The Wilson Neighbourhood Project /Mumbai
July 2002The project was initiated in Wilson College, one of Mumbai’s oldest educational institutions. It involved a series of exercises that required students to produce ethnographies and histories of their localities and neighbourhoods through narratives based on their family histories.
The idea was to explore the historical links between the college and the dense neighbourhoods around it where most of the college students reside. These urban enclaves mostly emerged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They represent a vital aspect of Mumbai’s urban history and complicate its self-definition as a global modern city. The college too plays a role in the process through which its students negotiate their citizenship in different ways. Most of the students involved in the project were first generation graduates with some being first generation learners for whom English is a second language. The project yielded narratives, images and arguments about Mumbai on a number of themes; cultural diversity, the nature of cosmopolitanism and pedagogy.