When, in 1995, Bombay was renamed Mumbai, it led to a spurt of such renamings of buildings, streets, parks, and railway stations in the cit...
When, in 1995, Bombay was renamed Mumbai, it led to a spurt of such renamings of buildings, streets, parks, and railway stations in the city. However, a few dead foreigners were spared the fate of being consigned to the dustbin of history. Among them were Annie Besant, after whom a major thoroughfare in central Mumbai is still named; and BG Horniman, whose name yet adorns a charming tree-laden park surrounded by grand old buildings in the south of the city.
I suspect that, in Mumbai as well as in India today, Besant commands far more name recognition than Horniman. As the founder with Madan Mohan Malviya of the Banaras Hindu University, as the founder with Bal Gangadhar Tilak of the Indian Home Rule movement, and as the first female president of the Indian National Congress, she still figures in school textbooks and general knowledge quizzes. The Horniman of Mumbai’s Horniman Circle remains much less known, although his legacy is probably more relevant to our times.
In 1913, a group of Indian liberals founded a newspaper called The Bombay Chronicle, which they pitched as a nationalist alternative to the pro-establishment Times of India. BG Horniman, then an assistant editor with The Statesman in Calcutta, moved to Bombay to become the Chronicle’s first...
