Mumbai’s unique city museum

Dr. Bhauji Lad Museum is a true repository of its city history

Nestled inside the grounds of Byculla’s Veer Mata Jijabai Bhonsle Udyan (also Rani Baug or Mumbai Zoo) is a large building on your left that most visitors to the zoo don’t pay much attention to.  This structure is the city’s museum which started on 2 May 1872 or one hundred and fifty years ago. 

The museum opened in 1872, starting as the Victoria and Albert Museum of Bombay. A little more than a hundred years later, on 1 November 1975, the city administration renamed the museum the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum to honor the key person whose vision and dedication led to setting up the museum.  Dr. Bhau Daji Lad was a multi-faceted Mumbaikar.  He was the first Indian Sheriff of Mumbai, a philanthropist, historian, physician, surgeon, and the Museum Committee’s first secretary.

As Mumbai’s first museum, it showcased the city’s cultural heritage and history through a rare collection of fine and decorative arts highlighting early modern art and the craftsmanship of Bombay’s communities.

The video Restoration & Revitalisation of Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum chronicles the public-private partnership of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM), the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), and the Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation to manage the museum.  

The partnership restored the once glorious museum that had become derelict with neglect through a comprehensive five-year restoration that won UNESCO’s 2005 Award of Excellence in Cultural Conservation.  The Bhauji Lad Museum reopened after renovation in 2008 with an extensive exhibition program to promote contemporary art and culture.

When you visit the museum today, you will appreciate the building with a high ceiling reminiscent of the Victorian era.  It transports you back to a time one and a half centuries ago.  The Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum building itself is a majestic one that you will admire on your visit.  The restoration has resulted in a brilliant display of attractive wooden cases with adequate lighting for the art objects inside.  The two-story museum structure holds enough objects of interest to visitors to enthrall them over many hours.

The museum’s collection of miniature clay models, dioramas, maps, lithographs, photographs, and rare books help visitors get a glimpse of the life of the people of Mumbai and the city’s history of over one and a half centuries from the late eighteenth to the middle of the twentieth century.

Mumbai History gallery: In the twentieth century, the museum’s curators embarked on a mission to document the history of Mumbai through pictures and antiques.  Interestingly, they initiated that project by seeking historical objects from the localities surrounding the museum.  As a result, the curators collected copies of maps, building plans, paper prints, and photographs which you can see today to visualize life in the city over three centuries from the sixteenth century.  The museum opened its Mumbai History collection to the public in 1918.

Suppose you are looking for a place to trace the geographical and built (through buildings and other structures) history of Mumbai. In that case, the Bhauji Lad Museum’s Mumbai History collection can help you in such an exploration.  Mumbai’s geographical features have changed over the past several centuries from the advent of different rulers, business expansion, and growth as a city.  The Mumbai History gallery beautifully captures all those changes and lets you correlate the city’s expansion through the maps over three and a half centuries.

In this collection, you can look at the scale models of the boats that sailed at Mumbai’s harbor, the earliest textile mill at Worli, and the Bombay Castle that the British used to manage Mumbai.  In addition, the collection includes models of the earliest boats in the city’s harbor, the first textile mills in Worli, and Bombay Castle’s diorama, the administrative headquarters at the heart of the British Fort. 

Under Portuguese rule, the Bombay Castle (or Casa da Orta) started its life as a defensive structure that the Portuguese noble Garcia de Orta built in the fifteenth century with local blue Kurla stone and Konkan red laterite bricks. 

After the British, first the king and then the East India Company, acquired de Orta’s manor, they fortified it with walls, only remnants of which remain today.  The Bombay Castle is now inside the western naval headquarters.

The museum has a collection of glass negatives through which you can trace Mumbai’s visual record from the nineteenth century.  The thousands of negatives in this collection capture the life of Mumbai more than a century ago from its buildings, people, and scenes from the daily life of the city at that time.

With their trade motive, the British established themselves in India.  Apart from Indian commodities like cotton, jute, and indigo, the British also developed a market back home for fine Indian artwork.  The demand for Indian artisanal objects was also influenced by Prince Albert and Queen Victoria’s interest in organizing international exhibitions to display products from British colonies.  Such trade fairs became popular across Europe and North America, generating demands for Indian designs and crafts.

You can glimpse the arts and crafts of the nineteenth-century Indian artisans whom the British trained in workshops and technical schools to imbibe European styles.  Rich Indians, influenced by the English and the European market, were also buyers of the artworks of Indian artisans who produced European objects with Indian motifs.

The museum has replicas of industrial art products that India sent to the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855 as the key part of the Museum’s Industrial Arts Gallery.

The early modern period gallery: This gallery holds models and miniatures that show Mumbai life in the nineteenth century and is a great depiction of that era in fine detail.  As the museum curators Ernst Fern and C.L. Burns were also heading the Sir J.J. School of Art, they could influence the creation of the company’s painting art style.  Company painting is the fusion style from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries influenced by European art, documenting Indian festivals, trades, communities, and local rulers.

The Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School (JJ School of Art) or Bombay School of Art, opened in 1856 to teach students the ‘science of art’ or the technical skills to become master draughtsmen.

As the museum had a close relationship with the JJ School of Art, the former became a choice place for displaying designs, artwork, paintings, and sculptures of the latter’s students.

Since reopening after its restoration, the museum has acquired contemporary Indian art and now has a modern and contemporary art gallery.