A filmmaker hosts a walk through Mumbai using the history of the city’s waterworks to uncover its influence on the past and present
The walk will make a pitstop at Banganga Tank in Walkeshwar. File pic
Can you count the number of taps in your home? You can stop when you reach four, because that’s already more than the entire neighbourhood of Char Nal in Govandi where residents line up for their share of potable water every day. Filmmaker Akanksha Gupta will unveil many such stories of Mumbai’s piped water system, and how it shapes the city’s population, politics, and lifestyle on her walk titled Tracing the Footsteps of Water this Sunday.
Gupta’s walk will begin at Hanging Gardens in Malabar Hill that stands upon one of the two oldest reservoirs of the city (the second being the Bhandarwada reservoir in Mazgaon). These reservoirs were built by the Municipal Water Works that supplied water to the city in the late 1800s. The high elevation of the hill made it the right choice for a reservoir location to cater to the sudden surge in demand for water in the mid-1800s, we learn. “It is only fair to start our walk at the point where water enters the city from the seas and charts its complex journey to quench Mumbai’s thirst,” she says.
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Akanksha Gupta (in green) reads out a Municipal Water Works stone plaque at Hanging Gardens; (right) Kamala Nehru Park offers a view of Cuffe Parade, where the municipal water works terminate
The participants will pass through nearly 10 such spots across the city, including Kamla Nehru Park where a bird’s eye view of the waterworks extending to the southern tip in Cuffe Parade awaits them. Gupta believes that another location, the Banganga Tank in Walkeshwar — one of the few freshwater tanks in the city — is a classic case of how a water body shapes beliefs and culture in an urban metropolis through time.
This water exploration will conclude with its final stop in the neighbourhood around Metro Cinema that was once home to a number of wells and artificial tanks, Gupta reveals. “These tanks and wells served the residents before they were subsequently filled to make way for other infrastructural projects,” she shares, adding, “You can read about these tanks and wells in books but physically being there opens your eyes to the prosperity they brought to the residents.”
Gupta circles back to the research she undertook in 2020 while working on a shortfilm based in Govandi, where the city’s now evolved water works dictate not only prosperity, but struggle. “Sometimes participants on the walk are surprised to know that there are neighbourhoods in Mumbai that don’t receive 24-hour water supply. Or that women continue to carry pots to fill water at community taps,” the filmmaker shares. This disparity, and the policies that shape it, are subjects best discussed while tracing the Maximum City’s water works on foot, she says.
ON December 15; 11 am
AT Hanging Gardens, Malabar Hill. (Meeting point revealed on registration)
LOG ON TO @akanksha2647
ENTRY Rs 1,000
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