Traveling through cities that are slowly disappearing.

Introduction — Traveling Through a Country Forgetting Itself

There is a strange ache in traveling through India today, a feeling that you are not just entering new cities, but witnessing the last breaths of old ones. Places that once carried centuries of memory now survive in fragments: a fading signboard, a collapsing haveli, an old shop pushed between two glass towers. India is not just changing; it is dissolving in slow motion.

For a generation raised in the speed of development, travel has become an act of documentation, an attempt to touch, see, and remember things before they vanish. What we explore now is not simply geography but disappearance. India is a place of destination and a place of archive. And everywhere we go, we find out the same unsettling truth: we are the last generation to see parts of this country as they once were.

The Disappearing Neighbourhoods — When Lanes Stop Remembering

Some neighbourhoods do not die dramatically — they fade like old photographs. Old Delhi kulcha lane still echoes with spices, copper, and Urdu signboards, but every year another courtyard collapses, another ancestral house is turned into a warehouse, and another lane is deprived of its identity in the name of redevelopment. These are the places that formerly contained the warmth of living memory — neighbours who remembered three generations of a family, shops older than independence — but modernity breaks these stories.

In Kolkata, massive rajbaris sit half abandoned, their columns cracked, their courtyards flooded in the monsoon. These were the houses of poets, musicians, and revolutionaries. They are used today in photoshoots since the families are unable to sustain them. In Pune, ancient wadas are being bulldozed for luxury complexes; in Hyderabad, Irani cafes, which used to be the soul of the city, are shutting down one after another in favor of theme restaurants, which are not part of the past, but imitations thereof.

Urban historians call this “cultural erasure through economic pressure”, cities losing the very elements that made them cities in the first place. For travellers, walking through these neighbourhoods today feels like opening a book that is being rewritten while you read.

When Crafts Become Ruins — The Slow Death of Living Heritage

India’s heritage is not only in monuments; it lives in the hands of the weavers, printers, potters, embroiderers, and instrument makers. Yet these hands, steady for generations, are slowly disappearing.

The noise of the looms has been drowned in the weaving quarters of Varanasi. Young weavers are turning to gig work because a handloom cannot feed a family in 2025. According to the governmental reports, more than 40 percent of Banarasi weavers dropped out of the trade during the previous decade (Ministry of Textiles, 2024). What disappears is not just fabric but memory — a generational knowledge system coded into fingers.

In Kutch, printers of ajrakh talk of increasing chemical dyes, heat waves, and drying groundwater water which has rendered their trade almost impossible. The blue-pottery clusters that used to be vibrant in Jaipur are now left to survive on export orders and tourist seasons. In Lucknow, the chikankari craftsmen are shifting to machine embroidery as the market is demanding low costs at the expense of manual perfection.

Visiting them now is like entering the museum and seeing the exhibits that are still breathing but are so tired. These crafts are not dying out due to the absence of beauty but due to the pressure of survival.

Food Streets Turning Into Food Courts — The Vanishing Taste of Cities

Every Indian city has a flavour that belongs to no recipe — a taste built from decades of frying pans, gossip, and stories. But that taste too is disappearing.

Irani cafes, which had long influenced the intellectual and cultural life of Mumbai, are closing down, with marble tables and bentwood chairs giving way to polished chain cafes. The old military hotel culture of Bengaluru is being forced out of the city by high-rise cafes. Mess that used to be 3 rupees in Chennai is being substituted by digital-first restaurant brands.

In a report commissioned in 2024 by the National Association of Street Vendors, it was discovered that about 30 percent of historic food lanes in the leading Indian metros have been reduced or eliminated because of the development push.

The tragedy is not just the loss of food but the ecosystem around it — the suppliers, the conversations, the regular customers, the street performers, the shared humanity. When a food street dies, a city loses a language.

The Identity Crisis of Indian Cities — When Glass Towers Replace Memory

All the Indian cities are experiencing an identity crisis today. Mumbai is becoming a forest of glass; the old mill areas in the city are now malls and posh flats. The cantonment architecture of Bengaluru is almost wiped off by tech parks. The old markets of Delhi are being restructured into heritages or plazas that resemble more of an airport. Gurgaon is devouring ancient villages at an alarming rate that people might even wake up and see that their lanes have been transformed into construction sites.

Urban sociologists refer to this as “speed urbanism” — development happening so quickly that the city forgets to carry forward its own memory. What gets built is modern, but what gets erased is irreplaceable.

A city without memory does not feel modern; it feels uprooted.

Conclusion — What It Means to Lose a City While Living in It

Cities do not disappear when they collapse; they disappear when they are forgotten. In India, loss is often silent — a demolished haveli, a vanished craft, a shuttered café, a street renamed. Travel today, more than ever, is about seeing what remains of what made India India.

Because in every vanishing market, every last artisan, every fading neighbourhood, lies a reminder:

A heritage lost is a history rewritten.
And a history rewritten is a future weakened.

To travel through India today is to grieve and admire simultaneously — grieving what is fading, admiring what still survives. The cities will keep changing, but remembering them as they were is our only way of keeping them alive.

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