Gordon’s Passage to India
By Ihsan Aslam

Like Pakistan, India is all for name changes. It perhaps has more to do with claiming what is not yours than shedding colonial legacies. Victoria Terminus was built to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. It has been renamed the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus.
When Gordon Bleasdale was called upon to join the British Army in August 1940 he couldn’t have imagined he’d end up serving in India within four years. His call-up included a leaflet “Welcome to His Majesty’s Army”, which reminded him: “You are about to become a soldier. This will mean a big change in your life. You will find yourself performing unfamiliar duties in a new atmosphere.” But Bombay was a long way from the hills of northern England.
Mr Bleasdale must have died for I recently acquired some of his papers and photographs at an online auction. What interested me was his connection with pre-partition India. Although I have travelld in India, I have not yet been to Bombay (Mumbai). It is thanks to Gordon Bleasdale, and the care with which he kept his souvenirs, that I’ve had the chance to discover the city and to tour some of the sites.
His notes at the back of an envelope tell us he embarked HMS Strathmore in Greenock, Scotland on August 20, 1944 and arrived in Bombay on September 21. It can’t have been a very pleasant “passage to India” because soldiers were squashed like sardines in the troop ship. The sight-seeing along the way — Alexandria, Port Said, Port Suez, Red Sea, Aden — must have made up for the inconveniences, however.
To crown it all, there was the stunning view of the Gateway of India and the awesome Taj Mahal Hotel to greet the new arrivals in Bombay. Although photographs in Bleasdale’s collection show him in various places — in Secunderabad and in Kashmir, for example — it is Bombay that dominates. The usual tourist attractions are all depicted: the Gateway, Victoria Terminus, Crawford Market, Flora Fountain, and the Prince of Wales Museum.
Like Pakistan, India is all for name changes. It perhaps has more to do with claiming what is not yours than shedding colonial legacies. Victoria Terminus or VT, for instance, was built to mark the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887. However it has been renamed the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. A memorial for Queen Victoria now recalls King Shivaji.
Another name-change is that of Crawford Market on Carnac Road. Completed in 1869 and decorated by Rudyard Kipling’s father, Lockwood, the grand covered market with fancy Moorish arches and a clock tower was named after Arthur Crawford. It is Crawford Market no more, but rather Jyotiba Phule Market. The market in the name of Bombay’s first municipal commissioner is now named after a Hindu leader who had nothing to do with it.
One also finds photographs of recreational places in the Bleasdale collection: the Regal and Metro cinemas, Mahalaxmi Race Course, swimming pools at Breach Candy. The British lads must have looked forward to going out together and unwinding a bit.
He names his colleagues on the back of the photographs: Alf, Ben, Bill, Blondie, Ernie, Ginger, and Pete — all very typically English. There he is with Blondie outside the Parsee Temple in Hornby Road, and there he is with Ginger at the Colaba Transit Camp in 1946. An old Bombay tram ticket labeled “Bombay ES & Tramways Co Ltd” is also preserved in the collection. This one anna ticket mentions 40 stops like Museum West, Bori Bunder, Crawford Market, Dhobi Talao, Opera House, Jakeria Musjid and so on.
Oh, wouldn’t you love to get on that tram in old Bombay! And wouldn’t you like to watch classics like Casablanca and Meet Me in St Louis at the Metro, or Jane Eyre, Henry VI, or Duel in the Sun at the Regal? Gordon Bleasdale did.
(Ihsan Aslam is exploring public history at Ruskin College, Oxford. He can be contacted at: timeshistoryman@yahoo.co.uk or visited at: http://www.pakistanhistory.com)

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Editor: Akhtar M. Faruqui
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