Place · Victorian Gothic market hall · India
Crawford Market, Mumbai
Also known as Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Mandai, Mahatma Jotiba Phule Market, Crawford Market
Crawford Market, officially the Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Mandai, is the Victorian market hall of South Mumbai, completed in 1869 to a design by William Emerson that blended Gothic with Indian elements, built of buff Kurla stone and red Bassein stone and donated by Cowasji Jehangir. Named after Arthur Crawford, the city's first municipal commissioner, it was renamed for the reformer Jyotirao Phule. It was Mumbai's main wholesale fruit market until 1996.
- Date
- 1869–None
- Function
- Trade & production
- Material
- Kurla stone; Bassein redstone
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 18.947, 72.835
Worth knowing
In 1882 it became the first building in India lit by electricity, and two of the carved panels over its entrance are by John Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard Kipling's father, who left India before finishing a third.
Connections (3)
- Site withinMumbai
Crawford Market stands at a busy intersection of South Mumbai, opposite the Mumbai Police headquarters and west of the JJ flyover. Completed in 1869 and donated to the city by Cowasji Jehangir, it fed Mumbai as its main wholesale fruit market until March 1996, when the wholesale traders were moved to Navi Mumbai. Its stalls still sell fruit, vegetables, poultry, clothes, toys and jewellery beneath a 15-metre skylight awning designed to light the market floor.
- Site adjacencyChhatrapati Shivaji Terminus
Crawford Market lies just north of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, and the two are neighbouring landmarks of Bombay's Victorian Gothic. The market, finished in 1869 to William Emerson's design, was an early attempt to blend Victorian Gothic with Indian elements; the terminus, begun in 1878 and completed in 1887 by Frederick William Stevens from an initial design by Axel Haig, carried that Indo-Gothic idiom to its most exuberant. Both were later renamed after Maharashtrian figures, Jyotirao Phule and Shivaji.
- Named afterJyotirao Phule
Crawford Market was first named after Arthur Crawford, the city's first municipal commissioner, and was later renamed the Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Mandai in honour of Jyotirao Phule (1827–1890), the anti-caste reformer and writer from Maharashtra. With his wife Savitribai, Phule pioneered women's education, opening his first school for girls in Pune in 1848, and with his followers he formed the Satyashodhak Samaj to win equal rights for people of lower castes.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Crawford Market" and "Jyotirao Phule". Times of India (Mumbai), "A 137-Year Legacy" (25 March 2006).
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