Kala Ghoda

On the traffic island at the beginning of K. Dubash Marg stands a black bronze horse without a rider. Kala Ghoda means “black horse,” but the name came from another statue: the former horse carried a British prince.

On November eighth, eighteen seventy-five, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII), arrived in Bombay. His four-month journey through India began here. The merchant Albert Abdullah David Sassoon decided to commemorate this visit with a monument. He headed a family trading house that had grown rich from cotton, textiles, and the sale of opium to China, so he could afford a commission costing twelve and a half thousand pounds.

The London sculptor Joseph Boehm depicted the prince in military uniform, mounted on an enormous bronze horse. The group was first shown at the World’s Fair in Paris, then ceremonially unveiled in Bombay on June twenty-ninth, eighteen seventy-nine, opposite the David Sassoon Library and Reading Room. The rider stood on a sixteen-foot pedestal with reliefs about the prince’s journey.

The patron dedicated the monument to Albert Edward, but in the everyday speech of city residents, it was the horse that caught on. The dark bronze figure was called Kala Ghoda, and that name came to denote the intersection and then the whole surrounding neighborhood.

In nineteen sixty-five, municipal services removed the statue and moved it to the former Victoria Gardens—now Veermata Jijabai Bhosale Udyan, near the Bhau Daji Lad Museum. The prince and his horse are still there. A parking lot remained here for several decades, yet the name Kala Ghoda did not disappear.

By then, the library, colleges, museums, and exhibition halls had already gathered around the former pedestal. In nineteen ninety-eight, gallery owners, patrons, and residents created the Kala Ghoda Association to maintain this neighborhood and raise money to restore its buildings. A year later, they held the first free street arts festival. Exhibitions spilled out of the halls onto sidewalks and into courtyards, and the festival’s proceeds went to the David Sassoon Library and Reading Room and other buildings in the area.

In two thousand seventeen, the association commissioned sculptor Shrihari Bhosale to create a new bronze horse. It has neither a prince nor a saddle. The original group with Edward now stands by the city zoo, while near the library a horse called Spirit of Kala Ghoda has appeared.