India News | Becoming Mumbai: Art Exhibition Shows Evolution of Bombay Through Centuries

Mumbai, Jan 10 (PTI) An exhibition, featuring works by artists like AS Tendulkar, KH Ara, and Charles R Gerrard among others, offers a glimpse into Mumbai's evolution from seven islands to a thriving urban centre.

'Once Upon a Time in Bombay', organised by DAG at the ongoing Mumbai Gallery Weekend, features works from the 19th and 20th centuries that capture the city's dynamic street life, colonial grandeur, and the quiet beauty of its hinterlands.

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The collection offers a peek into Mumbai's layered history, revealing stories - from its shifting urban landscapes to the lives of those who built, inhabited, and dreamed within them.

Through the three sections- 'Sacred & Storied'; 'By the Sea'; 'Cityscapes in Time­' - and diverse styles and mediums, the artworks invite viewers to reflect on a city that, though transformed, remains vivid in memory and imagination.

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"It is a love letter to the city painted by artists from the nineteenth century onwards for whom Bombay was a muse. It connects the city's natural landscape-the sea and the beaches-with its grand colonial architecture as well as its centres of pilgrimage, and, of course, its people and life on its streets," Ashish Anand, CEO and MD at DAG, said.

He added that no other modern Indian city has been painted as frequently as Mumbai.

"The selected works depict its enduring spirit with a sense of nostalgia, of a time when Mumbai was Bombay, when its once-leafy roads were a little less frenetic and one could still enjoy a walk on the beach, revel in the flowering of a gulmohar tree, see the fisher boats come to shore with their catch-vignettes that are difficult to glimpse in a Mumbai under constant redevelopment in which the present is already hurtling towards the future," Anand added.

A special inclusion in the showcase is a tinted lithograph "Map of the Island of Bombay". Made in 1923, it depicts the transformation of Bombay (now Mumbai) over the course of the 19th century, especially through the process of land reclamation.

The map details the land acquisition and development activities in Bombay, particularly under the administration of the Municipal Corporation and the Municipal Trust. The survey was conducted by J F Watson, one of the East India Company Engineers.

The exhibition also includes works by LN Taskar, NR Sardesai, AM Mali, Baburao Sadwelkar, GS Haldankar and Pestonji Bomanji.

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