Mumbai (Bombay)

Victoria Station

Mumbai waterfront

This is the cleanest and most modern city we’ve hit in India so far.  The streets have little garbage and the sidewalks are swept, at least in the areas we’ve been in.  The air is still quite polluted even along the beautiful promenade along the Indian Ocean.  There are still many old colonial buildings and they are beautiful.  All arches and towers and carved stone.  We managed to run around a bit today and saw the Gateway to India Arch, which was what ship passengers saw when they first arrived.  It is huge and very impressive.  It’s right in front of the Taj Mahal Hotel, which you may recall was the scene of a horrific terrorist attack a few years back.  All was peaceful while we were there.  We also visited a couple of museums, one that has art by modern Indian artists and one, The Prince of Wales Museum, which has some exquisite fifteen to eighteenth century woven and painted mandalas, miniature paintings, calligraphy and sculptures.  Many of the painting are done in painstaking detail with many, many figures and designs in each one.  Every one tell story and we had an audio guide so we managed to learn quite a bit.  The most beautiful were done under the Emperor Akbar as we’ve found throughout India.  He was a great patron of the arts and sponsored many beautiful works. 

We also visited Gandhi’s house, which was bigger and more elaborate than I would have expected and was filled with wonderful historical pictures and documents.  They include an exchange of letters with Tolstoy, a picture of a meeting he had with Charlie Chaplin and lots of other interesting things.   The Gandhi house was not on my list of places to go but our driver, who was a charming young guy who spoke perfect English, insisted that we go.  I’m glad he did.  We have found over and over the Indian’s we have dealt with have been helpful and lovely, including total strangers on the street, like the woman this morning who kept me from being mowed down by traffic when I momentarily forget they drive on left side of the road.

An interesting note:  the name changes of cities i.e. Kolkata for Calcutta and Mumbai for Bombay turn out to have been made years ago by a political party that was voted out of office immediately after the name changes, but the official names continued.  However, nobody here uses them.  People in Mumbai refer to their city as Bombay, a local newspaper has a section call The Bombay Times, etc.  So I thought I was being culturally sensitive by using the new names when in fact it’s the opposite.