Art district · Mumbai, Maharashtra
Kala Ghoda
A crescent of South Mumbai streets holding the city's main museum, its best-known public gallery and the national gallery's Mumbai branch. It hosts the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival each February.
See first
- CSMVS and its miniatures
- The Jehangir Art Gallery
- NGMA Mumbai
- The riderless horse, Spirit of Kala Ghoda
- The Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, in February
The name means black horse. It comes from a black stone statue of Edward VII, as Prince of Wales, on horseback, given by Albert Abdullah David Sassoon. The statue was removed in 1965 and now stands at the Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Byculla. For half a century the district was named after a horse that was not there. In 2017 the Kala Ghoda Association put up a new one, riderless, called Spirit of Kala Ghoda, designed by Alfaz Miller and sculpted by Shreehari Bhosle.
Within a short walk are CSMVS, the Jehangir Art Gallery and NGMA Mumbai. The Jehangir, built in 1952 with money from Sir Cowasji Jehangir at the urging of the painter K. K. Hebbar and the physicist Homi Bhabha, has four exhibition halls. The art publication Marg has its offices on the third floor of the Army and Navy Building.
Esplanade Mansion, India’s oldest surviving cast-iron building, is here too. As Watson’s Hotel it hosted the Lumière brothers’ first screening in India, in 1896.
Walk it on a weekday morning, before the gallery crowds.