Place · railway station · India

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus

Date

1878–1887

Function

Travel & migration

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

18.940, 72.835

Worth knowing

The dome was built on a masonry structure without a steel frame, which had not been attempted at that scale in a Gothic revival building, and the carving mixes English foliage with Indian animals cut by students of the Bombay School of Art. It took ten years and cost more than any building in India to that date.

Connections (7)

• Site adjacencyVictorian Gothic & Art Deco, Mumbai

  The terminus and the Gothic seafront were built in the same three decades by the same architects and the same Parsi and Gujarati money, and they face each other across the Oval maidan with the Art Deco of the 1930s along the other side. Two imperial centuries in one sightline, and the pair was listed by UNESCO together in 2018 on exactly that argument.

• Trade routeMountain railways: Darjeeling

  Victoria Terminus is the head of the network that reorganised Indian distance — a journey from Bombay to Calcutta went from months to days — and the mountain railways branch off it to reach the hill stations where the government went in summer. The main line was built for cotton, troops and famine relief; the branches were built so that officials could escape the heat, which is a fair summary of colonial priorities.

• Craft tradition ofWadiaji Atash Behram, Mumbai

  The Wadias came from Surat to Bombay in 1736 to run the East India Company's dockyard and built some three hundred and fifty ships in Malabar teak, including several Royal Navy vessels and HMS Trincomalee, still afloat today. The same family's money built the Ātash Behrām, and Parsi philanthropy paid for a large part of the Gothic and Deco city around it.

• PatronageJames Broun-Ramsay, Marquess of Dalhousie

  Dalhousie's railway minute of 1853 laid down trunk routes, gauge and the guaranteed-interest system that built them, and the first train ran from Bori Bunder to Thane that April. The terminus that replaced the platform thirty years later is the monument to the policy: a Gothic cathedral for a network built to move cotton, troops and revenue, which then moved everyone.

• Patronage networkTowers of Silence & Parsi Mumbai

  Parsi money built much of the fabric this city is now known for — Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy's hospital and school of art, the Petit and Wadia endowments, the dockyards, and the railway shares that paid for the network the terminus stands at the head of. The dakhmas on Malabar Hill are where that community's own dead go, in the middle of the city its philanthropy built.

• AnalogueNew Delhi, Lutyens' plan

  Lutyens' Delhi and the Bombay terminus are the two clearest statements of what the Raj wanted architecture to say, forty years apart and in opposite directions. The station is Gothic revival with Indian detail applied to a wholly European structure; New Delhi is classical with Buddhist railings and chattris built into its mass. Both were finished just as their purpose ran out.

• Site withinMumbai

  Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus lies within Mumbai — the two sites sit about 0 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus is one of the specific sites that give Mumbai its layered character, and reads differently when seen as a stop within the larger city rather than as an isolated monument on an open map. The surrounding neighbourhoods, roads and other heritage ensembles belong to the same single urban fabric.

On these journeys

• Colonial & republican urbanism
• UNESCO World Heritage — cultural
• Cities through time — many civilisations, one place
• British India — 1600 to 1947
• Parsi Bombay — dockyard, mill and mission

Sources

Wikipedia, “Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus”. UNESCO World Heritage nomination file (2004); Christopher London, Bombay Gothic (2002).

• UNESCO — Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus
• Wikipedia