Bombay's oldest museum opened in 1872 as the Victoria and Albert Museum, in a hall built between 1862 and 1871 and paid for, in large part, by the city's own merchants. It was renamed in 1975 for Bhau Daji Lad, the physician and scholar who had been among the men pressing for it. That sequence is the whole story in miniature: a city that decided to keep a record of itself, and then kept the record of the keeping.
It was rescued twice. The long restoration ran from 2003 to 2008, led by INTACH's Mumbai chapter with the Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation and the municipal corporation, and it won a UNESCO Asia-Pacific award for conservation before it was even finished; the doors reopened in January 2008. A second campaign, after years of water and neglect, put the building back again in January 2025. Both times the instinct was the same and it was the right one — bring the gilding, the painted ceiling and the tiled floor back to what they were, and resist the urge to make the place look like this century.
What I went for are the clay models — the small moulded figures of Bombay's trades and communities, made in the museum's own workshops around the turn of the last century. I call them the cast gallery; the museum does not, and I am aware I am being precious. Walk them once as inventory and once properly. The first pass is a cabinet of little men; the second is a census, and a rather tender one. Go at opening, in a cool month, and check the day before you set out — the museum shuts on Wednesdays and does not make an exception for you.
(plate not yet drawn)