Walk, to remember: Heritage tours in Indian cities are gaining new purpose
See Kolkata through a row of sweet shops, Mumbai via a segment of skyline, as guides craft experiences that can’t be googled; merge then, now and what’s next.
The best heritage walks in India’s cities are no longer a matter of standing before a building and hearing all about it; or walking down a street as someone paints a picture of how it once looked.

“An audience already armed with information wants an experience that can’t be Googled,” says Sibendu Das, 42, from Kolkata. So guides looking to stand out today are picking a niche within their niche, and aiming to excel within it. Das, for instance, doesn’t conduct “food walks”. Since 2022, he has led people on a single trail focused on heritage mishti (sweets) in north Kolkata.
Visitors tour some of the oldest shops in this neighbourhood, sample some of their wares. But Das is a food writer and researcher who has also spent years exploring and writing about these businesses (some of that time as a features writer with The Telegraph). So he is able to take them into backrooms and kitchens too, where sweetshop owners and managers talk about the difficulties of making some of the rarer treats, or the new battles engendered by the rising price of sugar.

“A cursory internet search can tell an enthusiast about Makhanlal Das & Sons, one of the oldest sweet shops in Kolkata,” says Das. “But only (current owner) Shibnath Das can tell you that the British East India Company had a stable a few metres away and describe how that affected business.”
Similarly, in Mumbai, documentary filmmaker Akanksha Gupta, 39, conducts a single walk built around the city’s water supply, tracing it from its colonial roots through its descent into house taps now.

Across the prime metros, where heritage walks have been increasingly popular over the past decade, hyperlocal histories and subcultures are zooming into focus, community members are being roped in to add perspective, and stories of the past are being extended into discussions of contemporary evolution, touching upon matters such as changing land use, town planning, infrastructure development, redevelopment and migration.
In one notable example, heritage guide and art educator Alisha Sadikot, 38, ends a walk at Mumbai’s Marine Drive, where she invites attendees to step back and look at the stretch not as one familiar sweep, but as distinct segments.
She draws their attention first to Nariman Point. What does it most closely resemble? The early skyline of Manhattan. Why? Because when the once-iconic office district was being built, in the 1970s, New York’s skyscraper builders were the rockstars of the global architectural world. Mumbai’s planners wanted a skyline of similar impressive, jagged height.
The rest of the stretch is from a different era entirely: middle-class housing designed in the new-wave, cement-driven, curved-lines Art Deco style traceable to the 1920s and ‘30s.
Detour
It begins, says Sadikot, with asking: Why me? “Guides today are realising that a deep personal connection, lived experience, or perspective are required in order to set their voice apart.”
Yunus Lasania, 33, has been a reporter on Hyderabad heritage for leading dailies since 2015. He’s built a collection of archival pictures, maps and data, which inform and enrich the heritage walks he conducts. Whether at the over-200-year-old Paigah Tombs or the British-era churches of Abids, he also often invites senior citizens to talk about their lived experience in the neighbourhood. How has it changed, how is it changing now?

One senior described how the artist MF Husain would often sit at a specific café in Secunderabad and paint. No one bothered him; he was at peace. “Then, one day, he apparently brought actor Madhuri Dixit to the café, and caused a huge traffic jam,” Lasania adds, laughing.
Travel experiences platform No Footprints specialises in uncovering these unknown histories, often with the help of domain experts and researchers. Cricket writer and former manager of media relations for the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) Devendra Prabhudesai, 47, for instance, hosts a No Footprints trail through Mumbai maidans, sharing anecdotes about Sachin Tendulkar, Sunil Gavaskar and Bambaiyya sports slang.
In Goa, another such company, Soul Travelling, is putting together a trail that will take participants to Curdi village. Submerged by the waters of the Salaulim dam in 1986, the village re-emerges in the dry months between April and June. What most people don’t know is that the village also comes alive at this time, with a mela organised around an old temple that still stands.
At No Footprints trails in Mumbai’s Worli koliwada (or fishing village), fisherfolk who have made a living from the sea for generations talk about the community’s struggles with grasping builders, and with redevelopment. They talk also about the impact of sewage released close to the coast, and point to giant outlets at their feet; and of how the upcoming Coastal Road has never had their vote.
By the end of such a walk, a city comes alive in new ways. Wherever one stands, there is new information to be navigated and shades of grey to be accommodated, potentially contributing to how citizens view new developments, political promises, campaigns.
As Delhi-based historian and author Swapna Liddle, who has been leading walks since the 1990s, puts it: “Heritage is, after all, how history connects with present-day life.”
