They came, they saw and they left intrigued. “You mean, this small lane is almost 200-years-old?” cried a participant at the Bandra walk event on Sunday morning. There were around 30 participants and the object of their wonder was the nondescript and narrow Bazaar Road, sandwiched between the posh Hill Road and the busy KC Marg. Before these two roads came up on land reclaimed from the sea, the older lane was the choice destination, especially for traders laden with goods fresh off ships berthed at the nearby Mahim port.Anthony Abraham, curator of the ‘Bazaar Road’ walk and founder of the Collage Collective art studio, said traders paid a premium to set up shop here and beyond the road was a creek. “I was born and brought up in Bandra and I didn’t know the road was this important!” said Pravar Obhan, a participant at the walk.
Once the collective exclamations subsided, Abraham said the street, a maze of modest homes and tiny shops selling anything from bread, eggs, photo frames and authentic East Indian masala, has retained most of its physical and ethnographic features. The road’s snaky shape, which firmed up around the late 1700s, is intact as is the multiethnic composition of its residents. “Six or seven trading communities have had roots here since the 18th century,” said Abraham, pointing to low-slung cottages of East Indian Catholics, chawl-inspired residences of Maharashtrian mill workers, sprawling Marwari chawls, an old mosque cheek-in-jowl with a chapel, and market areas filled with shops run by Gujarati and Bohri businessmen.