“Forty-Four Thousand Words”: A City’s Wounds Reopened at Mumbai Press Club”

Mumbai: The walls of the Mumbai Press Club, usually adorned with the humdrum of daily reportage, now carry the weight of a city’s trauma. Black-and -white images of burning buses, blood-soaked streets, and shattered images of burning shattered windows, and silent, stunned faces have taken over the gallery space for the powerful photo exhibition “Forty-Four Thousand Words,” which opened on March 15, 2025.

The exhibition, curated as a tribute to the courageous truth-telling of Mumbai’s photojournalists, features 44 haunting photographs, each telling a story of pain, resilience, and loss from one of the darkest chapters in the city’s modern history — the 1992-93 Bombay riots and the 1993 serial bomb blasts.

In December 1992 and January 1993, Bombay (now Mumbai) bled. Sparked by the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, communal riots broke out across the city, splitting neighborhoods along religious lines. What followed was an eruption of sectarian violence that killed over 900 people, injured thousands, and displaced even more. Just two months later, on March 12, 1993,

13 coordinated bomb blasts ripped through the city — the stock exchange, hotels, cinemas, and shopping complexes — killing 257 people and injuring over 1,400.

The exhibition does not shy away from the brutality. It doesn’t allow viewers to look away.

“I was a young photographer then,” says Sherwin Crasto, whose images are prominently featured in the exhibit. “You didn’t know if you’d come back home at the end of the day. But we had to document it. The world needed to know what was happening in Bombay.”

Being asked about another iconic picture placed at the exhibition, he becomes emotional and recalls the events that he captured then. “A train had arrived from Gujarat. Just as the travelers started walking from Bandra Terminus to the Bandra station, residents from the next neighborhood descended upon them, and stabbed two people in front of my eyes, said Crasto, detailing the backstory of a photograph of his that the then-home minister would allege was fabricated. It was only afterwards that I realized there was a third stabbing in the photo of a person facing me, his attacker behind. On the wayside, which cropped out, one man stood ready to throw stones at me, and another was hurtling towards me with a bamboo stick. I barely escaped the sight on my motorcycle.

On speaking about an image of an elderly couple, he paused for a while to share his profound feelings about that particular image. “Love amidst rioting, that image has never left me. There was

a radical scene just ahead, but I turned away from that and focused on something quieter, yet far more powerful: an elderly couple walking hand in hand past a charred taxi. That moment meant everything. It revealed a side of the riot that not many noticed. To that couple, it didn’t seem to matter what was happening around them. They weren’t frightened. They just walked on, together. It taught me something valuable: to focus on what truly matters.”

Crasto is joined in the exhibition by fellow lensmen Sudharak Olwe, Mukesh Parpiani, Raju Kakade, and several others. Fourteen in total — each having braved the mobs, the flames, and the deafening silence after the blasts to capture photographs that now form a collective visual memory of the city’s trauma.

Each photo in Forty-Four Thousand Words is a silent scream.

One photograph shows a man clutching his charred belongings as smoke coils behind him. Another captures a woman shielding her children from a mob just yards away. There are images of police presence, but also those of powerlessness. One particularly jarring image shows rows of covered bodies laid out like logs, each a victim of hatred, each a shattered dream.

“There are stories behind every picture,” says Mukesh Parpiani, the curator of the exhibition and one of the contributing photographers. “Some of these have never been displayed before. We wanted to bring them together now, so that Mumbai remembers — and doesn’t forget.”

The exhibition was inaugurated by Justice B.N. Srikrishna, a former Supreme Court judge who headed the Srikrishna Commission — the official inquiry into the riots. The Commission’s report, though damning in parts, remains only partially acted upon. For Justice Srikrishna, returning to these images was an act of moral reckoning.

“You cannot wipe out history,” he said at the opening. “If we forget, we are doomed to repeat it. These images are not just about the past — they’re a warning to the future.”

Justice Srikrishna spent years investigating the causes and consequences of the violence. His remarks echoed the underlying fear many Mumbaikars felt then and continue to feel today: that the threads holding the city’s diverse fabric together remain fragile.

For many who walked into the gallery this month, the exhibition was more than just an art show

• it was a reopening of old wounds. Families of victims, survivors, journalists, and students made their way to the Press Club, some wiping tears, others standing still in stunned silence.

“This picture,” says 68-year-old Farhan Khan, pointing to a photograph of a bloodied street corner, “that was my street. My brother was killed in that spot. No trial, no justice. Just gone.”

That is the story repeated across communities and the city. The riots and the blasts did not just kill

• they divided. They reshaped Bombay. They changed how people chose their neighborhoods, whom they married, how they celebrated festivals, and how they looked at each other.

The trauma was both public and private. And the photographers bore witness to all of it.

Sudharak Olwe, one of India’s most celebrated documentary photographers, recalls capturing images that he couldn’t sleep after developing. “There were days I would just cry in the

darkroom. You’d see a mother searching for her child in the debris. Or an old man whose shop had been burnt down, still holding his prayer beads. We didn’t just click pictures — we carried their grief with us.”

The exhibition has struck a chord not just with those who lived through the events, but also with the younger generation. College students have been visiting in large numbers, many of them

encountering this part of the city’s history for the first time in visual detail.

“It’s shocking,” says 20-year-old Nisha Pillai, a student of media studies. “We read about the riots in textbooks, but nothing prepares you for the rawness of these images. It makes you wonder: have we learned anything?”

That is the central question Forty-Four Thousand Words poses to its viewers. Not just what happened, but why it happened, and whether the conditions that made it possible have truly changed.

“Polarisation is creeping back in different forms,” says Justice Srikrishna. “When history is forgotten, it becomes easier to repeat it. That’s why exhibitions like this matter.”

When asked to comment on the recent riots in Nagpur over the Aurangzeb issue, Crasto responded firmly: “My captions never point fingers at any particular community. If someone has been attacked, I refer to the perpetrators as ‘miscreants’—I don’t name communities. Otherwise, we end up fueling the divide ourselves.”

Crasto’s statement exemplifies ethical journalism by deliberately avoiding community labels in his photo captions. His approach emphasizes humane reporting, focusing on events and their human cost rather than attributing blame to specific groups. This thoughtful restraint

underscores the power and responsibility of the media to report accurately without inflaming conflict.

As the sun sets over Mumbai and the city’s lights begin to flicker on, the images inside the Press Club remain frozen in time, as if to say, this happened, here, not long ago.

In a city that rarely stops, Forty-Four Thousand Words urges us to pause. To look. To feel. To remember. And above all, to promise: never again.