Shormistha Mukherjee is an urbanist who has been documenting her neighbourhood of Bandra via oral history. Inspired by Orhan Pamuk's description of modest museums that honour neighbourhoods, streets, homes and shops, she uses this philosophy to exhibit via words, text, videos and installations the story of Bandra, through its people. At our Online Talk #MemoryKeepersOfBandra, she traces the loss of the sea via reclamation and the impact it had on those who lived by it, traditions that are getting erased and small stories from what was once a collection of small villages.

About the speaker

Shormistha Mukherjee is a city chronicler who documents the visual and cultural landscape of Bandra with @HousesOfBandra on Instagram and publishes a free newsletter on Substack called Memory Keepers Of Bandra where she records oral history of the senior generation in her neighbourhood of Bandra. She is also the author of Cancer, You Picked The Wrong Girl, a non-fiction book published by Harper Collins. Shormistha has been in advertising as a creative person for over 30 years, and is the co-founder of Flying Cursor, a digital agency headquartered in Mumbai. She loves history, human stories, reading newspapers from the 1800s, and walking into every by-lane she can find.