Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus

The station was designed by British architect Frederick William Stevens and built between 1878 and 1888, in a High Victorian Gothic style modelled loosely on late medieval Italian buildings — but Stevens didn't stop at importing a European style wholesale. The stone dome, the turrets, the deliberately irregular ground plan all draw on Indian palace architecture too, the product of British architects working directly alongside Indian craftsmen and stonemasons on every detail. It became, quite literally, the image people used to describe Bombay as a "Gothic City," and it's one of relatively few buildings anywhere that visibly argues two architectural traditions into a single coherent structure rather than layering one on top of the other.

It's also never stopped being exactly what it was built to be. More than three million commuters pass through daily, making it one of the busiest railway stations on the planet — a 19th-century monument functioning, unglamorously and continuously, as ordinary infrastructure rather than something roped off for tourists.

That everyday role is also why the events of 26 November 2008 matter here specifically. Two of the ten gunmen involved in the coordinated Mumbai attacks — Ajmal Kasab and Abu Ismail Khan, both linked to the Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Taiba — entered the terminus's passenger hall with rifles and grenades, killing 58 people and wounding 104 in one of several simultaneous assaults across the city that night. Ismail was killed in the attack; Kasab was captured, tried, and executed in 2012. The station reopened and has operated without interruption since, but the history sits alongside the architecture rather than replacing it — a working terminus that is, at the same time, a memorial to a specific and well-documented night.

Getting there

13 km from Dhārāvi. Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (BOM) is about 17 km away.