Untitled [A Group of Four Works on Bombay: Bombay Place-Names, Murray’s Handbook, Survey of India Map Guide, and Road Map of Bombay]

a) J E E Edwardes, Bombay Place-Names, Bombay: The Times Press, 1901

148 pages; original blue cloth gilt, upper cover lettered “Bombay Place-Names.”
8.66 x 5.51 in (22 × 14 cm)

Published at the dawn of the twentieth century, Bombay Place-Names by J. E. E. Edwardes—an officer of the Indian Civil Service—remains one of the most authoritative reference works on the historical, linguistic and cultural origins of the city’s toponymy. Drawing upon archival records, land grants, parish registers and oral tradition, Edwardes meticulously traced the derivations of more than a thousand street and district names within the Island City and its adjoining suburbs, explaining their Marathi, Gujarati, Konkani, Persian, and Portuguese roots. It reveals the intricate palimpsest of influence that shaped Bombay’s identity at the threshold of the twentieth century—when tramways, new reclamations, and administrative reforms redefined its civic map.

The work was originally issued under the auspices of the Government of Bombay and is often regarded as a companion to the Bombay Gazetteer series. Beyond its etymological interest, the volume captures the layered colonial and indigenous character of the metropolis at a pivotal moment of urban transformation—when new reclamations, tramways and civic wards were reshaping its geography.

Copies in the original blue cloth binding, as here, are uncommon: most surviving examples were rebound for administrative use within municipal offices. The gilt-lettered cover exemplifies the restrained utilitarian aesthetic of Bombay government printings of the early 1900s. Today the book is indispensable to historians, urban planners and collectors concerned with the palimpsestic evolution of Mumbai’s geography and nomenclature. The inclusion of folding maps and detailed plans in this book reflected an age when travel itself was an act of observation and classification.

b) John Murray, India. Handbook of the Bombay Presidency. with an account of Bombay city, London: John Murray, 1881

pp. viii, 405, 66 adverts dated 1888-89, 4 maps and plans including the folding map in the rear pocket; publisher's red cloth gilt
7.09 x 5.12 in (18 x 13 cm)

This title is one of the four "Presidencies", which also include Bengal, Madras and Punjab. Bombay and Madras were the first to be published. All are extremely rare and highly collectible. Maps include a plan of Bombay and a general map of the entire "Presidency". Endpapers dated "July 1888".

Part of the celebrated Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers series, this compact guide to Bombay was designed for the European visitor and resident alike. Published in the late 19th century, it offered practical advice on travel, accommodation, climate, health, and currency, alongside detailed historical and topographical descriptions of the city.

The Handbook reflects the growing cosmopolitanism of Bombay in the Victorian period, then a bustling entrepôt of empire. Its entries combine utilitarian detail—hotels, conveyances, local customs—with concise historical background, making it both a travel companion and a cultural digest. Murray’s guides were renowned for their accuracy and became indispensable for administrators, businessmen, and tourists navigating the colonial world.

The survival of such copies in their original gilt-stamped publisher’s binding is scarce, given their intended use as portable field companions. Today, the volume stands not only as a relic of Bombay’s colonial urban landscape but also as part of the wider phenomenon of guidebook culture in the 19th century, which codified travel as a structured and informed experience.

c) Survey of India, Map of Bombay Guide, Dehra Dun: Survey of India, circa 1935–1945

Printed map, scale 1:25,000; issued folded in original printed paper wrapper with the royal crown and Survey of India crest; priced “2-1-0” (Rupees–Annas–Pies).
8.66 x 5.31 in (22 x 13.5 cm) (closed booklet)
39.76 x 33.46 in (101 x 85 cm) (map size when unfolded)

Issued by the Survey of India, this Bombay Guide Map represents one of the most detailed topographical depictions of pre-Independence Bombay. Printed at a large scale of 1:25,000, it offered a comprehensive urban and suburban overview at a time when the city was undergoing rapid expansion—bridging the late colonial period and the dawn of modern municipal planning.

The map’s title page bears the Survey of India emblem with the royal crown and motto “L’amston–Everest”, a reference to the geodetic lineage from Col. William Lambton and Sir George Everest, whose 19th-century triangulations established India’s cartographic precision. This design was standard for maps issued under the British Raj through the early 1940s, marking the transition from the imperial crown to post-war republican emblems.

Produced from the headquarters at Dehra Dun, such maps were indispensable not only for civic administration and engineering works—including the expansion of railway yards, dock installations, and road networks—but also for military and air-survey use during the Second World War. Bombay’s strategic coastal geography and its role as the primary western port of the Empire made this series among the most frequently updated in the Survey’s portfolio.

Copies of the Bombay Guide Map are rarely found with their original printed wrappers intact. The modest printed price of 2 rupees 1 anna hints at its intended circulation among professionals and educated citizens, distinguishing it from the larger-scale (1:63,360) provincial survey sheets. Its uncluttered typographic cover design and utilitarian paper reflect the official style of late-colonial government cartography—functional yet elegant, with restrained British modernist influence. Extant copies seldom survive outside institutional holdings, making this a scarce and historically significant artefact of Bombay’s urban cartographic record.

d) Tej Bros., Road Map of Bombay, Bombay: Tej Bros., circa 1973–late 1970s

Large folding double-sided road map (offset-lithograph) titled Road Map of Bombay — “Seeing Bombay City & Suburbs Made Easy Through this Road-Rail-Sea-&-Air Route Map Guide” (recto) / Road Map of Bombay (Businessman & Tourist need this guide with 5 detailed & latest maps of Bombay City and Suburbs) (verso) , issued in original pictorial paper wrappers printed in two colours (red and black); the upper cover featuring vignettes of the Gateway of India. Lower right featuring the Taj Mahal Hotel, the Trimurti medallion, the Flora fountain, and a modern high-rise skyline (Nariman Point/Cuffe Parade era), together with smaller Bombay views; the imprint line with the publisher’s address and the printed price “Rupees Three Only”.
6.30 x 4.33 in (16 x 11 cm) (closed booklet)
29.53 x 19.76 in (75 x 50.2 cm) (map size when unfolded)

This commercial city plan—issued by the Bombay publisher Tej Bros.—belongs to the generation of practical, pocketable maps that accompanied Bombay’s rapid transformation after Independence. Priced at ?3, the map was aimed squarely at the everyday user—motorists, sales agents, and new suburban residents—rather than the professional surveyor. Its cover design neatly compresses Bombay’s layered identity: the Gateway of India as a colonial icon and tourist locus; the Elephanta Trimurti signalling an ancient sacred geography; and the new concrete towers of Nariman Point/Cuffe Parade, emblems of a modern financial capital rising from land reclaimed through the 1960s–70s.

Unlike the pre-war Survey of India sheets, private imprints such as this prioritised navigability: arterial roads and junctions, bus depots, railway lines and stations on the Western and Central Railways, municipal wards, police stations, hospitals, post offices and petrol pumps. The promise of an “Additional Detailed Map of Bombay Suburbs” reflects the city’s real demographic story of the period—northward expansion into Bandra, Khar, Santacruz, Andheri, Ghatkopar and beyond, just as new flyovers, Sion–Panvel and Western Express corridors, and planned townships altered patterns of movement and residence.

Ephemeral by design and heavily used, such maps seldom survive with their original wrappers intact. Copies that retain strong cover impressions—particularly with this striking two-colour, halftone-driven graphic that juxtaposes heritage and high-rise—offer valuable primary evidence for the visual culture of urban Bombay and the everyday cartographies through which citizens learned a rapidly changing city.

MAPPING AND NAMING BOMBAY: FROM COLONIAL TOPONYMY TO POST-INDEPENDENCE CARTOGRAPHY

Spanning nearly a century of Bombay’s urban and intellectual evolution—from late-Victorian cartographic empiricism to post-Independence popular mapping—this group offers an exceptional cross-section of how the city was seen, structured, and understood through the printed word and map. Each work captures a different layer of the metropolis’s development: from colonial nomenclature and travel narrative to imperial survey precision and democratic urban expansion.

Together, these four works chart the intellectual, cartographic, and cultural construction of Bombay across a transformative century. From the archival precision of the civil servant to the portability of the modern road map, they testify to how a city of islands became a metropolis of imagination—mapped, named, and reinterpreted anew with each generation.

(Set of four)

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