Every city generates more history than it can hold. Documents are misplaced, buildings altered, voices left unrecorded. What survives is rarely accidental; it is the result of deliberate, often quiet acts of keeping. Double Take is Avid Learning’s new series spotlighting creative partnerships across disciplines. Conceived as a presentation-led format, each episode invites speakers to explore a central theme through their individual lenses, drawing from their practices and experiences. Together, these perspectives offer complementary and at times contrasting ways of engaging with the subject.
The first episode brings together two collaborators to examine archiving through textiles, photography, and writing. Reflecting on their shared project, Pudding: The Memory Keepers of Bandra, they will share how stories, structures, and memories are captured, catalogued, and carried forward, and what is at stake when they are not. They will also ask who determines what is worth preserving, how documentation shapes collective memory, and which methods are redefining the archive for an urban future.
A Bandra chronicler and urbanist, Shormistha Mukherjee, documents the neighbourhood’s visual and cultural landscape through @housesofbandra, her Substack Memory Keepers of Bandra, and thoughtful oral histories of its older residents. Inspired by Orhan Pamuk’s idea of modest neighbourhood museums, she uses words, videos, and installations to honour Bandra’s people, stories, and shifting shoreline. A longtime creative with over 30 years in advertising and co-founder of Flying Cursor, she’s also the author of Cancer, You Picked the Wrong Girl. Shormistha loves local history, human stories, old newspapers, and wandering every hidden by-lane she can find - keeping Bandra’s memory alive with curiosity and heart.
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Savitha Suri is a strategist, author, educator and cultural practitioner with over a decade of immersive engagement with India’s handcrafted textile traditions. She has led market revival initiatives for endangered weaving traditions including Kunbi kaapod in Goa, the Udupi sari in Karnataka, and East Indian textiles in Maharashtra — work that has drawn government recognition, GI tag pursuits, and community ownership of outcomes. Her co-authored book Assam — A Journey Through Its Textiles (Speaking Tiger) is widely regarded as the first illustrated history of the state’s indigenous weaving traditions. Savitha curates exhibitions, heritage walks, and international delegations — including India’s representation at Silk in Lyon — and teaches textile studies and market orientation at institutions including NIFT Mumbai and Somaiya Kala Vidya. She founded and leads Pravaaha Communications and is currently completing a Doctorate in Business Administration. She brings to this panel the rare combination of field practitioner, scholar, and storyteller.
Read moreDocumenting the City: Avid Learning’s Double Take Opens with a Focus on Bandra’s Memory Keepers
Cities are constantly rewriting themselves. Streets change names, neighbourhoods evolve, familiar buildings disappear, and entire communities are reshaped by development. Yet beneath this continual transformation lies another quieter process: the effort to remember. Every archive, photograph, oral history, architectural survey, or written account begins with a decision that something deserves to be preserved before it vanishes.
In rapidly changing urban environments like Mumbai, the relationship between urban memory and documentation has never been more urgent. As cities expand and histories become increasingly vulnerable to erasure, archiving emerges not simply as preservation, but as an act of cultural responsibility. It determines what future generations will know about the spaces they inherit and the stories they continue. The archive is not only a record of the past, but also a framework through which societies understand identity, continuity, and change.
Modern cities generate history faster than they can preserve it. Neighbourhoods transform within years, often leaving little trace of the communities, cultures, and lived experiences that once defined them. In cities shaped by rapid redevelopment and evolving social landscapes, preserving memory becomes increasingly complex. What gets documented, restored, photographed, or written about often reflects larger conversations around visibility, cultural value, and power. Some histories become institutional memory, while others survive only through fragments, oral traditions, photographs, or personal recollections.
This makes archiving a deeply human act. It raises questions that remain relevant across disciplines and generations: Who decides what deserves preservation? Which stories become part of collective memory? What happens to communities whose histories are overlooked or forgotten? These questions are especially important in contemporary urban life, where the pace of change frequently outpaces the ability to document what is being lost.
Within this context, Double Take Avid Learning, Avid Learning’s new series focused on Interdisciplinary Creative Practice, explores the relationship between cities, memory, storytelling, and preservation through multiple perspectives. The opening edition, Archiving Bandra for the Future, brings together Shormistha Mukherjee and Savitha Suri in a conversation that examines how writing, textiles, photography, and research shape the emotional and historical fabric of cities.
The dialogue reflects a growing interest in Interdisciplinary Creative Practice, where architecture intersects with literature, cultural research, visual documentation, and urban studies. Rather than treating disciplines as isolated fields, the conversation considers how ideas move between them and how collaborative thinking can deepen the understanding of place and memory.
At the centre of the discussion is Pudding: Memory Keepers of Bandra, a collaborative project developed by Mukherjee that explores Bandra as a living archive shaped by migration, architecture, storytelling, and community histories. Through observation, documentation, and cultural research, the project captures the fragile textures of neighbourhood identity that often disappear under the pressures of urban transformation.
Bandra occupies a unique place within Mumbai’s cultural imagination. Its layered histories, architectural diversity, and evolving social landscape make it an important site for conversations around Heritage Conservation Mumbai, Urban History and Storytelling, and the preservation of local memory. By examining Bandra through interdisciplinary methods, Pudding: Memory Keepers of Bandra demonstrates how archives can move beyond institutions and become more participatory, community-driven forms of remembrance.
More than a reflection on preservation, Double Take Avid Learning invites audiences to reconsider how memory is created, shared, and sustained within urban life. It suggests that archives are not static collections confined to institutions, but living systems shaped by stories, communities, and everyday acts of documentation.
In a city like Mumbai, where reinvention is constant, these conversations become particularly meaningful. They remind us that preserving memory is not simply about nostalgia. It is about continuity, cultural responsibility, and the recognition that every city is ultimately shaped as much by what it chooses to remember as by what it leaves behind.
