Visiting the Municipal Corporation
Yesterday my friend, the historian and collector Deepak Rao, took me for what he excitedly described as a “peep show” in the corridors of the Bombay Municipal Corporation, which are lined with glass-faced cupboards containing a veritable treasure trove of municipal archives. Deepak is the only person I know who will compare the delight of visiting a rare archive to the pleasures of a brothel. And his “peep show” was indeed titillating. Everything from the proceedings of the Corporation House, to the departmental files of the Education, Sanitation, Improvements and Standing Committee are carefully stored in bound volumes which are seemingly catalogued according to an internal file keeping system, going back to the 1880s (!). Today I again returned to the corridors of the Municipal Corporation, this time to the Estates and Land Management Department at Manish Market. I gazed longingly at the files stacked next to the desk where I was sitting, each of which contain the files for individual plots in the old Scheme no.5 of the Bombay Improvement Trust, the neighbourhoods of Dadar and Matunga. While I am scheming to get access to the records in the main office I saw in the glass cupboards today, the hope of accessing these mountains of detailed files for research is a distant dream. The builders would sooner burn the place down.
