Voicing the forgotten stories of the Mills in Bombay
Tanishka D’lyma

The Mythologies of Mumbai Project tells us a story more than 300 years in the making.

It begins with King Charles II handing out the islets of Bombay to the English East India Company for the 50,000 sterling pounds he borrowed from them. That’s when Bombay became the Company’s west coast headquarters for colonial industrialization.

From there, it chronicles the rise of the mills in Bombay, the influx of people from all over the country in search of labour, the increase in population and production of one of the most important commodities – cotton, and ultimately the fall of this industry. With that the stage is set for the heart of the project that is the people who’ve seen these mills through its life.

The project archives and tracks the evolution of Bombay from an industrial centre to a metropolis, thus leading us to the protagonists – the mill workers. It aims to give us a detailed and very human documentation of the people of Girangaon, the industrial centre of Mumbai, and Dharavi, supposedly the city’s biggest slum area, from a perspective that is true to these communities.

Three centuries ago, in search of work and being attracted by the incentives provided by the British government to lure labourers to the mills, they arrived in Bombay from various parts of the country and pushed the economy upward. These mill workers today now have their lives being encroached upon by highrises. In houses built for them and that are unfit for living, they struggle to survive the process of gentrification. The people of Girangaon have their history and culture being bulldozed in front of their eyes by a metropolis that closes in on mill lands, leaving not enough space to breathe.



Girangaon meaning the ‘village of mills’ is still home to thousands of mill workers. This is their story.

Narrated using 360 multimedia production techniques, the project puts up a platform that talks about the past, present and future of the mill workers. And in order to do just that it begins with the factors that contributed to their history.

The medium used to tell the bigger picture combines photographs and interviews with virtual reality to bring the past and current conditions of the mill workers closer to our minds. It’s surprising how closely involved our lives are and yet how distant the thoughts we have towards them.