19 April,2026 12:20 PM IST | Mumbai | Tanisha Banerjee
This is the lost station of Colaba that opened in 1896 and shut down in 1930
There is a particular kind of Mumbai that lives almost suspended in time. It is not the Mumbai of traffic updates or skyline ambitions, but one made of forgotten footnotes, buried objects, and stories that linger like humidity in the air. This is the Bombay that Kunal Tripathi has been patiently piecing together for over a decade through his digital archive, @mumbaiheritage. And now, with his newly released ebook - a collection of 25 lesser-known stories from the city's past at Rs 99 - he offers readers not just history, but a way to feel the city differently.
Long before Ballard Pier existed, all passengers arriving by sea came ashore at Apollo Bunder. A small pavilion offered shelter to weary travellers in the late 19th century
An engineer by profession, working with the Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport (BEST) Undertaking, Tripathi's relationship with the city is both functional and deeply personal. His journey into archiving the city's memory did not begin in an academic institution or a museum, but online, in 2013, with a simple impulse to document. Over 12 years, that impulse has grown into a vast, living repository followed by lakhs across platforms. "Today @mumbaiheritage has 4 lakh+ followers on X, over 45,000 on Instagram, and is fairly active on Facebook too," he says.
Over the years, he has conducted heritage walks, written articles, and even put out postcards and calendars. The ebook feels like a natural culmination of this journey.
A photograph of the Maharashtra Police Headquarters after its construction on what was once Mendham's Point Cemetary. During construction work in 1928, workers discovered human bones from the Portuguese-era burial ground
Interestingly, the seed for it was sown in a fleeting moment online. "It started with a tweet. I asked people what's the craziest Mumbai history fact they knew. It got 5.7 million views and thousands of replies. That's when I realised people are genuinely hungry for this," he recalls.
What could have remained a transient digital exchange instead became something lasting. "The ebook felt like the right way to package it, something complete, curated, worth reading. Good stories, good photographs, accessible to anyone who loves the city," he explains.
What makes Tripathi's work compelling is not just the stories he tells, but the way he finds them. His process is slow, layered, almost archival in temperament. "It's built on years of collecting - old Gazettes, British-era records, archive collections, books most people haven't touched in decades," he says.
In 1962, India imported 12 Skoda electric trolleybuses all the way from Czechoslovakia. Pics courtesy/Kunal Tripathi
"Cities that forget their past lose something essential," he says, "Mumbai is changing fast, buildings disappear overnight, neighbourhoods transform. When the physical traces go, the stories go too, unless someone writes them down."
Buy the book from @mumbaiheritage
"The most surprising discovery was the petrified forest beneath Mumbai's soil," says Kunal Tripathi. "In the 1870s, workers digging Prince's Dock found nearly 380 ancient tree trunks buried under clay. An entire submerged forest, thousands of years old, lying beneath one of India's busiest port areas. I'd been researching Mumbai for over a decade and had no idea." It is the kind of revelation that makes the ground beneath your feet feel heavier with time.
Kunal Tripathi
"The time capsule beneath Bombay Central Station [today's Mumbai Central]," he says, when asked about what impacted him personally. "When the station was being built, a brass cylinder was placed under the foundation stone, sealed with the names of the officers who built it and coins from that era. Millions of people pass through that station every day, completely unaware that there's a little piece of history buried beneath their feet."
1853-1970
Period from which the photos in the booklet
have been sourced
