If you’ve ever been to Bombay, you will have walked through F.W. Steven’s V.T. Station, now Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus. As a student of architecture, I found myself frequently on the station’s premises. Standing beneath the 20th-century steel trusses, enveloped by yellow Malad stone walls and stained glass windows, I was invariably reminded of the structure’s lasting journey through time and of the many ways in which it departs from traditional understandings of monumentality.

While the term ‘monumentality’ holds a variety of meanings1, typical identifiers include a grand size, historical or cultural significance, permanence and complexity of architectural details. Built in the late 1800s, Victoria Terminus was a symbol of the growing power and transportation prowess of the British Empire in the Indian Peninsula. A first in the subcontinent, what holds it apart is also that the Terminus lives on today, in service of the city’s many travellers.

One sees them take a few steps down from the humble back entrance through the busy DN Road into the station’s dull foyer. The foyer opens to the staircase that leads to the interconnecting bridge on the left. The tiled platform stretches to welcome visitors from the main entrance and ticketing gallery to the south. The structure is enclosed, and yet the platforms are better-lit than many other stations. The skylights spanning across the large steel trusses brighten the vast expanse of space. Gothic windows admit light clemently and offer glimpses of the activities on the adjoining DN Road. Above windows and doorways is ornate stonework that was crafted in association with the Sir JJ School of Art and that represents a wide range of Indian flora and fauna. While the station’s gothic style is inherited from its colonial parentage, the manifestation in its materiality (porous Malad stone for walls) and craftsmanship (Indian local artists and workers) is rooted in the context, morphing the Gothic into the distinct Bombay Gothic2. The station is a fusion of identities: British and Indian, colonial and local, past and present, old and new.

This fusion that highlights an innate complexity, a critical feature of monumentality, is coupled with the ordinary. The station’s interior has changed over the years, through occasional renovations to preserve its architectural presence. These makeovers emphasise the existing features, without taking away what the platforms have amassed over time, the details that appeared in response to the life that surrounds it. The entanglement of cables on the column capital, projecting AC boxes, rusted metal rods, bright advertisement boards – printed and digital – stains on the walls, chipping paint, dusty overhead channels. The space would fare better in visual appeal, had it not been for these ‘contaminants’ but as Renzo Piano puts it, “Architecture is art, but art vastly contaminated by many other things. Contaminated by the best sense of the word – fed, fertilised by many things.”

In the monsoons, the relief is clear on the faces of half-drenched commuters, as they close their umbrellas and squeeze past one of the doors. They join the herd of passengers waiting to board the 7.13 pm Belapur local back home. Others zig-zag their way through the platform to exit the station. Across the tracks, two schoolboys cut through the crowd to board a departing train, beaming with the excitement of the dash. They whizz, almost slipping on the grey tiles, past a woman trying to comfort her crying baby, pointing to the pigeons on the trusses. The pigeons fly over the tracks, avoiding the large ceiling fans suspended from the steelwork, to perch on the gothic window, next to the tea stall on Platform 1. The tiny stall between striped steel columns is swaddled with commuters. The wooden roof above is lower than the steel trusses and makes for a delightful extension for the Gothic stone facade. A young man scrolling through his phone periodically checks the time on the platform board while biting into his vada pav and glances over to an occupied seating ledge attached to the wall, disappointed that it seats only four. Architectural intricacies take a step back to allow the station’s activities to shine through, giving way to a monument in motion. The stage is shared and an equilibrium of focus between the two is established like actors in a well-executed play.

Photographed by author.

When trains on all platforms align, a doorway appears. Mumbaikars dart across the carriages. For those not jumping through, the door becomes a frame. Through it, another door appears, and then another. Each doorway opens up a portal – a sudden crack in space. And through this crack, you find yourself waving to a child or whispering a quick goodbye. Then a train begins to depart and with it, this momentary illusion of doorways.

The very few in the station who are not rushing to catch a train, tourists and architecture students, take the winding staircase to the ‘Star Chamber’ which looms above the ticketing area. Above the long queues of people are wooden vaults that end in a Corinthian3-like order with ornate details. The double-height ticketing counter provides visual contrast to the platforms it opens into. With its arches, golden-painted stars, glazed flooring, and ornamental ironwork, the area seems a world apart. The crowd divides itself based on comfort with technology and head towards Tthe traditional manned ticket counters, or the battered self-ticketing kiosks lining the adjacent wall. On busy days, queues extending from both these counters intersect at right angles, scrambling towards the ends. Only once in a while does someone look up at the vaults above.

Most monuments suffer from a focal point effect. They command the sole focus of their viewers. The negotiation in VT’s case doesn’t necessarily make it a counter-monument4. On the contrary, the dispersion of focus allows it to take on a rare versatility – something quite striking in its diurnal character. On a late-April night, back in 2019, I boarded the last harbour line train from Vashi to CST, for a night out with friends. After a surprisingly chilly one-hour run, the train drew to a halt at the empty platform number one. For once, there wasn’t a rushed exchange of passengers at the car door. The station was shrouded in a strange stillness. The emptiness made the platform seem more expansive. In the quotidian rush, I had barely noticed the wide-flange ceiling fans, now switched off. The tea stall, adorned in the day with all kinds of snacks, was now closed. Adjacent to it, a man in his mid-forties lay supine on his push-cart. The faint persistence of the voice on the PA system, the mumble of commuters, and the distant honking of the cars outside reverberated in the silence of the space.

It was as though someone had turned down the ruckus of the day to a diluted dream-like melody. In the absence of crowds, we simply walked out the entrance over to the footpath. The building’s facade was lit in a deep red – a feat to appeal to the night-time onlookers – its arches and gargoyles doused in colour.

Looking back at the red edifice, the transience embedded in the perception of it struck. To outsiders, the station is a monument. To others, it is merely a stop along the way. Somewhere in the middle, between its intended and perceived associations, lies the received monumentality5 of the terminus. It is this middle ground that is transient, marked by fragility and resilience both.

And these extend to its surroundings. For years, the JJ Footover bridge escorted pedestrians from the footpath alongside the Sir JJ Campus and the Times of India building to an interconnecting bridge that led to the seven suburban platforms. In my first year at college, I used this bridge like several others, overlooking the hubbub of cars that ran beneath. Post-sundown, the signal lights below turned red, bringing a sea of vehicles with flashing brake lights into deceleration, allowing the pedestrians to make their way through hastily. Occasionally, my friends and I would notice the vibrations from the footsteps that sent the bridge trembling. Nothing alarming, we’d think. Nothing ominous, we’d hope. One evening, the bridge succumbed to those vibrations and crumbled onto the road below. In one fell swoop, our pedestrian connection to the station had been severed. For a brief time, the absence of the bridge was looked at as an inconvenience. Then Mumbaikars did what they do best: acknowledged the loss and swiftly moved on. So now, when the signal lights turn red, swarms of jaywalkers spill onto the zebra-crossing. Under the bridge’s haunting vacuum, they caper their way to the station’s entrances.

Few buildings project a negotiation between their monumentality and the every day like VT does, effortlessly. The terminus embraces the culture that thrives around it, developing an identity not driven by a single narrative, but strengthened by the convergence of several: an emblem of a powerful Empire transformed into a lieux de memoire6 of a million Mumbaikars.

Notes: