In 1982, the great textile mills strike went on for 18 months and resulted in lakhs of workers losing their jobs, 70% of Bombay’s textile mills shutting down, and a permanent change in the city’s urban economic landscape. The strike, however, was not all in vain. It gave rise to incredibly powerful people’s movements and poets. In the Abandoned Histories Poetry Crawl, we walk through Bombay’s abandoned, restored, reclaimed, and now converted textile mills—whose presence still haunts the city—while reading working class, dalit, female, and labourer poets from the 1980s. This is a crawl through uneven development, forgotten histories, capitalistic progressions of society, and the power of poetry in helping a movement come to life.