Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Mandai (Crawford Market)

The stone buildings at the edge of the former British fort brought under one roof the trade that had previously spread through cramped markets. The railway ended nearby: goods were received at the covered weighing yard, checked, and distributed among the rows and warehouses. The city assigned vendors separate places and maintained order through a manager. This arrangement is still visible in the municipal counters occupied by licensed traders.

Two names stand side by side on the facade. Arthur Travers Crawford remains on the stone plaque and in the tower's initials. Officially, this is Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Mandai (Crawford Market): “mandai” means market in Marathi, while “mahatma” is an honorary name, “great soul.”

Arthur Travers Crawford was Bombay's first municipal commissioner—the appointed head of the city's municipal administration. He took up the post in eighteen sixty-five, at an unfortunate moment. During the American Civil War, Bombay merchants had grown rich from expensive cotton, but the war ended, prices collapsed, and companies and banks fell one after another. City funds called for caution.

Crawford chose otherwise. He considered the old markets dirty and poorly managed, and just a year later he launched Bombay's first large planned market here. The site suited his design: to the south, the business district of the former British fort ended; to the north, densely populated trading quarters began; and nearby was the terminus of the Bori Bunder railway. Goods could be brought in, weighed, and immediately distributed among the shops.

The project cost the municipality almost two million rupees. After the financial crash, such a sum made Crawford a target for accusations of extravagance. He was a career colonial official, and his professional reputation depended on whether the costly undertaking proved useful to the city.

The first sections—the fruit and vegetable sections—opened on January sixteenth, eighteen sixty-eight. Then the meat rows, warehouses, and covered weighing yard began operating. Incoming consignments were checked there before being taken to the counters. The municipality divided the trade into hundreds of leasable places: a vendor needed a license, had to pay for a shop, and a manager kept order. Crawford gained a market that could be accounted for by the number of traders, loads, and rents collected.

His risky expenditure paid off. Traders occupied almost all the sections, and net rental income eventually exceeded six percent of the sum invested by the city. Crawford left municipal service in eighteen seventy-one, but the market already bore his name. For an official, it was a rare monument inside which the city continued to collect payment for every workplace.

The arrangement outlasted the original range of goods. Until nineteen ninety-six, a significant part of Bombay was supplied with fruit from here; then the main wholesale flow was moved to Navi Mumbai. Wholesale and retail trade in fruit, vegetables, groceries, and household goods remained here. The stone buildings still belong to the municipality, and licensed vendors still occupy their allotted places.

It is precisely the payment for a place that explains why the market's present name is connected with Jyotiba Phule. This nineteenth-century social reformer knew trade not from books. His family grew and sold flowers, and from that occupation received the surname Phule—“flower.” Jyotiba himself earned money through farming, construction contracts, and wholesale sales of vegetables and fruit; he sent part of the goods from Pune to Bombay.

When Phule became a member of Pune's municipality, a proposal was made there to build an expensive covered market. He spoke against it: in his calculation, poor vegetable vendors would not be able to pay for the new counters. For him, this was an argument about people who lived on the takings from a basket or a tray. Phule spent his own income on public work; together with his wife Savitribai Phule, he opened a school for girls, and then created schools and associations for those whose sex and origin barred them from education. For this work, the market later received his name.

Outside, the plaque names Arthur Travers Crawford as the initiator; inside, a bust of Jyotiba Phule is installed. Between them remain the municipal trading places: one secured their construction, while the other warned that the price of such a place determines a vendor's fate.