What the city remembers | ‘Bombay Framed: People, Memory, Metropolis’ at DAG Mumbai

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.