It is a few minutes to nine on a Sunday morning. There is a nip in the air. The sun no longer feels harsh. And, the Red Fort doesn’t look like its usual self. It is quieter, emptier save a group of 20-30 individuals gathered outside its Delhi Gate. They are waiting to visit the monument, but it is not just any tour of the Red Fort, where one reads text off the ASI plaques, clicks Gram-worthy pictures and calls it a day.
Conducted by Purani Dilli Walo Ki Baatein, the walk, ‘From Red Fort to Rangoon’, is led by historian Rana Safvi. The Old Delhi-based organisation is part of the new coterie of explorers who are redefining the idea of a heritage walk.
From a typeface designer taking people around the bylanes of Bengaluru to Carnatic vocalists immersing visitors in sacred hymns at temples in South India and an archaeologist recreating the WWII era in Kolkata, the trails and tales go beyond the Wikipedia-driven regurgitation to lend sensorial context to the Indian cities.
Bring History to Life
Addressing her audience—comprising healthcare professionals, architecture students, geography teachers, as well as a Class V student—Safvi opens the three-hour walk with a recap of how all gates were named after the city they were leading to. Walking through the Delhi Gate takes one to the Chhatta Chowk, beyond which is the Diwan-e-aam. Then she points towards the other side—a red wall faces the gate. Safvi elaborates on how Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan’s penchant for symmetry led to the building of a long road from the throne in Diwan-e-aam to the Jama Masjid.
She reveals that because the courtiers could not disembark in his presence, they did so at the Fatehpuri mosque, which was too far from the fort. To avoid that, Aurangzeb built the barbican, allowing people to get off their horses much closer. “Heritage is a neglected part of the consciousness of our society. Earlier people used to scribble on the monuments; now thankfully all they do is take selfies. That shows how little sense they have of the importance of a place. These walks help sensitise people about the historicity,” says Safvi.
The decision to have the historian lead the walk was non-negotiable for Abu Sufyan, the founder of Purani Dilli Walo Ki Baatein.“An SME (subject matter expert) is able to impart not just facts, but also presents a place’s cultural essence through legends and anecdotes,” says Sufyan, adding, “Our walk leaders, thus, are either local people, or someone like Safvi or William Dalrymple (who conducted the Mehrauli Archaeological Park walk).”
Sufyan’s clarity of thought deceives the founding story of his organisation, which started in 2014 as a whimsical Facebook page, where he would share his observations about Old Delhi, and the eccentricities of its people, with a tinge of humour. What followed was an overwhelming response in the form of stories from people who had grown up there. As he began looking at the city in fresh light, he wanted to share the joy and conducted his first walk—Pre-Shahjahanabad Delhi—in 2016. “It starts from the Turkman Gate, then moved to the dargah of Hazrat Shah Turkman Bayabani, followed by the Kalan Masjid. But I didn’t want to limit it to the structures; I wanted to give people an idea of what life was like during that period,” says Sufyan, adding, “So, I had an Urdu teacher from Old Delhi take people to watch kabootarbaazi and calligraphy, which were the dominant professions then.”
Around the same time, about 1,500 km in the east, a similar hankering to make public history engaging was brewing. Tathagata Neogi, an ethnographer and archaeologist, and his linguistic anthropologist wife Chelsea McGill had returned to India in 2017. In their bid to “make information that usually stays within academia” more accessible, they founded Heritage Walks Calcutta, later rebranded as Immersive Trails because “we want to take the model to other cities as well”.
One of their most captivating walks is ‘Calcutta in World War II’, which looks at the changing political and social landscape of the first capital of Colonial India as the British tried to hold fort in the face of a growing enemy in Japan at the expense of the Bengalis. Its geographic scope covers what was then known as the inbound area—today’s Esplanade and Maidan. It begins at 7.30 am in front of the New Market entrance gate—which still bears a board with its former name, SS Hogg market— before the area begins to bustle. The central topic is the Bengal famine, which left over three million people dead.
As Neogi places the structures along Lindsay Street within the historical context of WWII, he leads you to the silo right next to the market. “This is where the British hoarded tonnes of grains to deny the Japanese army any local resources to sustain on,” he says. That, however, also meant depriving the countryside folk. The walk also recollects worker strikes at paper mills, firing at students protesting outside the Kolkata Municipal Corporation building by the British, and the final air raids by Japan. Talking about how Immersive Trails zeroes in on a topic, Neogi says, “We focus on untold stories about the city. Our sources include archival material, oral history and books, and if we can turn it into a good story, we go ahead.” The WWII walk took him a year to curate.
Shining the spotlight on lesser-known tales from the south is Kochi-based The Traveling Gecko, which Rajith Nair founded in 2012. He decided to go beyond the touristy Fort Kochi and Mattancherry to explore Tripunithura, the capital of the erstwhile Kingdom of Cochin. It resulted in the Cochin Royal Heritage Trail. “Unlike the royal family of Travancore, the Cochin royal family is not that well known, but they have survived for the last 800 years,” Nair says, adding, “If the Portuguese, Dutch and British could establish themselves here, it was thanks to the assistance of the Cochin rajas.” The tour begins with a walk through the Hill Palace Museum built in 1865, and culminates with an informal session with the members of the family over tea.
Culture is Key
It was during one such interaction with the royals that Nair found out about India’s first all-women Kathakali troupe, thus successfully tapping into the other storytelling tool of culture. “The dance is traditionally performed by men. So, I became curious when I heard about these women who, in 1975, started their troupe. Initially they were rejected by the audience who questioned women playing Arjuna or Ravana, but with every performance, the perception changed. These women have also gone on to perform internationally,” he says. On the Women of Kathakali tour, visitors meet dancer Geeta Varma, who has been performing for the last 45 years. She talks about the troupe’s journey—challenges and achievements—and makes the session interactive by enacting different mudras.
In Chennai’s Mylapore, The Traveling Gecko tunes into hymns for its Carnatic Tales walk at the Kapaleeshwarar temple. It is led by Carnatic vocalist Madhuvanthi Badri. As the aromatic mix of camphor, sandalwood and jasmine flowers being sold outside the temple fills the air, she tells visitors about the magnificent 17th-century Dravidian architecture of the place and explains the significance of the two central shrines—Kapaleeshwarar (Shiva) and Karpagambal (Parvathi)—complemented with a live performance. “She sets the context for a shrine, and then sings a few lines from a relevant song,” Nair says.
Music is key also to Chennai-based Courtyard Tours founded by Jayakumar Sundararaman, a Carnatic singer. Like Madhuvanthi, he too, at the end of a tour of the Meenakshi Sundareshwar temple in the ancient town of Madurai, enthrals the participants with a live performance. The idea behind starting Courtyard Tours, Jayakumar says, was to redirect the focus to the rich heritage of South India. “When one thinks of visiting India, the Golden Triangle in the north and Goa top the list of holiday destinations. I wanted to change that,” he says. To that end, he curated the Chola Trail, which looks at the reign of the great dynasty, with a visit to Thanjavur, the Cholas’ medieval capital, the Brihadiswara temple, and bronze artisanal villages, which continue to thrive. “In Swamimalai town, they still make bronze items like they did in the 10th and 11th centuries. Hundreds of artisans who trace their lineage to the Chola era keep the craft alive,” says Jayakumar, adding, “We still have the Nadaswaram, the traditional wind instrument that is played in temples. In that sense, Thanjavur has a living tradition that has been continuing since the 7th century.”
If art and architecture are evidence of our rich past, festivals are the chroniclers. Anchal Sachan and Aayush Rathi of Roobaroo Walks explore this facet of tradition in the most engaging way. Their Ramlila of Banaras walk looks at the month-long celebration in Ramnagar. The entire city transforms into a stage, with key episodes from the Ramayana—from the birth of Lord Rama to Bharat Milap—enacted in different parts on different days.
Roobaroo Walks makes this open-for-all experience more immersive by taking visitors backstage. “It is an opportunity to see artistes in their elements. While most performers are children, the musicians and other members are often eager to tell stories,” says Sachan.
While the Varanasi-based organisation also conducts the quintessential walks—the sunrise and sunset boat tours, photography walks, a Sarnath trail—its festival tours are unique in their exploration of the ancient city. Next in the segment is the Dev Diwali Tour in November, which allows visitors to soak in the beauty of the seven-km ghat stretch that lights up in all its glory.
Odd One In
If you thought the lens of monuments, art and culture was the ultimate way to perceive a place, then Noida-based typeface and graphic designer Pooja Saxena will make you think again. Her one-woman studio, Matra Type, is driven by her passion to decode what lies beneath the unassuming letters that dot a city’s signboards. Her Paharganj Type Walk in Delhi follows one of the market streets. “The area is next to the New Delhi Railway Station and you see signs in different Indian as well as foreign languages—Russian, Hebrew, Korean and Japanese. This is because the place is a stopover for globetrotting backpackers,” Saxena says, adding, “Asking why a sign exists and why it looks a certain way gives an idea about what a place might have been like in the past.”
Her expertise as a typeface designer gives her walks an edge. For instance, the Paharganj walk starts at the Imperial theatre, which has a signboard distinctly different from the hand-painted or neon signages in the area. “It is in a style known as modulated sans serif, where there is a noticeable difference in the thickness of strokes. You can see that in the ‘A’, for instance: the left diagonal stroke and crossbar are thin, but the rightmost stroke is thick,” she says, adding, “It is a sans serif because the strokes don’t terminate in serifs, or little feet that you see in a typeface such as Times New Roman.”
Peeling off layers to bare a city’s character is also what powers the walks by Shriti K Tyagi of Beyond. Again, a one-woman show, Tyagi’s first walk was a gallery hop with a tour company in Mumbai in 2007. But that wasn’t what she had in mind. “The idea was to do walks that did not exist at that point of time,” she says, adding that she then started curating walks keeping in mind her own interests, and thus was born the now-famous Bookworming tours, where she explores a city as detailed by a literary character. So in Mumbai she has Lin Baba’s Colaba based on Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, and Babbanji Bihari Trail based on Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City; in Delhi, there’s Spiralling through CP based on Sam Miller’s Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity. “I wanted to see how a book lends to the city and vice versa,” she says, adding, “Lin Baba’s Colaba was my first bookworming tour in 2008 and had one person attending it.”
Mimicking Lin’s tryst with the city, the walk opens with the dense but glittering Colaba Causeway market, which one navigates to reach the Leopold Cafe. There are many reasons why the 1871 eatery now enjoys an iconic status, but on this walk, it’s because Shantaram “immortalised it with its cedar chairs, marble topped tables and woody interiors”. Across the road is the Colaba police station, crucial to both Lin and Mumbai’s journeys. “Established in 1906, it houses a tablet that marks the date Colaba was fused with the main island in 1838,” Tyagi says.
Further on the trail is the India Guest House, followed by the Sassoon Dock. The tour is not just a joy for bibliophiles, but also gives visitors an opportunity to juxtapose the present-day cityscape with that of the Eighties in the book. Immersive Trails’ Murder and Mayhem trail, which starts at the Lalbazar Post Office and ends at the Shree Madandahan Shiv Mandir, uses the lens of crime to explore 19th-century Calcutta. Curated by McGill, one of the unmissable stories retold is of Troilokya, the city’s first recorded serial killer. “We discuss why certain murders received more attention than others as an extension of the deeply entrenched patriarchy of the time,” says Neogi, adding, “The walk also interrogates contemporary socio-cultural racial and gender dynamics to situate the victims, perpetrators and the police.”
Of, by, for the People
Even as the focus of these innovative tours is to explore the unexplored, the underlying aim remains not just to know the cities better, but also their people. So when Ashmitha Athreya, head of operations at Madras Inherited, conducts the Faces and Phases of Chintadripet tour, she curates it around the local community. Now associated with its wholesale fish market, Chintadripet, situated in the centre of Chennai, was originally developed as a village for weavers and served as a crucial cloth trade junction for the East India Company.
The walk traces the area’s evolution over years, as Ashmitha takes visitors through its streets, telling stories using the remnants of its past—1900s’ symmetrical homes with big windows, wide columns and pilasters, age-old markets and traditional professions—weavers, painters and temple priests. “The information I was able to unlearn and relearn while developing this walk was largely to do with the communities that continue to live there, and also with colonial institutions, to which Indians contributed significantly. A common feedback is that visitors are amazed by the history these streets contain,” she says.
Reinventing the image of Goa beyond its beaches and nightlife was the trigger for childhood friends Kedar Borker and Varun Hegde to start Soul Travelling, leading them to make first-hand accounts of locals the soul of their walks. Take, for instance, their Nature Trail at Chorao Island. On the face of it, the central attraction, perhaps to draw in visitors, is the well-known Salim Ali Bird Sanctuary, where one can spot birds like stork-billed kingfishers, Eurasian curlews and more. But as the four-hour trail proceeds, participants often experience a shift in opinion.
The erstwhile Ilha dos Fidalgos (Island of Noblemen), as the Portuguese had named Chorao, is also home to the only Krishna-Devaki (his biological mother) temple in the country. “It is followed by an easy 20-minute climb. Once you finish the trek, you realise you’ve been climbing the ruins of a Portuguese seminary,” Borker says. The visitors are then taken to the house of a farmer, whose family has been living there for centuries. “He shares stories about his family’s history and how the landscape of the area has changed,” Borker says, adding, “He also cooks them breakfast—often a serving of the traditional god pole (jaggery-based stuffed dosa) with a Goan gravy made out of the vegetables grown on the island.”
Much like people and things, places too can be taken for granted, and often while travelling the world, one tends to ignore their own neighbourhoods. This realisation dawned on Tyagi, when she conducted her first Bylanes of Bandra walk in Mumbai, and 10 out of the 15 participants were from the suburb. She says, “I remember feeling such a sense of validation because it meant that people wanted to know more about their neighbourhood.” The walk focuses on the pakhdis (villages) of the ‘Queen of the Suburbs’ to observe the change in the visual language as one moves towards the outskirts of South Bombay. “I encourage an organic interaction of the people living in these areas with the guests. And, over the years, because people have come to know about my walks, there is a level of comfort when they join in to add perspective or open their homes to us,” Tyagi says.
Neogi agrees, “We always want the community to participate. That way, they aren’t being alienated or made to feel that they are being shown off as artefacts,” he says, citing the example of Immersive Trails’ India’s Oldest Chinatown tour. During the walk, visitors go to Chinese temples and restaurants, gaining insights into the evolution of the phenomenon of Kolkata-Chinese. They also meet community members who stayed back after the 1962 war, and share their experiences of being in the Deoli prison camp, and how they built back their lives in the city. “We also go to a club where they still play mahjong (traditional Chinese game played with tiles),” he adds. So put on your shoes, and head out to see your city like never before, because ‘tis the season.
Savoury sojourns
Lucknow Food Walk by India by Locals
Rediscover the rich flavours of Awadhi cuisine as you hop shops in the city’s Bawarchi Tola (chefs’ colony) to enjoy succulent treats from its iconic eateries. There’s Mubeen’s pasanda (barbequed slivers of lamb or beef) served with sheermal; at Raheem’s dig into the juicy nihari gosht, then come the unmissable Tundey’s kebabs, before finally wrapping the walk with sweet-treats—habshi halwa, lauki halwa, jauzi halwa and kali gajar halwa—from Rehmat’s.
Dehradun Food Walk by Been There Doon That
In the valley, the predominant pahadi flavours get tempered with Afghani and colonial influences in dishes such as katlamba (deep-fried snack served with chole), puri bhaji and Kabuli pulao. Relish the literal melting pot as you walk through the bustling Paltan Bazaar in the heart of the city. Top it off with an array of sweet treats such as kulfis, laddoos and gulab jamuns.
Kabab and Curry Walk by No Footprints (Mumbai)
Take a stroll through the Bohri Mohalla as you gorge on non-vegetarian delicacies, which trace their origins back to the Dawood Bohra community. They settled in India during the mid-16th century and became one of the wealthiest communities in colonial Bombay. The 10-course meal has everything from a 12-pot meat bhel, meaty chaat and hand-churned ice-cream at the city’s oldest dessert shop.
Death by Dosa by Gully Tours (Bengaluru)
How much dosa is too much dosa? Find out on this culinary heritage walk through Chickpete, the oldest neighbourhood in Bengaluru. Its narrow alleyways are peppered with dosa joints serving numerous, sometimes unimaginable, versions of the crispy rice-flour pancake. Apart from the well-known rava and ghee masala dosas, there’s also noodle and pav-bhaji dosas. An appetite for food and history is recommended for this trail, which will let you feast on three kinds of masala dosas as you pay a visit to master sari weavers, the oldest antique shop and a 150-year-old old abandoned mansion in town.
Cabin Food Walk by Calcutta Walks
Dilapidated and run-down as they may be, the food cabins in north Kolkata form an intrinsic part of the city’s character, and this walk is as much about its food as it is about history. Having served as adda (meeting) points for revolutionaries during the freedom struggle to feeding the Bengali culterati as they indulged in brainstorming sessions, these hole-in-the-wall eateries are treasure trove of stories and munchies—fish kabiraji, Mughlai paratha, devilled eggs, prawn cutlets—which have been flavoured with plethora of influences through the passage of time.