Grounds of the Museum. Beautiful but sharing the same air as the rest of the city.
Our last stop in India was in Mumbai, the city formerly known as Bombay. In some ways it was a big change: it’s a massive, global city after our schlep through Rajasthan and to me, at least, it has more in common with southern India than the north where we’ve been up until now. In most ways, though, it was similar to what we’ve been experiencing; crazy, chaotic, dirty, smoggy, and fascinating.
I’m familiar with Clear, Cloudy, Rain, Snow, whatever. Never seen Smoke before….
Sadly, the most memorable part of the visit may have been the air quality. After Delhi I didn’t think anything could surprise me but this was all but unbelievable. Just a heavy haze hanging over the city much of the day, bad enough that the weather app we use showed the current condition as “Smoke.” Seriously. Bizarre and I assume pretty unhealthy.
Although we had limited time there we weren’t total Philistines, we spent much of one day at few of Mumbai’s good museums. The most important is the improbably named Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya. Once upon a time it was the Prince of Wales Museum, named after the future Edward VIII in honor of his visit to Bombay. (Edward, you will recall, spent a lot more time as Prince of Wales than he did as king, given that he abdicated so he could marry Wallis Simpson, but that is a very separate story.) When India was busy changing Bombay to Mumbai (and Madras to Chennai and Calcutta to Kolkata; you get the idea) they also renamed the museum for a King Shivaji. As that name is too difficult even for Indians it’s nicknamed “CSMVS” but as that is both stupid sounding and still too long for people to really remember these days the museum is mostly just known as … the museum.
So we spent a few hours in the museum, a museum of India’s history. Mark is reading a (long) history of India and he in particular appreciated the layout of the exhibits, tracking surprisingly closely the structure of his book. One could argue that we should have toured the history of India before we spent five weeks there rather than on our last day but hey, we got there eventually.
This tiny bronze figurine, known as the Dancing Girl, dates from about 2,500 BC and is considered the iconic artifact from the Harappan Empire of the Indus Valley, contemporary to the great Egypt and Mesopotamian civilizations.
That was the big museum but right in the same area were two smaller art museums so we stopped in at those as well and they were both fun. Short, quick stops with some interesting art, just the way I like it best.
A piece from an exhibit called Tribal Beauty. Sadly, I forgot to capture the artist’s name.
And that was it, time to leave India. It is an intense place and it took me longer to warm up to all that than it did on earlier visits but eventually I got there. We had scheduled the five weeks in large part because we were afraid we would just need to get away at that point. In fact I’d be happy to have had more time to see more of the country but apparently we’ll have to save that for another visit. I won’t miss the dang dynamic currency conversion scam we have to watch for like an eagle and I’d be OK if waiters quit insisting you can’t eat Indian curry without rice or bread (you can). For now, though, it’s south to Sri Lanka!
The view from our hotel room. Thought I was kidding about the air quality?
After our museum wanderings we were looking for a place to lunch. As we walked past one restaurant Mark’s face lit up: “I think I ate here in 1993,” he said. As we entered it was more clear that indeed, he’d eaten here on his first trip to India nearly a quarter of a century earlier. Weird.
In a welcome break from Indian curry – we love it, but five weeks is a lot of curry – we had this amazing plate of sashimi
Indian modern art
And this piece called “Still Chewing.” That red stuff is the artist’s rendition of chewing gum holding her from the ceiling.
If you paid attention you could see grand colonial architecture along, of course, with the more mundane modern apartment blocks
Strange sight – apparently this is the laundry district, just acres and acres of laundry drying
And of course, like presumably all Indian cities big and small, there is always a street scene