For over a decade now, Indologist and art historian Sandeep Dahisarkar has been on an unusual pursuit, attempting to retrace the footsteps of his ancestors, the Pathare Kshatriyas, who made Mumbai their home nearly 10 centuries ago. His research got the much-needed boost, when he received the Gulestan Billimoria Junior Research Fellowship by the Asiatic Society of Mumbai in 2017. “After that, for about a year, I only focused on this subject, [the cultural history of my community in the Bombay presidency]. I submitted the research in 2018, but felt the need to publish it, and make it accessible to everyone,” shares Dahisarkar, when we meet him on a weekday afternoon inside the Town Hall, where he has spent endless hours poring over old records for his work. “There are barely any books on the Pathare Kshatriyas in English. Of course, Rao Bahadur Yeshwantrao Harishchandra Desai [engineer of the Gateway of India] and Gajanan Govind Naik had published their works in Marathi. But, their sole purpose was documentation of community records.”

Dahisarkar, on the other hand, wanted to explore the entire gamut of the community’s experiences, travelling back in time to reconstruct the past, and understand how the Pathare Kshatriyas came to make present-day Mumbai their home. Some of the answers—a result of several years of meticulous research—can be found in his just released book, The Pathare Kshatriyas of Bombay (Sahit Prakashan). His findings are not just ground-breaking, but radical enough for the community to sit up and take notice, and re-examine their identities.