By Sheena Maria Piedade, Co-Founder IT'S FICTION that brought us -- Sheena Maria Piedade and Jane Borges -- together. And it's fiction which first made us curious about our families, our pasts, and the homes that we shared with our ancestors.
A few months before the pandemic, Jane, a Mumbai-based journalist, had published her debut novel, 'Bombay Balchao', set in Cavel, a tiny neighbourhood on Mumbai's D'Lima Street. The stories were inspired from the Catholic community, also named Cavel, where she moved with her family as a 16-year-old. I (Sheena) am an artist, writer and facilitator, currenty living in Pune. Over the last few years, I've been reading fiction almost exclusively by South Asian women writers. So it was only a matter of time before I found myself picking up 'Bombay Balchao'. I was so excited to see it was set in Cavel, because of my family's ties to the neighbourhood. My grandmother was a schoolteacher at the Barretto High School in Cavel, and three generations of her family, including her three children, lived in nearby Dabul, another Goan neighbourhood on the verge of extinction. I immediately connected with Jane to share my grandmother's story, and ended up sending her a lot of photos and material memory. Incidentally, I have been working with family photos for many years, and actively contributing to existing archival projects. SImultaneously, I'd been looking to situate many of the photographs from Bombay within a larger archive in some way. At some point, I realised I might have to be the person who was responsible for creating the archive. Jane too had been "curious and anxious about why the population of Cavel was fast dwindling", and was also looking to record oral histories of its residents, to understand how neighbourhoods like these swelled and thrived in pre-Independence Bombay. We ended up confiding in each other about our individual interest in creating a memory project, and later shared the idea with Malvika Bhatia of the Citizen Archive of India (CAI). The rest, as they say, is history. Soboicar, which is being done in partnership with the CAI, is an oral history and material memory project, which attempts to trace the stories of Catholic neighbourhoods, in South Mumbai, which, over the last few decades, due to movement patterns (people shifting to the suburbs or migrating abroad), gentrification, and the spate of redevelopment projects, are slowly disappearing from the city's consciousness. Through the project, we seek to document the personal and visual histories of Catholic migrants from the Konkani who made South Bombay their home, living alongside the East Indian Catholics, and why some of them left, and a few others stayed, and how this influenced the complexion of these spaces. The scope of the project is deeply personal to us. Jane's family hails from Karwar and Mangalore in Karnataka, and currently lives in Cavel, and I am Goan, and still have an ancestral house in Dabul. Our project hence focuses on these communities as a starting point. But we want to cover an entire gamut of neighbourhoods in South Bombay. These include the Catholic pockets of Colaba, Byculla and Mahim, Matharpacady in Mazagaon, Sonapur in Dhobi Talao, Dabul and Cavel in Chira Bazaar, Kotachiwadi in Girgaum amongst others. South Mumbai, or SoBo, as the locals say, is what inspired the title of our project. Bombay Goans call themselves 'Bomoicars' and our objective is to archive the disappearing stories of those who lived as 'Soboicars', and made the Southern part of the island city their home. To participate, email us: dearsoboi...@gmail.com ### Courtesy The Examiner, Mumbai, March 12-18, 2022.