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Thanks UNESCO ... but what next?
MUMBAI's architectural heritage conservationists and lay citizens were alike delighted to learn, earlier last month, that UNESCO had accorded the city's Victoria Terminus building the coveted status of a World Heritage Site. Renamed the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) in 1996, it takes its place after the Elephanta Caves complex as the second World Heritage Site in Mumbai and the 25th in India. This elevation marks the acme of a two-year process of deliberation, which began with the visit of a UNESCO team to Mumbai in September 2002 and the Central Railway's submission of a conservation dossier to the international agency in early 2003.
But even as the Central Railway celebrates the bestowal of this accolade, heritage conservationists and civic activists, as well as Mumbai's citizenry at large, have begun to ask some germane questions: How does this signal honour translate in practical terms? Can sufficient funds be raised to restore the newly anointed World Heritage Site, which is subject to the daily traffic of lakhs of commuters, and stands at the intersection of arterial roads in a congested zone at the heart of the megalopolis? Can this grand Victorian structure of the late 19th Century withstand the pressures of the early 21st? As conservationists point out, UNESCO allocates no funds for the upkeep of its designated World Heritage Sites. At the same time, should a site's maintenance slip below international norms, it can be de-listed, or worse, put on the Endangered Monuments list. "Fortunately, the Central Railway will probably provide the funding for the restoration of CST," says Sharada Dwivedi, urban historian and co-author of the benchmark study, Bombay: The Cities Within. She draws our attention to the fact that "a detailed plan for the cleaning-up and restoration of CST has already been prepared by a team of conservation architects and urban historians headed by Ravi Gundu Rao, which needs to be implemented."
Out of a wooden structure
Conceived as the headquarters of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway, the edifice took a decade to build (1878-1888) and cost a consolidated sum of Rs. 26,75,810, an emperor's ransom at the time. "Such a substantial expense, drawn as always from Indian revenues, was incurred despite the severe strain on public finances following the 1876-1878 famine," remarks Rusheed Wadia, an economic historian who specialises in the study of 19th-Century Mumbai. Despite this, he concedes that the CST forms "an enduring tribute to the architectural talent of F.W. Stevens, who designed the main building, the engineering abilities of T.W. Pearson, who supervised the station, and the varied skills of the large number of Indian craftsmen employed on the project."
Wadia invites us to imagine the site as it had been before the station came up. "What is today one of India's most attractive buildings evolved out of a poorly built pre-1878 wooden structure that had functioned as a terminal until then," he says, evoking that vanished landscape. "Facing it was the Dhobis' Ghat, which was moved to Mahalaxmi, and nearby stood the Phansi Talao, where public hangings were carried out till the mid-19th Century. Not far away stood the `public pillory', where offenders would face rotten eggs, old shoes and brickbats, a manner of punishment abolished after Queen Victoria ascended the throne."
Commentators have described the CST's architectural style as "Italianate Gothic" or "neo-Gothic", but the terminus eludes all stylistic straitjackets. It combines its Venetian Gothic basis with vibrant Mughal, Rajput and Deccani elements. The building is one of the most spectacular outcomes of that play of fantasy in which British architects could engage in colonial India during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Freed from the constraints of conventional taste and drawing on a cultural environment new to them, they experimented with new skills, styles and materials. In the Stevens-Pearson plan, the long platforms ending in the massif of the station building suggest the nave and apse of a secular church of progress; but its liturgy is a joyous, eccentric one, for an army of Andhra sculptors laboured to create the lively gargoyles, sentinels, domes, turrets and arcades that etch the CST's image in the mind. Lockwood Kipling, Principal of the Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy School of Art across the road (and father of Rudyard), also worked with a team of students on some of the station's decorative schemes.
A splendour hardly noticed
Unfortunately, few of the 30 lakh commuters who daily negotiate its crowded concourses have the leisure to cherish CST's stained-glass windows or the sculptural detailing. The world's busiest suburban station, it runs 1,080 local services while handling 68 passenger, mail, and express trains. As the euphoria settles, observers insist that the station cannot be seen in isolation from its functions, or from the area in which it stands. "The appropriate way to celebrate the recognition of the CST as a World Heritage Site would be by developing the infrastructure within and outside it," insists Wadia. "For instance, within the terminal, the waiting time at ticket windows must be reduced, the public address system needs to be improved, sanitary facilities must be improved and enlarged, and adequate ventilation, better canteen facilities and safe drinking water must be provided. And the area around the station must be developed."
Dwivedi agrees that the CST restoration must be integrated within a holistic revitalisation programme. The Urban Design Research Institute, with which she is associated, has already drawn up a management plan for the colonial Fort quarter, which treats the Fort as the sum of several interrelated parts including a corporate district, a banking district, an arts quarter and a civic node.
Within this plan, she notes that the CST area is the "logical civic node, as it also hosts the General Post Office and the offices of the municipal corporation". As such, she asserts, the authorities cannot ignore its basic problems of traffic, solid-waste management, garbage disposal and appropriate street furniture. "The inscription of the CST on the World Heritage list is wonderful news," she says, "but what is more important is a management plan for the entire CST area."
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The Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, as Mumbai's celebrated Victoria Terminus is now known, has just been placed on UNESCO's World Heritage list. But will this significant honour change the fortunes of a 19th-Century railway station coping with 21st-Century pressures, asks RANJIT HOSKOTE.
The terminus eludes all stylistic straitjackets.
... majestic from afar.