Mumbai: Gateway to India

The formal inauguration was in nineteen twenty-four, with the Viceroy of India presiding. But the date that matters came later. On February twenty-eighth, nineteen forty-eight — six months after Indian independence — the First Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry marched through this arch to the harbour, boarded a troopship, and sailed for England. They were the last British troops to leave India. A bagpipe band played. A crowd of newly independent Indians watched. The arch that had been built as a symbol of imperial arrival became, at the moment of imperial departure, something more complicated — a frame through which two hundred years of British rule in India passed out of sight.

Stand here for a moment. Behind you is the Arabian Sea and the fishing boats and the ferries to Elephanta Island. In front of you is Mumbai — the Gateway district, the Colaba peninsula, the towers of Nariman Point in the distance. The city was called Bombay until nineteen ninety-five, when the Shiv Sena government renamed it Mumbai, after Mumbadevi, the patron goddess of the original Koli fishing communities who lived here before the Portuguese arrived in the sixteenth century. Most people who live here use both names interchangeably depending on context, mood, and generation. The old name is not gone. It's just contested.

The hotel faces the wrong way. Its most ornate facade, with the great central dome and the most elaborate stonework, faces the sea rather than the city. Three explanations circulate: that it was a planning error (the architect sent the plans from Europe and the builders constructed the building facing the wrong direction); that it was a deliberate choice to face Mecca; or that Tata deliberately chose to face the sea rather than the colonial city. None of these explanations is definitively documented. The building faces the sea and has always faced the sea, and from the harbour it looks magnificent.

On the night of November twenty-sixth, two thousand and eight, Lashkar-e-Taiba gunmen arrived by speedboat from Pakistan and attacked multiple locations across Mumbai simultaneously. The Taj was seized and held for sixty hours. One hundred sixty-six people were killed across the city; thirty-one at the Taj alone. The gunmen set fires in multiple parts of the building. The damage was severe. The Tata Group, which still owns the hotel, restored it entirely and reopened it within a month — a decision understood at the time as a statement about Mumbai's refusal to be permanently marked by the attacks. The hotel kept its original form, its original furniture, its original staff where possible. It reopened in December two thousand and eight, one year and a few weeks after it had closed.

The neighbourhood of Colaba behind the market was the British military cantonment — the area where the colonial army was quartered. It became after independence the bohemian district of Mumbai, full of cheap hotels, cafes, and the kind of transient population that accumulates around ports. It is now expensive and gentrified, but it retains a certain reputation for tolerance — Colaba is where Mumbai comes when it wants to be slightly less formal than the rest of itself.

Leopold Café, near the northern end of the causeway on the corner of Colaba Causeway and Nawroji Furdunji Road, was one of the first targets of the two thousand and eight attacks. The gunmen entered and opened fire, killing at least ten people. The café, which had been operating since eighteen seventy-one, chose to keep the bullet holes in the walls rather than repair them. It reopened quickly. The holes are still there. The café is still busy. Whether this is a memorial or simply a refusal to be defeated is probably both.

Three million commuters pass through this station every day. It is one of the busiest railway stations in the world. The trains that leave from here go to every corner of India — to Delhi, to Chennai, to Kolkata, to the small stations of rural Maharashtra. The suburban railway network that radiates from CST and the other terminal stations of Mumbai carries seven million passengers daily and is the circulatory system of the city. Without it, Mumbai stops.

On the night of November twenty-sixth, two thousand and eight, Ajmal Kasab and his accomplice Mohammed Ismail entered through the main hall and opened fire with AK-47s and threw grenades. Fifty-eight people were killed here. Kasab was twenty-one years old. He was the only attacker captured alive, tried, convicted of murder and waging war against India, and executed in two thousand and twelve. The building itself was undamaged. The hall where the killings occurred was cleaned and restored to service within days. The station did not close.

In nineteen sixty, the intersection was renamed Hutatma Chowk — "Martyrs' Square" — to commemorate the Samyukta Maharashtra movement. The movement agitated through the late nineteen fifties for the creation of a 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. On November twenty-first, nineteen fifty-nine, police opened fire on protesters demonstrating at this intersection. One hundred and five people were killed. The following year, on May first, nineteen sixty, Maharashtra state was created, with Mumbai as its capital. A memorial — a steel fist rising from a flame — was erected at the intersection in nineteen sixty-five, and 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 once stood here and was demolished in the eighteen sixties to make room for the buildings you see now. The banks, insurance companies, legal chambers, and trading houses that built the financial apparatus of colonial India were headquartered in the streets around this intersection. Many of them are still here, in the same buildings, doing comparable work.

The most remarkable objects in the collection: original manuscripts by Dante Alighieri — the Asiatic Society holds one of the few original Dante manuscripts outside Italy, acquired in the nineteenth century through the kind of imperial acquisition that was considered normal scholarship at the time. There are medieval Persian manuscripts, Sanskrit texts, colonial-era maps of Bombay and the Konkan coast, and two hundred years of proceedings recording what European scholars thought about Asia and, occasionally, what Asian scholars thought about Europe.

At the landing of the main staircase inside, you'll find two bronze equestrian statues — Mountstuart Elphinstone and Sir John Malcolm, governors of the Bombay Presidency in the early nineteenth century. The story told about these statues is that portraits of the two men had been commissioned and found unsatisfactory — the subjects' faces were thought insufficiently impressive in paint. Horses were commissioned as an improvement, on the theory that equestrian portraits were more flattering than pedestrian ones. Whether this is true or simply a good story about the vanity of colonial administrators is not definitively established. The statues are very fine.

Every February, the entire district is taken over by the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival — nine days of street installations, music, dance, theatre, film, and visual art, run by the Kala Ghoda Association. The festival began in nineteen ninety-nine as a small local initiative and has grown into what its organisers call the largest arts festival in Asia. The streets between the museums fill with temporary structures, art installations made from found materials, food stalls, and crowds. For nine days, the streets are closed to traffic and given entirely to people.

The David Sassoon Library, a short walk east, is worth a detour if it is open. It was founded in eighteen forty-seven by David Sassoon, the Jewish merchant banker who was one of the great figures of nineteenth-century Bombay commerce. The reading room is a high-ceilinged Victorian space with wooden bookshelves and rattan chairs, largely unchanged since it opened. Membership is open. The library is underused and underfunded and very beautiful.

The collection inside is one of the best in India across three departments. The ancient Indian sculpture collection covers the full arc of Indian sculptural tradition: Indus Valley seals from around two thousand BC, Mauryan-era polished stone capitals, Gupta-period terracottas, and most importantly a strong collection of Chola bronzes from Tamil Nadu, cast between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. These are among the finest cast bronzes ever made anywhere — the dancing Nataraja, Shiva encircled by flame, is the canonical form, but the Chola collection at the CSMVS contains figures that reward long looking. The Gandhara collection — Buddhist sculpture from the region of modern Afghanistan and Pakistan, produced between the first and fifth centuries AD under Greek and Roman stylistic influence — shows the moment when the Buddha first acquired a human face, derived from the Apollo types of Hellenistic sculpture. The Mughal miniature paintings in the decorative arts section are detailed enough to require the magnifying glasses the museum provides.

The name comes from Premchand Roychand, the cotton trader and speculator who funded the tower's construction and named it after his mother, Rajabai, who was blind. She liked to hear the bells tell the time. The tower houses a clock with twelve bells that chime on the quarter hour, playing melodies drawn from English hymn tunes and folk songs that rang out over the city for over a century. The mechanism is still functional, though the chimes are not always reliable.

The Bombay High Court, built in eighteen seventy-nine to a design by Colonel J.A. Fuller, stands directly adjacent to the west — a Gothic Revival building with pointed arches and two towers, one topped with a figure of Justice holding scales and blindfold, the other with a figure of Mercy. Together, the tower and the court form what is genuinely one of the finest Gothic civic ensembles in Asia, comparable to the great Victorian civic buildings of Manchester or Glasgow but in a tropical city, set against palm trees and Arabian Sea light.

The University Library reading room attached to the tower base is the finest Victorian reading room in Mumbai: high ceilings, carved timber shelves, iron balconies, filtered light. It is used by students. The books are real and in use. The building is exactly what it appears to be.

The nickname is the Queen's Necklace. When seen from Malabar Hill at night, the streetlights along the promenade trace a curve of amber light across the dark water that looks, in the photographs that have circulated since the nineteen fifties, like a necklace of jewels. The curve has not changed. The lights have been upgraded to LED. The effect is the same.

Chowpatty Beach at the northern end is where Mumbai comes to be publicly itself. The beach is not for swimming — the water is polluted and the surf is uncertain — but for everything else: eating bhel puri and pav bhaji and corn from the street stalls that operate from late afternoon until midnight, flying kites, walking, conducting political meetings, holding religious ceremonies. Every September, the Ganesh Chaturthi festival culminates here when enormous clay images of Ganesh — made by the image-makers of Lalbaug and other workshops across the city, some of them five and ten and fifteen metres tall, carried through the streets by crowds of thousands — are brought to the beach and immersed in the sea. The immersion dissolves the clay. The Ganesh is gone. The sea takes it. Next year another will be made. The festival has been celebrated continuously since Bal Gangadhar Tilak revived it as a mass public event in eighteen ninety-three, as a way of gathering people across caste lines under a religious occasion that the British colonial government could not easily suppress. It worked. The festival is now the largest in Maharashtra and one of the largest in India. Stand at the sea's edge and face the water. This is where the city ends.