An Art Deco walk around Mumbai changed how I look at the city

A week ago, if you’d asked me about the Mumbai skyline, I would’ve responded with adjectives like ‘smog’, ‘pollution’, ‘barely visible’ and ‘overcrowded’. 23 years here, South Bombay’s Gothic gargoyles and Bandra’s cosy bylanes had all blurred into the background. What remained were towering cranes, traffic diversions and glass towers. The city I grew up in felt like one big construction site.

This changed when I met Tinaz Nooshian, creative director of Art Deco Alive!, a celebration marking a hundred years of the Art Deco movement through an exhibit at the Bhau Daji Lad Museum, a block party at Churchgate, Art Deco walks around the city and much more—all happening from the 6th to the 25th of November.

We spoke over coconut water and a cup of tea at Gaylord in Churchgate, a fitting location to relive Mumbai’s glory days. Established in 1956, Gaylord is one of those anachronistic spaces that can transport you to the past. Its walls are lined with photographs of esteemed patrons, like Pandit Ravi Shankar and George Harrison. Behind me, a piano stood in a corner.

“Every restaurant used to have its own band, its own musicians it was known for,” Nooshian tells me. “Hotel Astoria down the street had a very popular restaurant called Venice. People went just for the music.” She began sketching a Mumbai I’d never known—dimly lit bars with jazz always playing in the background, smoky rooms where art and politics coexisted. A newly independent city, pulsating with possibility. It was a Mumbai built on hope and dreams.

“Art Deco here is almost an entirely Indian contribution,” Nooshian adds. “It was embraced by local architects who wanted to differentiate themselves from the English colonisers’ Victorian architecture.”

Mumbai is home to the second-largest cluster of Art Deco buildings in the world. Clean and contemporary, these structures are a reflection of the new India that the architects wanted to build. Yet most of us, me included, pass them by every day, barely sparing a glance. If you start paying attention, you can see Art Deco everywhere. You can recognise it by its two-tone façades (like the butter-yellow and burnt-orange of Soona Mahal), the vertical banding, often in threes, that ends in geometric ziggurats, turreted rooftops, scattered bas-relief, curved ship-like balconies and ‘eyebrows’ shading the windows, made to answer the city’s tropical sun and rain.

Eros Cinema is perhaps one of the city’s most recognisable Art Deco structures. Partially made with Agra stone, its cream and red circular façade is wrapped in vertical bands and topped with a tiered crown. “They needed something imposing enough to stand at this junction,” Nooshian tells me as we watch the unceasing flow of traffic. If you look closely, you can see waves etched along its exterior—the ocean is a recurring Art Deco motif.

Mumbai is a port city, and the architects of the 1940s looked to the ocean liners that docked here for inspiration. Now, we have balcony railings that resemble those on ships and designs that look like portholes by window frames.