Tour of Mumbai - Victoria Station and Municipal Building

Shweta signed us up for a full day, guided tour of Mumbai.  The tour was just us, a driver and a tour guide, so we had a great opportunity to ask many questions and tailor the tour to our specific needs.

We started things out with a visit to Victoria Train Station, or now renamed to Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus.  These name changes are very common here in Mumbai.  Prior to India's independence, there was a very, very strong British presence in Mumbai.  So, there's understandably a large desire to erase as much British naming and statues from the city as possible.

This station serves somewhere in the range of 3 to 5 million people per day.  It's amazing to see the amount of humankind that blasts through here.  Here are a few photos of the station.  This, like other British built train stations, is designed to make a statement - multi-part vaulting, all kinds of original carvings on the outside, including a statue of Queen Victoria that has since been removed from the side of the building.  Apparently the statue snapped in half when it was removed from the building and no one is too sure exactly where it is today (reportedly it's somewhere on the black market).

  

Here's an example of the carvings on the outside of the building.  There are many different India native animals that can be found carved in to the structure:

On the opposite side of the street from Victoria station is the municipal building, also designed by Frederick Stevens:

Note the statue out front.  This statue is of Pherozeshah Mehta, who was the first native to be highly successful at law in Mumbai.  He did this in the late 19th century, at a time when he would have been arguing cases against British lawyers and in front of British judges.  Mehta played a major role in politics in Mumbai, thus his rightful place in front of a building that he dominated for much of his professional life.