, colonial structures.

“Heritage” is largely reduced to an inventory of helpless buildings that must be protected by activists from villainous developers. But what if heritage becomes an agent of change, instead of simply a passive victim? This would require a radical redefinition of the meaning of “heritage” itself.

In 2024, with this more nuanced understanding of heritage, I began journeying up and down the route of the Aqua Line while it was still being built. Many fascinating city stories emerged and the outcome of my quest was Mumbai Metro Aqua Line: A Time Traveller’s Guide. This is guidebook of sites along the Aqua Line that often fall outside traditional heritage registers and travel guides.

The book is an attempt to bridge the gap between urban planning and heritage by weaving the metro into the fabric of the city more intimately. In the process, it attempts to reframe how we understand “heritage”.

How can we stitch heritage into daily life? We can begin by expanding what we mean when we talk about heritage. It is not solely isolated, grand, colonial monuments, but living, breathing mosaics, relevant in the present to a range of people.

This makes many more spaces, objects, and practices count as heritage. It also makes heritage messy and contested, because we no longer end up with an objective measure for defining it and rendering it neatly enumerable on a list.

I found heritage and stories of various kinds while researching the book. The story of Mahim Fort, for instance, illuminates the inherent elitism in current heritage practice: the restoration and “beautification” of the structure that dates back to around the 12th century comes with the demolition of 267 hutments and displacement of 3,000 people. So, whom does heritage conservation really serve?

Rajguru Memorial shows us how the meaning of heritage is constantly re-made in the present. Hutatma Rajguru Chowk, on which the memorial stands, had been named after the freedom fighter Shivaram Rajguru who fought and died alongside Bhagat Singh in 1928.

In 2022, the city’s dabbawalas canvassed for a memorial at the spot. Most of them come from the Maharashtra’s Khed, Rajguru’s hometown, and they saw such a tribute as a fitting acknowledgement of their own service to the city.

Seafood Plaza in Mahim, run by Koli fisherwomen’s self-help groups, serves bombil fry, squid masala and sol kadhi and proves that heritage is not only a physical object to preserve for posterity. It can mean livelihoods and traditions as well.

Through the book, I wanted to spotlight heritage along the route of the metro, but also bring the story of the metro into the conversation on heritage. During its planning and construction, the Aqua Line faced stiff resistance from various quarters: heritage and environmental activists and some communities.

The most prominent example is of Aarey Milk Colony at the northern end of the line. Environmentalists, activists, and residents opposed the construction of the depot because it meant rampant tree-cutting and displacement of adivasi families. In a ping-pong match between political parties, the site of the depot was changed twice.

At the southern end of the line, members of the Parsi community asked for the track to be shifted because it obstructed core sacred spaces in two fire temples.

Such stories illuminate the more controversial side of the metro and help us consider it critically, and not simply as window from which to observe other heritage.

My hope with the book is to democratise heritage and make it an accessible part of daily life. By showing what’s possible, it is also a nudge to conservationists and urban planners to venture outside their siloes and tinker with alternative, potentially more fruitful ways of thinking about how the past can become a dynamic part of planning for the future.

The research for Mumbai Metro Aqua Line: A Time Traveller’s Guide was funded by INTACH Heritage Academy’s Research Scholarship.

Maitri Dore is a researcher and freelance illustrator. She is currently on a postdoctoral research fellowship in architecture at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. Her Instagram is @dore.mai.