A lot of people migrate to Mumbai without knowing about the city’s history,” says Rajhans Tapke, a member of the Koli community and a participant in Through the Eyes of the Kolis: A Reflection on Mumbai’s Past, Present and Future. It is a digital photo exhibition documenting the history of the community and the transformations that have taken place in its relationship with the city and its ecological systems since the 1950s. He remembers the Amboli creek flowing through the Andheri and Amboli villages, when he was a child, and of taking big boats from Versova to the Andheri market to sell fish, and how he and his mates would drink from the streams of the Navrang hillock, whose waters met the Amboli creek. “This seems almost impossible [now] due to the dense urbanisation that has occurred,” observes architect and urban designer, and one half of the urban solutions experimental think tank Bombay61 Studio, Ketaki Bhadgaonkar, who has curated the show. “The water channels have become smaller, and the water is not deep enough to allow boats.”

She points out that Tapke’s narrative for the exhibition also highlighted how the names of the water systems have changed—a water body that is recognised as Mogra nullah (drain) in the BMC maps was known by the fishermen as the Amboli creek. “For the urban youth, it is difficult to associate with these natural systems because they have seen them in a deteriorated state,” she says, explaining how an acceptance and normalisation of this degradation is apparent in the present allusions to these water systems as ‘nullahs’ or gutters.