Dadabhai Naoroji Road - History

History

The history of Dadabhai Naoroji Road could be chronicled to the time when it was a small street called Hornby Road (named after William Hornby, Governor of Bombay from 1771 to 1784) in the erstwhile old fort area, more than two hundred years back. The British East India Company built the Fort (Mumbai precinct) liesurly between 1686 and 1743 with three gates, a moat, esplanade, level open spaces on its western fringe (to control fires) and residences. (remnant of the fort wall is pictured). The fort was demolished in 1860s by the then Governor Sir Bartle Frere to provide adequate space for the growing civic requirements of the city and the area was substantially re–structured. The small Hornby Road was converted into a broad avenue, and on its western border large plots were laid and impressive buildings (built during the boom years 1885-1919) constructed in accordance with mandatory (government regulation of 1896) pedestrian arcade in the ground floor that performed as the unifying element tying together the various building facades. What ensued in the nineteenth century was thus a magnificent spectacle of Victorian neo–Gothic, Indo–Sarcenic, neo–classical and Edwardian structures linked together by a continuous ground floor pedestrian arcade along the streetscape.

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The eponymous Dadabhai Naoroji Road, the heritage road of Mumbai, is named after Dadabhai Naoroji (1825–1917), an Indian nationalist leader known as the "Grand Old man of India". He was an intellectual with high academic achievements. In 1892, he was the first Asian to become Member of the British Parliament. As the founder of the Indian National Congress and three times its party President, his most notable contribution was to publicly voice the demand for swaraj (Independence of India), in 1906. History books on India have recorded his achievements and contributions to India’s freedom movement. Concerned by the economic consequences of the British rule in India, he propagated a theory that India’s unfortunate economic condition and poverty then was the result of the British Colonial government ‘draining’ resources out of this country, a unilateral transfer of resources from India to Britain. He also expanded on this theory through lectures and wrote on "Poverty" and "Un–British Rule in India" (1901), which provoked and inspired economic nationalism in India. This theory, termed the “drain theory” caught the imagination of the people and became the rallying point for India’s nationalist movement for independence.

His statue (made of black marble), bespectacled with a Parsi hat and with a book in one hand, overlooks the iconic Flora Fountain. It is stated that during his time one could get a panoramic view of the city all the way past the Taj Mahal Hotel into the waves of sea waters of Bombay harbour, before this part of Bombay got overbuilt.