Mumbai: Colonial Fort & Gateway of India

The formal inauguration took place on fourth December nineteen twenty-four, with the Viceroy of India presiding before a crowd that filled the harbour plaza. The monument to imperial arrival had finally been completed.

Then came the moment that reversed its meaning. On twenty-eighth February nineteen forty-eight — six months after Indian independence on fifteenth August nineteen forty-seven — the First Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry marched in formation through this arch to the waiting troopships in the harbour. They were the last British troops to leave India. A crowd of newly independent Indians watched them go. The arch built as a symbol of colonial arrival became, in that single morning, the frame through which two hundred years of British power in India passed out of sight and into history.

That inversion is the Gateway's true significance. It was designed to welcome the Raj and it ended up dismissing it. Stand here for a moment. The Arabian Sea is the same sea it always was. The city behind you is something entirely new.

The formal inauguration took place on fourth December nineteen twenty-four, with the Viceroy of India presiding. The crowd was enormous. The harbour was full of ships. The monument to imperial arrival had finally been completed.

Then came the moment that reversed its meaning entirely. On twenty-eighth February nineteen forty-eight — six months after Indian independence on fifteenth August nineteen forty-seven — the First Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry marched through this arch and boarded troopships in the harbour. They were the last British troops to leave India. A crowd of newly independent Indians watched them go. The arch built to welcome the arrival of British power became the frame through which that power departed.

That reversal is the Gateway's real meaning. It was designed as a monument to colonial authority, and history turned it into a monument to the end of colonial authority, and it has stood here ever since, doing both jobs at once. Feel the Arabian Sea breeze coming off the water. Look up at the stone. This city, and this country, contains multitudes.

The building was designed by a team that included D.N. Mirza and Sitaram Khanderao Vaidya, an Indian architect. Notice that the most ornate facade faces the sea rather than the land. The great central dome, the most elaborate stonework, the grandest proportions — all face the harbour. Various explanations circulate: that the plans arrived from abroad with the orientation reversed; that it was a deliberate choice to face westward. Whatever the reason, the effect is that the hotel presents itself to anyone arriving by water.

On the night of twenty-sixth November two thousand and eight, Lashkar-e-Taiba gunmen arrived by boat from Karachi and attacked multiple locations across Mumbai simultaneously. The Taj was seized and held for approximately sixty hours. The attacks killed one hundred and sixty-six people across the city; thirty-one died at the Taj. Fires damaged significant parts of the building. The Tata Group, which still owns the hotel, restored it entirely and reopened in December two thousand and eight — a decision understood at the time as a statement of refusal. The hotel kept its original form, its original character, and as much of its original staff as possible. It did not close for long. It did not change its face.

Notice that the most ornate facade faces the sea rather than the land. The great central dome, the most elaborate stonework, the grandest proportions — all of it faces the harbour. The city behind the hotel sees the building's back. The sea sees its face. Various explanations circulate for this orientation, including the possibility that the plans arrived from Europe facing the wrong direction, but the effect is that the hotel presents itself to the water, to the ships, to anyone arriving by sea.

On the night of twenty-sixth November two thousand and eight, Lashkar-e-Taiba gunmen arrived by boat from Karachi and attacked multiple locations across Mumbai simultaneously. The Taj was seized and held for approximately sixty hours. The attacks killed one hundred and sixty-six people across the city; thirty-one died at the Taj. The Tata Group, which still owns the hotel, restored the damaged sections and reopened in December two thousand and eight. The hotel kept its original form and its original character. It did not flinch.

The collection inside is one of the finest in India. The ancient sculpture galleries hold Indus Valley seals from roughly two thousand three hundred BC through to Mauryan-era stonework and a strong collection of Chola bronzes from Tamil Nadu, cast between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. The Chola casting tradition produced some of the finest bronze figures ever made anywhere — the dancing Nataraja, Shiva ringed by fire, is the canonical form, but the figures at this museum reward slow looking with detail that photographs miss. The Gandhara Buddhist sculptures, produced in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan between the first and fifth centuries, show the moment Buddhist art adopted the human face, deriving the features of the Buddha from Hellenistic Apollo types carried east by Alexander's campaigns. This is a museum where East and West have been in conversation for nearly two millennia.

Even from the street, stand at the gate and look up at the dome. The jali screens catch the morning light and the dome appears to float above the building. It is one of the most beautiful things in South Mumbai.

The Kala Ghoda neighbourhood around the museum has become the cultural district of Mumbai — the Jehangir Art Gallery, the oldest commercial gallery in the city, opened in nineteen fifty-two and is a short walk south. The National Gallery of Modern Art is nearby. Every February the streets fill for the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, nine days of installations, music, and open-air exhibitions that draw enormous crowds. The art world that Bollywood money and Indian economic growth have made possible in the twenty-first century centres itself here, in the streets around the dome that George Wittet built when this city was still the capital of a colonial presidency.

The collection is one of the finest in India across three main areas. The ancient Indian sculpture galleries hold Indus Valley seals, Mauryan-era stonework, and a strong collection of Chola bronzes from Tamil Nadu, cast between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. The Chola casting tradition produced some of the finest bronze figures ever made anywhere in the world — the dancing Nataraja, Shiva ringed by fire, is the canonical image, but the figures here reward unhurried looking. The Gandhara Buddhist sculptures, produced in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan between the first and fifth centuries, show the moment when Buddhist art adopted the human figure, deriving the face of the Buddha from Hellenistic Apollo types brought east by Alexander's campaigns.

Even if you do not go inside, stand at the gate and look up at the dome. The jali screen catches the morning light and the dome appears to float. It is one of the best things Wittet built, and he built two extraordinary buildings in this city.

Look east at the High Court: pointed arches, two towers with figures of Justice and Mercy, Gothic stonework in basalt and sandstone. Look north at the Rajabai Clock Tower rising eighty-five metres above the University of Mumbai library. Look south at the Elphinstone College facade and the old Secretariat buildings. These structures were built to last and to impress. They were also built in a tropical city where the scale of the monsoon and the heat and the humidity is completely unlike anything in northern Europe, and where the architects had to adapt their European models to conditions they had never personally experienced.

That adaptation — European Gothic in the Arabian Sea humidity, Gothic spires above coconut palms, stone gargoyles alongside carvings of Indian animals — is exactly what makes this precinct so extraordinary. UNESCO recognised it. Step onto the grass if the cricket allows it.

The Oval itself predates the grand buildings around it. It was a parade ground and recreational space during the colonial period, and the practice of playing cricket here is at least as old as the Victorian buildings on its edges. Cricket in India is not a colonial hangover — it became something entirely Indian, the sport of a billion people, the context in which figures like Sachin Tendulkar, who grew up in Mumbai, became national heroes of a scale that has no equivalent in most other countries. The boys playing here on these overlapping pitches are playing the same game in the shadow of the same buildings that Victorian administrators watched from their offices a hundred and fifty years ago. The buildings stayed. The meaning of the game changed entirely.

Look east at the High Court. Look north at the Rajabai Clock Tower rising above the University library. Look south at the Elphinstone College. These buildings were all constructed between the eighteen sixties and the eighteen eighties, during the cotton boom that made Bombay one of the wealthiest cities in the British Empire. The American Civil War had disrupted cotton supply from the southern United States, and Bombay's merchants — Parsi, Hindu, Muslim, and British alike — filled the gap and made extraordinary fortunes. The buildings you see are what those fortunes built: institutions of law, education, and government, in a Gothic style that the patrons associated with the great universities and cathedrals of Britain, transplanted to the western edge of India and adapted, imperfectly and magnificently, to the humidity and the heat.

Step onto the grass if the cricket allows it. This is one of the most important urban spaces in the world.

The tower's name comes from Premchand Roychand, the cotton trader and speculator who funded the construction. He named it for his mother, Rajabai, who was blind. She could not see the clock face, but she could hear the bells that chimed on the quarter hour, playing melodies from English hymn tunes. The mechanism is historic and the bells still function, though the chimes are not always reliable on a given day.

The University was established in eighteen fifty-seven, the same year as the universities of Calcutta and Madras — the three formed together as part of the British colonial educational project, modelled on the University of London. The campus that Scott designed is the architectural heart of the institution: the library attached to the tower base has a Victorian reading room with carved timber shelves and iron balconies that is still in daily use by students. The books are real and in use. The building is exactly what it appears to be.

The full ensemble of the University campus, the Rajabai Tower, and the High Court immediately to the south is one of the finest Victorian civic groupings anywhere in the world. Look at the proportions. They built for permanence.

The tower's name comes from Premchand Roychand, the cotton trader and speculator who funded the construction and named it for his mother, Rajabai, who was blind. She could hear the bells tell the time. The mechanism chimes English hymn tunes and folk melodies on the quarter hour. On a quiet morning, when the traffic noise dips briefly between waves, you can hear them from the Oval Maidan.

The University of Mumbai was established in eighteen fifty-seven, the same year as the universities of Calcutta and Madras — three institutions founded together as part of the British colonial educational project, each modelled on the University of London. The campus library that Scott designed adjacent to the tower has a Victorian reading room with carved timber shelves, cast-iron balconies, and filtered light from high windows that is still in full daily use by students. The books are real and in circulation. The building is exactly what it appears to be: a working library in one of the most beautiful Victorian interiors in India.

The full ensemble here — tower, library, High Court directly to the south — is one of the finest Victorian civic groupings anywhere in the world. The British built for permanence, and permanent is what this is.

The University of Mumbai has produced many of independent India's most significant figures across law, politics, science, and the arts. It is a functioning institution of over half a million students — one of the largest universities in the world by enrollment — and the Victorian campus at the southern end is only one part of a much larger network of colleges spread across the city. But this campus, with Scott's tower and Wittet's associated buildings, remains the symbolic heart of the institution. Students with exam papers under their arms walk past the base of the tower on their way to the library. The bells ring. The city continues around them at its usual overwhelming pace.

Look at the pointed arches along the ground-floor arcade, at the carved stone columns, at the way the building manages to be simultaneously imposing and human in scale at street level. The Bombay High Court has jurisdiction over the state of Maharashtra and the union territories of Goa, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, and Daman and Diu. It handles some of the most consequential commercial litigation in Asia — this is, after all, the financial capital of India, where Bollywood contracts are contested and corporate mergers are challenged and property disputes over land worth hundreds of millions of dollars work their way through the system.

The court still functions inside. Lawyers in black gowns move through the corridors. Cases are called. Arguments are made. The building that Fuller designed as a statement of colonial legal authority now serves the legal system of a sovereign republic. The architecture has not changed. The jurisdiction has.

Stand on the pavement and look up at the full facade in the mid-morning light. The stone is a warm buff sandstone that catches the sun differently at different hours. In the early morning it glows. By noon it goes flat. In the late afternoon it goes golden again. The builders understood the light here, even if they had never seen it.

The Bombay High Court has jurisdiction over the state of Maharashtra and the union territories of Goa, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, and Daman and Diu. It handles some of the most consequential commercial litigation in Asia — this is, after all, the financial capital of India, where Bollywood contracts are contested, corporate mergers are challenged, and property disputes over land worth hundreds of millions of dollars work slowly through the system. Lawyers in black gowns move through the colonnaded corridors. Cases are called. Arguments are made in English and Marathi and Hindi. The heat builds through the morning inside the stone chambers in a way that air conditioning softens but never entirely defeats.

The building that Colonel Fuller designed as a statement of colonial legal authority now serves the legal system of a sovereign republic. The jurisdiction has changed entirely. The architecture has not. Stand on the pavement and look up at the full facade in the mid-morning light. The stone glows differently at different hours: warm and gold early, flatter by noon, golden again in the late afternoon. The builders understood the light here, even if most of them had never seen it before they arrived.

Adjacent to the High Court the old secretariat buildings continue the Victorian Gothic language of the precinct in a register that is slightly less theatrical but equally assured. The whole southern end of Oval Maidan is framed by this continuous wall of Gothic stonework: arches and towers and carved detail in the basalt that the Deccan plateau provides in abundance. Mumbai sits on one of the great volcanic rock formations of the earth. The Deccan Traps, formed by an enormous volcanic event roughly sixty-six million years ago, underlie the entire city. The black rock that the Victorian architects used for these buildings has been here far longer than any empire.

Three million commuters pass through this station every day. Seven million passengers use the suburban railway network that radiates from CST and the other Mumbai terminals daily. The trains that leave from here go to every corner of India — to Delhi, to Chennai, to Kolkata, to the villages of rural Maharashtra. Without this network, a city of over twenty million people cannot function. The Victorian grandeur of the exterior conceals one of the most intensely used pieces of transport infrastructure in the world.

Cross to the median strip on Dr. D.N. Road and look back at the full facade. This is the correct viewing distance. The proportions, the detail, the controlled extravagance of the whole thing — this is what the British Raj built when it wanted to impress itself.

Cross to the median strip on Dr. D.N. Road and look back at the full facade. From here the proportions are correct and the detail resolves: you can see how Stevens controlled the composition across the entire width, letting the dome dominate while the clock tower pulls your eye up and the arcade of arches at ground level invites you in. This is what the British Raj built when it wanted to impress itself and the world.

Three million commuters pass through this station every day. The suburban railway network that radiates from CST carries seven million passengers daily across Mumbai — it is the circulatory system of a city of over twenty million people and it runs continuously from before four in the morning until past midnight. The trains that leave from the long-distance platforms go to every corner of India. The Victorian grandeur of the exterior conceals one of the most intensely used pieces of transport infrastructure on earth.

During the rush hours the platforms fill to a density that is almost incomprehensible from the outside. Commuters board trains through open doors while the trains are still moving slightly. The compartments designated for women are marked in yellow. The dabbawallahs — the tiffin-delivery workers who collect home-cooked lunches from suburban kitchens and deliver them to office workers in the city by late morning — move through this station as part of a logistics network that has been running since the late nineteenth century and achieves near-perfect delivery accuracy using a colour-coded system that business schools around the world have studied. They pass through these same arches that Frederick Stevens built, under the same figure of Progress, holding the same tiffin boxes. Mumbai does not stop.

Inside, the market is divided into sections under a great iron-framed roof with clerestory windows that filter the light into something bearable in the Mumbai heat. Fruit and vegetables occupy the central hall: mangoes in towers during the season from May through June, dozens of varieties from across Maharashtra and the Konkan coast, piled with the abundance of a city that sits at the end of a vast agricultural hinterland. The smells are layered and immediate — fresh coriander and green chilli, the sweetness of ripe chikoo and guava, dried spices whose names you may not know but whose warmth you feel in the air. Meat and poultry fill the eastern sections. Dry goods and provisions line the outer stalls.

The traders here have often held their pitches for generations. The negotiation is continuous, the quantities are professional, and this is not a tourist market but a working one that tourists can enter and walk through with their eyes wide open.

Lockwood Kipling's connection to this city goes beyond the relief panels on this building. His son Rudyard was born in Bombay in eighteen sixty-five and spent his early childhood here before being sent to England for schooling at the age of six. The Bombay of those first years left permanent marks on his imagination: the heat, the density, the smells, the mix of communities and languages. Rudyard Kipling returned to India as a journalist and writer in the eighteen eighties and the work that emerged — The Jungle Book, Kim, the Barrack-Room Ballads — drew on a version of India that was partly remembered, partly imagined, and thoroughly shaped by the imperial context in which both Kiplings lived. That context is all around you here. The building, the market, the city — they were all constructed within the same system, and they have all outlasted it in their various ways.

Inside, the market is divided into sections: fruit and vegetables in the central hall under the great iron-framed roof with its clerestory windows, meat and poultry in the eastern sections, dry goods and spices elsewhere. The quantities are staggering. Mangoes in the season — and Mumbai's mango season, running through May and June, is a serious civic event, with dozens of varieties from across Maharashtra and Goa arriving daily — are piled in towers. The smells are layered: fresh coriander and fenugreek, the sweetness of ripe chikoo, the sharp edge of green chilies, the warm heaviness of dried spices.

The market supplies restaurants and hotels across South Mumbai. The traders who work here have often held their pitches for generations. The negotiation and the noise and the energy are continuous from early morning to mid-afternoon. This is not a tourist market. It is a working market that tourists can enter.

In nineteen sixty, this intersection was formally renamed Hutatma Chowk — 'Martyrs' Square' in Marathi — to commemorate the Samyukta Maharashtra movement. Through the late nineteen fifties, this movement agitated for the creation of a separate Maharashtra state with Marathi as its official language, separating the Marathi-speaking areas from the Gujarati-speaking areas that had been combined in the Bombay State under the administrative arrangements following independence. On twenty-first November nineteen fifty-nine, police opened fire on protesters demonstrating at this intersection. One hundred and five people were killed. The following year, on first May nineteen sixty, Maharashtra state was formally created with Mumbai as its capital. A memorial — a steel fist rising from a flame — was erected at the intersection in nineteen sixty-five. It stands there now alongside Flora's outstretched hands: the colonial goddess of spring and the memorial to people who died to make their language a state language, occupying the same small island in the middle of five converging streets.

The surrounding streets are the Fort area: the old commercial district of colonial Bombay, named for the British fort that occupied this ground until the eighteen sixties, when it was demolished to make room for the Victorian buildings you can see on all sides. The banks and trading houses that built the financial apparatus of colonial India were headquartered here. Many are still here, in the same buildings, doing comparable work.

The British East India Company established its trading position in Bombay after Portugal ceded the islands to the English Crown as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza when she married Charles II in sixteen sixty-two. The Crown leased the islands to the East India Company in sixteen sixty-eight for ten pounds a year. From that transaction grew a commercial empire that eventually controlled the trade of the entire subcontinent. The company built its fort here and the city that grew around it became one of the three great presidency capitals of British India alongside Calcutta and Madras. The fort is gone. The financial apparatus remains.

In nineteen sixty, the intersection was renamed Hutatma Chowk — 'Martyrs' Square' — to commemorate the Samyukta Maharashtra movement. This movement agitated through the late nineteen fifties for the creation of a separate Maharashtra state with Marathi as its official language. On twenty-first November nineteen fifty-nine, police opened fire on protesters at this intersection. One hundred and five people were killed. The following year, on first May nineteen sixty, Maharashtra state was formally created, with Mumbai as its capital. A memorial — a steel fist rising from a flame — was erected at the intersection in nineteen sixty-five. It stands there now, alongside Flora's outstretched hands.

The surrounding streets are the Fort area, the old commercial district of colonial Bombay, named for the British fort that stood here until the eighteen sixties. The banks and trading houses that built the financial apparatus of colonial India were headquartered on these streets. Many are still here, doing comparable work in the same buildings. This is where the money was made, and where it still is.

At night, the streetlights along the promenade trace a curve of amber across the dark water. Seen from the vantage point of Malabar Hill to the north, the effect looks, in the long-exposure photographs that have been taken of this view since at least the nineteen fifties, like a necklace of light curved across the bay. The nickname — the Queen's Necklace — is old and it holds.

Sit on the sea wall. The Arabian Sea wind comes in off the water in long warm gusts. Watch the city going about its business along the water's edge. Twenty million people live in this metropolitan area. The film industry the world calls Bollywood produces more feature films annually than any other national industry in the world, and its economic centre of gravity is within a few kilometres of where you are sitting. The financial markets that drive the Indian economy operate in the tower blocks at the southern end of this curve. The seven separate islands that the British and Portuguese slowly connected with causeways and landfill over three centuries, turning an archipelago into a peninsula, are beneath the buildings and the roads and the reclaimed shoreline of everything you have walked through today.

The walk is done. Face the water. The Arabian Sea runs west to Africa. Behind you is India.

At night, the streetlights along the promenade trace a curve of amber light across the dark water that looks, from the vantage point of Malabar Hill above the bay, like a necklace. The nickname — the Queen's Necklace — has been in use since at least the nineteen fifties, and it still holds.

Sit on the sea wall. Feel the Arabian Sea wind, damp and salt and warm even in the evenings. Watch the city that grew from seven separate islands — connected by causeways and land reclamation over three hundred years of Portuguese and then British engineering, slowly filled in until the archipelago became a peninsula — going about its business along the water's edge. Twenty million people live in this metropolitan area. The film industry that the world calls Bollywood produces more feature films annually than any other national industry in the world. The financial markets that drive the Indian economy operate in the towers you can see at the southern end of this curve.

This is where the walk ends. Face the water. The Arabian Sea runs three thousand kilometres to Africa. Behind you is India.