You are in the middle of the old Fort, the walled town the East India Company built around its castle. In the eighteenth century this space was Bombay Green, a dusty open ground where cotton was stored and merchants of every community met: Parsis, Gujaratis, Bohras, Armenians and Britons.

1Cotton and the stock exchange

Around the 1850s, a handful of brokers began meeting under a banyan tree in front of the Town Hall to buy and sell shares. When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, Europe lost its supply of American cotton and turned to India. Bombay was swept by a speculative frenzy, the 'share mania', which collapsed when the war ended in 1865. The brokers kept moving from tree to tree until they organised themselves in 1875: the origin of the Bombay Stock Exchange, the oldest in Asia.

2A garden named after a journalist

The circular garden was laid out between 1869 and 1872 as Elphinstone Circle. After independence it was renamed after Benjamin Horniman, the British editor of the Bombay Chronicle who championed the Indian cause and was deported in 1919.

The Town Hall, completed in 1833, houses the Asiatic Society, founded in 1804. Among its treasures is an early manuscript of Dante's Divine Comedy.

Where banks and offices stand today, cotton was traded in the shade of a tree.

3What to look for

  • The Town Hall steps, one of the city's favourite meeting places.
  • The arcades of the buildings around the garden.
  • St Thomas Cathedral, a few steps to the west, dating from 1718.
Old photograph of the Town Hall and the Elphinstone Circle gardens
The Town Hall and Elphinstone Circle gardens, now Horniman Circle, in the early twentieth century.

Documented

The garden was laid out in 1869-1872 as Elphinstone Circle; the Town Hall was completed in 1833; the brokers formally organised in 1875.

Sources and credits

The Asiatic Society of Mumbai, history of the institution and the Town Hall; Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra, 'Fort Walks' (1999); BSE Ltd., history of the Bombay Stock Exchange.

Photos:

  • Neoclassical facade with Doric columns of the Town Hall, home of the Asiatic Society, beside Horniman Circle: Radosław Botev, CC BY 3.0 pl.
  • Old photograph of the Town Hall and the Elphinstone Circle gardens: University of Houston, Dominio público.

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