Restored to its former glory, it’s time for water works at Mumbai’s Flora Fountain once again

“When the fort walls were pulled down, new buildings were commissioned to benefit the city,” conservation architect Vikas Dilawari says, “The CTO [central telegraph office], the public works department, the high court, Mumbai University, the municipal corporation—these new landmarks also became the new ‘imageability’ of the city, and Bombay [now Mumbai] became known as one of the finest east of the Suez.”

Created in honour of Frere in 1864, Flora Fountain, was initially meant to be placed in Byculla’s Victoria Gardens [now the Jijamata Udyan]. But when the fort walls were removed, the authorities decided to mark the intersection of new roads here with what was then called the Frere Fountain.

PORTLAND TO PORBANDAR
The team used the best resources, working with professional conservators from Mumbai and New Delhi branches of INTACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage) on marble cladding, waterproofing and related works carried out by its civil contractors. The soul of the fountain, however, its water engineering, was a mystery to be unravelled.

Leakages, accretions and damage all interfered with the water flow. The team had to excavate added concrete, search and locate different aspects of the plumbing and create a map. In what is now a well-known nugget of this restoration story, Dilawari chanced on an architect’s etching of the fountain’s water engineering online. They then enlisted the services of Burjoor Framji & Co, the city’s oldest plumbers to move things along.

Matching stone from Portland was hard to come by, so the architect matched limestone from Porbandar to fix the statues. But here, too, there was much time travel needed. “For a missing hand, you had to create a visualization based on old photographs. We had to get the anatomy right, see the expression of the hand and then have several moulds made, give them to a carver and when it was done attach them with stainless steel,” Dilawari smiles.

While work on the plaza continues, Flora Fountain has been restored to her former glory, steadfastly reminiscent of a different era, and ethos. “The city is always evolving and changing—renewal is a part of it,” Dilawari says. But it is important to remember that as the city shape-shifts, “architecture is a mirror of society and that can be the best and worst comment on where we are today. It is obvious that the people who were running the city (when Flora Fountain was built) had good taste. And today there is tremendous change in the MCGM; young officers, even the higher-ups, have opened up their purses where (the conservation of) individual buildings are concerned.”

Now Lady Flora stands regally, watching the pedestrian and vehicular traffic surging past, taking her presence as a given. But sometimes, perhaps one of them looks up and meets her eye, wondering all that she has seen—and our own fleeting moment in the march of time.