In a city synonymous with cinema, it seems fitting that movie theatres were used as a venue for revolutionary communications during the freedom struggle. Suresh Chaturvedi, a Mumbai resident who passed away recently, had recounted episodes from teenage years when he was unknowingly recruited into passing on secret packages for activists of the Quit India movement there. This and other stories narrated to the oral history project Citizens’ Archive of India (CAI) offer a glimpse of the experiences of the first citizens of Free India as well as of what the city was like at the time.

On the occasion of the 75th Independence Day, CAI shared a selection of such accounts with Mid-day.com. Among other things, these recollections demonstrate how fearlessly women citizens had led picketing exercises, likely in the 1930s, outside shops selling liquor and foreign clothes. They reveal the fervent following that ‘Bombay Pentangular’, a cricket tournament played in those days, enjoyed, and also what had first inspired the culture of eating out in the commercial capital.