Hope and Stay

THE FAMILY ALBUM is a reluctant medium—unyielding until the people in the photographs narrate a moment, conjuring a polyphonic history from the photographs and other printed memorabilia. Soboicar is a community archive maintained by journalist Jane Borges and art-therapist Sheena Maria Piedade in partnership with The Citizens’ Archive of India. Constructed from and around family albums and memorabilia, this archiving project gathers the collective memory of Christian communities in southern Mumbai. Its name alludes to “Bomoicar”—a Konkani name given to the Goans of Bombay, or Mumbai. Both Borges and Maria Piedade bring their personal histories and generational stories of living in these parts of the city into the archive.

Soboicar “is part of a larger documentation of urban Indian life,” Borges writes. “It tells the story of what drew people to [Bombay], why they made it their home, how they helped build it, and their contributions to the various cultural, social and political movements.” Though the archive was created mainly for research and scholarship, Borges hopes to tease out the submerged narratives of the city’s shifting population—“what made people leave the city, which communities are now shaping the new megapolis, and do Soboicars have any stake in it.”

Borges is a third-generation inhabitant of Mumbai, whose paternal and maternal grandparents migrated to the city in the early 1900s, settling in neighbourhoods in southern Bombay—then the preferred area for many migrants. Her paternal grandfather, as well as her maternal grandparents, came from Karnataka, while her paternal grandmother hailed from Old Goa. Following their marriage, her paternal grandparents established their home in Mazagaon and subsequently moved to Grant Road, while her maternal grandparents resided in Malabar Hill. These neighbourhoods were a melting pot of diverse communities, including Marathis, Gujaratis, Marwaris and Parsis, who significantly influenced both her grandparents and parents.