Andheri Kurla Roador Sir Mathuradas Vasanji Marg
Poor Sir Mathuradas. He lived his life as Vissanji, becoming president of the Bombay Indian Merchants Chamber in 1934, setting up the Harijan Sevak Sangh to help lower castes, even trying to influence Mahatma Gandhi. Vissanji and other Bombay Hindu leaders met Gandhi to discuss his fast unto death against the British Government’s announcement of separate electorates for the depressed classes. He also founded a girls’ school in the 1960s. The Andheri-Kurla stretch named after him also houses the Lady Ratanbai and Sir Mathuradas Vissanji Academy. Unfortunately the road uses the corruption Vasanji, not Vissanji.

Antop Hill
Seedy Antop Hill may get its name from its Hindu owner Antoba. The name, or its variation Antob, was common among Hindu residents and there was even an assistant secretary in the Bombay Government called N Antoba. The area was called Antob’s hill, which appears to have been corrupted to Antop by Portuguese or English writers.

Carter RoadorSangeet Samrat Naushad Ali Road
Bollywood composer Naushad lived in a bungalow onCarter Roadand this is enough reason for the BMC to rename the road after him when he died in 2006. But the name isn’t half as catchy as Naushad’s melodies. Locals refer to the Bandra-Khar sea-facing stretch asCarter Road, named after a collector called Carter Perry, who also had a bungalow in the area. He was collector in 1924 and the two roads that led to his home are both named after him. What’s the other one called? Perry.

Clare Road
Byculla’s Clare Road wasn’t named after a pretty local Catholic girl. It wasn’t named after any girl. It’s named for John FitzGibbon, the Earl of Clare and governor of Bombay between 1831 and 1835. Incidentally, Earls of Clare have been created three times in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century. There have been eight Earls of Clare and our man, often called the second because his earldom was created in the second instance, is actually Earl number seven. He was also a school friend of the poet Byron.

Chicago Square
Not after the musical. Not after the rock band. Not even after Chicago Radio. The junction under the Bandra Reclamation flyover, at the point where Mahim Causeway turns toSwami Vivekananda Road, is calledChicago Squareto honour Vivekananda, who introduced Hinduism to the world through his speech at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in 1893. In 1995, a part ofChicago’s busy Michigan Avenuewas  renamed “Swami Vivekananda Way”. ButChicago Squareremains largely unknown. There isn’t a plaque at the junction.

Delisle Road or NM Joshi Marg
Constructed in 1868 and named after lieutenant A De Lisle, a secretary of the Bombay Government’s Foras Commission, Delisle Road was renamed NM Joshi Marg after trade unionist Narayan Malhar Joshi. While De Lisle has made it to the history books for a memorandum supporting the reclamation of land between Bombay and Trombay, Joshi’s list of accomplishments is longer. He was the secretary of the Social Service League in 1911, which championed better living and working conditions and set up schools, crèches, training centres and dispensaries for mill workers. He also founded the All-India Trade Union Congress in 1920, helping organise a strike that would stop the city’s textile mills eight years later. NM Joshi runs through the heart of the mill district, from the east side of Byculla station, past Chinchpokli andLower Parel stations, towards Elphinstone Road bridge. But there are more corporate types than mill workers along the way today. 

Haines Roador or E Moses Road
Haines Road, constructed in 1868, could be named after either Sir Frederick Paul Haines who was the Indian Army’s  Commander-in-Chief between 1876 and 1881. Or it could mean Stafford Haines, who was the Bombay Presidency’s political agent in Aden (nowSouth Yemen) and served without leave for 15 years.  E Moses, on the other hand, is easier to identify. Elijah Moses Raspurkar was born into a family of Bene Israeli government servants in Ahmednagar. One  story of his growing up in the drought-ridden district involves the family getting ready for the Passover meal. Following tradition, Raspurkar’s father read the prayers thrice in Hebrew then translated them into Marathi. The words explained that whoever was poor or hungry was welcome at the Passover table. It caused a bedraggled local who had sneaked in to dart out from under the bed pleading that he was not a thief but was too poor to buy food. Raspurkar’s father not only gave him clean clothes and enough to eat but also packed a dabba for his family. Elijah Moses was Bombay’s mayor from 1937 to 1938. The Worli road that bears his name is home to five-star hotels and slums. Doesn’t anybody want to share anymore?

Frere Roador or P D’Mello Marg 
The city’s easternmost public road, which covers the east side of St George’s Hospital near the GPO and passes Masjid Bunder, Chinch Bunder, Wadi Bunder and Reay Road, is named after Placid D’Mello, a Mangalorean trade union leader who, in uncharacteristically un-placid fashion, spent years organising dock workers around Ballard Pier. D’Mello is also famous for being  mentor to the politician and fellow union leader George Fernandes.  The stretch was once calledFrere Road, after Sir Henry Bartle Frere,Bombay’s governor in 1862. Frere was responsible for pulling down the Fort’s walls (a process set in motion by another governor, John Elphinstone, see The station masters) allowing the city to expand. He also oversaw much of the Fort area’s town planning, the construction of its aesthetically designed buildings and drainage system.

Ibrahim Rahimtoola Road 
If you’re going south from Sion, Ibrahim Rahimatullah Road starts where Dr Ambedkar Road ends in Byculla and continues until the road forks into the Kalbadevi and Mohammed Ali Roads. It’s as busy today as Rahimtoola (who used the Anglicised spelling of his name) was in his lifetime. The merchant who studied at Elphinstone School, excelled in arithmetic, algebra and geometry, but failed Matriculation. It was his only moment of failure. He spent his youth in the Indian National Congress and joined the Bombay Municipal Corporation, putting in 26 years of service, becoming president of its standing committee and working for the Bombay Improvement Trust in 1898. He became  mayor the year after, was the sheriff of Bombay in 1904, a governor of Bombay in 1918, a fellow of Bombay University in 1921 and president of the Bombay Legislative Council in 1923 and 1925. He even found time in between to urge the British to form an Indian navy. Described by the Imam as “the most distinguished member our community has produced in Western India”, Rahim toola’s accomplishments only ended with his death in 1942. His family now lives in the UK. 

Lalbaug
Though convenient, Lalbaug does not refer to the land of Communist agitators. Two stories vie to explain how Lalbaug got its name and only one attributes it to a person. The first story says the area is home to a dargah that holds the tomb of a fourteenth-century Muslim saint called Lal Shah. The second story seems more likely. Pestonji Wadia, a brother of the shipbuilding Jamsetji, and a broker with two wealthy mercantile houses had plenty of property across the city. Apart from owning a large part of the Fort and tracts of land at Mazagaon and Breach Candy, he also had a thousand square yards in Parel, where he built himself a country home called Lal Baug, or red garden, in the nineteenth century. The house helped distinguish the neighbourhood from Parel and today, the property houses Navroze Baug, a Parsi colony. 

Mori Road
Mahim’s Mori Road is where the devotees spill on to the road on Wednesdays when St Michael’s Church holds its novenas. It gets its name not from the local fish but because the street was once flanked by houses from the Mori or More class of Marathas, who are believed to have descended from the ancient Mauryas. 

Nesbit Road
If you’ve driven down the JJ Flyover towards Mazagaon, there’s no way you can avoid Nesbit Road. The half-road, half-bridge is the only way in and leads to the Mumbai Sales Tax office and no fewer than five schools. The road honours a Rose Nesbit, a Catholic and the wife of the East India Company’s Bombay Harbour Master. The Nesbits had property in the area and in 1787, Mrs Nesbit used it to build a private chapel in which her remains were buried when she died in 1919. When the property was turned over to the Church, the chapel was replaced with the St Anne’s Church. The church’s sacristy has a tablet honouring old Mrs Nesbit.

Pandurang Budhkar Marg
Were he alive today, Pandurang Budhkar, who lends his name to the street connecting Worli to Elphinstone Road, would probably find it hard to recognise the area in which he grew up in the middle of the last century. There wasn’t a Hard Rock Café or a Shiro to hang out in on weekends. No swanky office complexes like Paragon Centre in which to spin millions into billions. Not even Doordarshan’s now-famous TV tower. Budhkar, the son of a labourer at the Bombay Dyeing mills, died in 1968, four years before a television service was set up in Mumbai. He lived simply, teaching students from hutments at the neighbouring Delisle Road and helping local vegetable hawkers fight police harassment. His family now lives in Borivali.

The Pasta lanes
No romantic stories about hungry Italians. No anecdotes about Mumbai’s role in the invention of macaroni carbonara. The four lanes in Colaba are named after a wealthy Bhatia family, the Pastas, who owned property there.  Gokuldas and Madhavdas Pasta also owned property in Dadar (E), behind the present-day Chitra Cinema. This explains why there are Pasta roads there as well. 

Pedder Road or Gopalrao Deshmukh Marg
Pedder Road, running from Kemp’s Corner down to the Haji Ali junction, is almost never called Gopalrao Deshmukh Marg. Deshmukh, a surgeon, the first president of the Indian Medical Association and the first mayor of Bombay in independent India, lived on the road. He also helped fund Sion Hospital’s gynaecology and obstetrics wing by donating R15,000 in  memory of his deceased wife Annapurnabai. WG Pedder, on the other hand, was the city’s Municipal Commissioner in 1879. He served in the Bombay Civil Service, where he introduced stricter ways to check salt smuggling after salt taxes were raised in the 1860s, and eventually became secretary to the India Office’s Revenue and Commerce department. He also makes an entry in Hobson Jobson’s dictionary of Anglo Indian words, in which he has his own story on why Apollo Bunder is so named. Pedder reports that a native told him that it was where polis were baked for Holi.

Ram Ganesh Gadkari Chowk
BEST buses that claim Ram Ganesh Gadkari Chowk as their final destination aren’t heading to some obscure dead end you’d never want to visit. They’re merely heading to the five-road junction outside Shiv Sena Bhavan. Gadkari was a playwright, poet and humorist of the early twentieth century, writing such plays as Punyaprabhav and Ekach Pyala and a collection of poems called Wagwaijayani.  He is also credited with penning what eventually became Maharashtra’s state song. Yes, we have a state song. “Maharashtra Geet” roughly speaks of Maharashtra as a land of extremes. 

Sion Trombay Road or VN Purav Marg
It starts out at Chunabhatti, heads towards Kurla, turns sharply east and runs past Chembur, Govandi and Mankhurd before fusing with the road and rail bridges across the creek. It passes buildings like the Board of Radiation and Isotope Technology, National Centre for Science Educators, Naval Armament Depot and Telecom Factory as well as Reliance Corporate Park, RK Studio, TISS and the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. Vitthal Narayan Purav didn’t build or work in any of these institutions. But he certainly helped people get to them. Around Independence, the Chembur resident and village sarpanch signed a pact with Burma Shell (now BPCL) allowing them to use village land. He opened the neighbourhood’s first school, the Chembur Education Society, and even offered refuge to the Sindhis who fled Pakistan during Partition. When Chembur was assimilated into Mumbai city limits in 1950, Purav ran unopposed for the office of Corporator and served successfully till his death two years later. The road adopted his name in 1968. Nobody opposed that decision either.

SG Barve Road
Everybody’s favourite short-cut to get in and out of Kurla during rush hour, SG Barve Road often gets as jammed as its bigger brothers LBS Marg and AH Wadia Road. Barve knows all about congestion in big cities. He was chairman of the Study Group on Greater Bombay in 1959, in which he suggested building a township across Thane Creek to ease the city’s  density and connecting the two via road and rail bridges. Barve went on to become Pune’s Municipal Commissioner and the state’s finance minister. His idea went on to become Navi Mumbai.

Sydenham Road or Mohammad Ali Road
The road you’ll miss if you zip over the JJ Flyover was built as part of a massive decongestion drive that followed after a deadly epidemic of the bubonic plague hit Mumbai in the last years of the nineteenth century. The British, believing that the disease was caused by miasma or foul vapours that thrived in badly ventilated areas, set up the Bombay Improvement Trust to ventilate the city and spread out its population. Sydenham Road was part of the plan and was named after George Sydenham Clarke, the governor between 1907 and 1913. There was a feeble attempt to name it New Memonwada Road, but the idea was put to vote at the Trust and lost. Renaming occurred after Independence, when the road was changed to Mohammad Ali Road after Maulana Mohammad Ali Jouhar, a nationalist, scholar, journalist and poet. Jouhar served as the president of the All India Muslim League in 1918 and was elected president of the Indian National Congress in 1923. He died in 1931, much before Partition. 

Vatsalabai Desai Chowk
Did you know that the Haji Ali junction is officially called Vatsalabai Desai Chowk? Neither did we. Vatsalabai isn’t related to Bhulabhai Desai up the road. She’s the wife of Balasaheb Desai, a former state minister for home, education and culture, and a social worker. He helped establish the Shivaji University in Kolhapur. His wife, Vatsalabai, is best known in Mumbai for her chowk. It leads to Lala Lajpat Rai Road, the erstwhile Hornby Vellard named after William Hornby, the Governor of Bombay, from 1771 to 1784. The word vellard probably comes from the Portuguese vallado, a fence or embankment, and is said to be unique to Mumbai. The next time you’re in the neighbourhood, look out for a building called Hornby View near Heera Panna  on Tardeo Road and a Vellard View close to the Cadbury Junction end of Pedder Road.