Gateway of India

The strange thing about the Gateway of India is that its most famous moment — commemorating the arrival of King George V and Queen Mary in December 1911 — happened thirteen years before the monument itself was finished. The visit was a landmark event, the first time any reigning British monarch had set foot in India, and Apollo Bunder was picked for the arch precisely because it was the first thing anyone would see stepping off a ship: a deliberate piece of stagecraft for arriving dignitaries, built where the water met the city. The site itself had to be manufactured before the monument could exist. What is now solid ground was previously open water at a modest fishing jetty; the government spent four years, from 1915 to 1919, reclaiming land and building a new seawall at Apollo Bunder before construction of the arch itself could even begin.

Architect George Wittet designed it in the Indo-Saracenic style, deliberately fusing Gothic structural bones with Hindu- and Islamic-derived surface ornament — a visual argument, intentional or not, about what British rule in India was supposed to look like. It took until 1924 to complete, using yellow basalt quarried locally and reinforced concrete, with a central dome rising 26 metres on four turrets.

The monument's real historical irony arrived on its own schedule. In 1948, less than a quarter-century after completion, the last British regiment to leave independent India marched out through the same arch it had been built to welcome royalty into, with a 21-gun salute marking the end of nearly two centuries of British presence on the subcontinent. A gate built to stage an arrival ended up staging a departure instead.

Getting there

12 km from Uran. Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (BOM) is about 19 km away.