Mumbai's General Post Office very Indian, says e-book

Although it was built during the British Raj, the majestic General Post Office in Mumbai's Fort area is exclusively an Indian building.

This was revealed in an e-book named 'Dawn Under The Dome', which delves into the history of the iconic building which is over a century old.

Released by Maharashtra Governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari, the research that went behind the book was done by Swati Pandey and Orchida Mukherjee while the photography was done by Krishna Iyer, Yash Kocchar and Orchida Mukherjee.

“The GPO is a very important building…it is as important as CSMT or BMC….in fact, the post connects people and it is for the general public,” said Pandey, Postmaster General, Mumbai Region. This is also the first time that the history of the building, located in a tri-junction off the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) and in the vicinity of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) headquarters, is being documented in the form of an e-book.

A paradigm of Indo-Saracenic architecture, the GPO, which covers an area of 1,20,000 sq ft and is the biggest post office in the country, was built on the lines of Gol Gumbaz of Bijapur in Karnataka.

“The GPO’s beautiful external dome at the top has a diameter of 65 ft, almost half the diameter of the tomb of Mohammed Adil Shah at Gol Gumbaz that features a dome of 125 ft, making it a building with the second largest dome in the country,” said Pandey. The building has 100 working counters, nine gates, 10 entrances, three basements along with a blend of different kinds of staircases. Interestingly, it also had three tunnels.

Pandey said that the Indo-Saracenic style denotes a fine blend of Indian and Islamic architecture. “We can say it is an integral part of archaeological tripartite along with the Victorian Gothic Revival (Victoria Terminus or CSMT) and the Gothic (BMC) genre,” she said.

The book says that three types of Indian stones were used in the construction of the building – the grey basalt with buff trachyte and the yellow stone from Mumbai's Kurla and Malad respectively and the white stone from Dharandhra, a small town in Gujarat which was then part of the erstwhile Bombay Presidency.

The building was designed by a Scottish architect named John Begg who had practised in London, South Africa and India with the help of his protégé George Wittet.

It took the architect duo nine years to complete the building's construction which began on 1 September, 1904 and was completed on 31 March, 1913. The entire construction cost Rs 18,09,000, as mentioned a commemorative plaque.

Though fully Indian in theme, design and material, Begg did not forget to leave behind traces of his Scottish roots by presenting an interplay of lotus and thistle sculpted throughout the walls.