In 1929, a Fox Movietone recording was shot across Bombay’s bustling Null Bazar, a dhobi ghat, and a mosque. They were trying to document the city, but ended up recording something else entirely: history as sensory overwhelm. Hollering hawkers, loud car horns, Marathi and Hindi instructions cutting over each other.

This accidental document does what no image can quite do: it gives you the city as the body receives it. The recording now sits outside Bombay Framed: People, Memory, Metropolis, DAG’s landmark exhibition at their gallery in the Taj Mahal Palace.

Elsewhere, essayist Naresh Fernandes’ catalogue essay conjures its ghost. He tracks what the city no longer sounds like: the Angelus bells at Mount Mary Church still ring across Bandra three times daily, but the low-rise neighbourhood that once let that sound travel freely has been surrounded by high-rise towers. The bells are now acoustically swallowed before they reach anyone. The air raid siren that tested itself from the Town Hall every morning at nine — a municipal ritual maintained since 1971 — went permanently silent after the July 2005 floods destroyed its underground cables.

This is the condition Bombay Framed sets out to reckon with — the active, ongoing erasure of what a city knows about itself. The exhibition spans three centuries of paintings, photographs, prints and archival material, accompanied by a scholarly catalogue (and a parallel festival, The City as A Museum, which ran across nine sites through March). Together they make an argument that is both urgent and difficult: that Bombay — the name the project deliberately chooses over Mumbai, and the distinction matters — is best understood through what its most famous images leave out.

‘Not just a place but an idea’

Mumbai is a city; Bombay is an emotion. Or as DAG’s senior vice president Ritu Vajpeyi Mohan describes the project’s premise, Bombay is “not just a place but an idea — one formed through memory, shaped by what the city has meant to different people over time”. Everyone in India carries some version of Bombay already: Marine Drive’s arc of streetlamps at night, the local trains packed past capacity, the Bollywood poster bleeding colour across a crumbling facade. It is the original city of dreams, which means it is also the city where most dreams are quietly surrendered, where people arrive with everything and learn to survive on considerably less.

These images are real. They are also, as Gyan Prakash, the Princeton historian who edited the catalogue, argues, “surfaces that need excavating [how when you press into familiar images, the history emerges]”. Take finance. The Parsi and Gujarati merchants who built the city’s commercial foundations did so when British managing agencies were crowding Indian capital out of Calcutta — a mercantile confidence that runs through the exhibition from colonial-era trading prints all the way to Chittaprosad’s devastating linocuts of labour camps, tents stretching to the horizon, factory chimneys rising like a second, crueller skyline.

Take cinema. The genuinely strange fact of a Hindi film industry thriving in a Marathi-speaking city — drawing on Urdu’s literary traditions, absorbing Punjabi idiom, producing something that belongs to none of its sources and all of them simultaneously.

From Churchgate Station to Siddhartha College

The exhibition lives at the Taj Mahal Palace — itself a layered choice. The Taj is one of Mumbai’s great historic buildings, and a site forever marked by the November 2008 terrorist attacks. It is also one of the city’s most exclusive addresses, which means the exhibition is structurally inaccessible to many of the communities it documents.

The festival answers that directly, by expanding outside the hotel to venues that carry specific community histories, such as Churchgate Station and the David Sassoon Library. Ashish Anand, CEO of DAG, describes the programme as an effort to “inhabit the contestations that shape the cultural landscape of the city”.

At Our Lady of Salvation Church, M.F. Husain’s lithographs and Anjolie Ela Menon’s paintings are discussed inside a space already holding the argument between universal form and particular faith. At Siddhartha College, a discussion of colonial-era caricatures of B.R. Ambedkar takes place inside his personal library. Ambedkar held doctorates from Columbia and the LSE in economics and law, drafted the Constitution, and in the city specifically, organised its textile mill workers, founding the Independent Labour Party in 1936. The room carries all of that.

At Kanheri Caves, an archaeologist walks visitors through a site whose Buddhist past was substantially shaped by colonial scholarship, which needed ancient India to be singular and found, in caves that had served multiple sects across centuries of global trade, something far more complicated. The venue in each case is argument.

Bombay Framed — both the exhibition and the catalogue — makes no claim to comprehensiveness. Prakash describes the project as removing “the screen of the present’s phantasmagoria [the sense that the way things are now — the glass towers and coastal highways — was inevitable]”.

Chor Bazaar, once the city’s great informal archive, where you spent a Friday digging through vinyl and forgotten objects, has been institutionalised into a tourist version of itself. The Bhendi Bazaar redevelopment will replace over 200 turn-of-the-century buildings with towers rising 40 storeys. The 1947 Rent Act, which capped rents at 1940 levels, kept buildings socioeconomically entangled: a clerk and a mill owner in the same stairwell. Redevelopment incentives have systematically unpicked that entanglement, one tower at a time.

No exhibition can stop a demolition, but it can create the conditions for a different conversation. Anand is honest about the scale of what a private institution can do: “The research and ideas generated through this project do not end with the exhibition; they remain part of a larger and growing body of work that can be revisited, reinterpreted, and built upon.”

Bombay Framed is on till April 12 at DAG Mumbai.

The essayist-educator writes on culture, and is founding editor of Proseterity — a literary arts magazine.