Travel to Peninsular India: Mumbai / Bombay: Victorian Vanities

India tolerates British memorials--pushes them to quiet corners instead of talibanizing them into blasted rubble.

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The training of a queen must be so thorough that she takes no notice of slights. And could this be the white-marble statue, by Noble, that for many years sat where Patil(Mayo)Street diverges from Mahatma Gandhi (Esplanade)? If so, it was unveiled in 1872 and paid for by the Gaekwar of Baroda. It's presently stashed in a yard adjoining Mumbai's Victoria and Albert Museum.

The same statue--20 years (2002) later.

Probably Sir Richard Temple, who was certainly a paragon of imperial ambition and arrogance. Formerly near the Public Works Department, he now sweats alongside Victoria in the V&A garden.

Victorian testosterone: Sir Bartle Frere, the governor of Bombay during its first great boom, which was prompted by the American civil war and its disruption of British cotton supplies. Odd, that men who dressed to the gunwales should be sculpted bare chested, but never underestimate the impact of a classical education.  The bust is in the Bombay University Library.

Governors, senators, deans: they come, they go. (Could this be Governor Reay?)

Inside the Victoria and Albert Museum: Albert himself, by Noble.

Proconsul in toga, bathed in fluorescent light. This happens to be Mountstuart Elphinstone, by Chantrey, in the reading room of the old Town Hall, now the library of the Asiatic Society.