Murals by the sea

It was on HMS Minden in 1812 that lawyer and poet Francis Scott Key wrote an ode to the stars-and-stripes flag he saw fluttering victoriously atop Fort Baltimore after having immense bombarding from British gunboats the previous night. Two years later, the whittled down version, The Star-Spangled Banner, became the United States of America’s national anthem. The Royal Navy 74-gun Ganges-class third rate ship was born at the Bombay Docks that comprised of what is today the Naval Dockyard and Mazagon Docks Limited (MDL) in 1810.  

India's first stealth warships named after the country’s lush hill ranges - INS Shivalik, INS Satpura and INS Sayhadri were built at MDL. So was the Royal Navy 74-gun third rate ship in teak that on which China signed the Treaty of Nanking with Great Britain to end the First Opium war in 1842. And that the last Master shipwright of the Wadia family at MDL, Ardaseer Cursetjee (1808-77) was a technology evangelist, who introduced Mumbai to the gaslight, sewing machine and electroplating silver, and is commemorated via a postage stamp.

Vignettes of such national pride about frigates, submarines, corvettes and destroyers trace the dock’s contribution to India’s maritime history and find mention on 27 murals accompanied by plaques in English and Devnagiri on a wall at Mumbai’s Mazagon Docks, in what will be Mumbai’s first nautical heritage walk. It took eight months for Verres, an art consultancy roped in to curate the murals, to arrive at corrosion-proof materials, fibre coated in a special outdoor paint in beige hue. "The sedimentary nature of the rock saw every application of paint on the mural change shades within a few days," says Verres’ curator Panna Gandhi, who sourced data from London’s Royal Museums Greenwich, Mumbai’s Asiatic Library and MDL’s own archives. “For instance, we’ve demonstrated how the Campbell Engine and was produced here, after chancing upon the sketch in an MDL journal. Right to the costumes of the dockyard workers, we've replicated it all,” says Gandhi. Verres also beautified the docks with sculptures made from ship scrap.

The first thought of documenting the dockyard’s rich past occurred to Rakesh Anand, IN(Retd), the Chairman & Managing Director (CMD) of MDL after he visited ship museums overseas. “HMS Trincomalee, built at MDL in 1817, is now the second oldest warship afloat in the world today, docked at The National Museum of the Royal Navy Hartlepool. Almost every shipyard in the world has its own museum, so why not MDL?” says Commodore Anand. Tight security at the dock means there’s limited access for the public. However, measures are being taken to relax this level of caution. Be sure to check http://www.mazdock.com/