The royal visit
In December 1911 George V and Queen Mary came to India for the Delhi Durbar, at which the king announced that the capital would move from Calcutta to Delhi and that the partition of Bengal would be reversed. They landed at Apollo Bunder in Bombay on 2 December, the first reigning British monarch to visit India. At the time of their landing only a temporary structure of plaster and cardboard stood on the site to receive them.
Apollo Bunder had long been the formal landing place of Bombay. Before the age of air travel, governors and viceroys arriving from Britain came ashore there, and the reclamation of land along the Colaba waterfront in the late nineteenth century turned it into a public promenade. The new monument gave the city, and India, a ceremonial entrance from the sea.
The arch
The permanent monument was designed by George Wittet, a Scottish architect working for the government of Bombay, who also designed the Prince of Wales Museum nearby. The foundation stone was laid in 1913, the land reclaimed from the sea, and the arch completed in 1924. It is built of yellow basalt and reinforced concrete in the Indo-Saracenic style, combining a Roman triumphal arch with elements drawn from Gujarati architecture of the sixteenth century: pointed arches, pierced stone screens and turrets. The central arch is about twenty-six metres high, with halls on either side.
The end of empire
On 28 February 1948, the 1st Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry, the last British unit to leave India, marched through the Gateway to the boats that took it to the troopship. The monument built to welcome the king became the symbol of the British departure.
Today
The Gateway stands at the tip of the Colaba peninsula facing the harbour, beside the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, opened in 1903. It is one of Mumbai's best-known landmarks and the departure point for ferries to the Elephanta caves. Statues of Shivaji and of Swami Vivekananda were installed near it after independence. The area was the scene of a car bomb in 2003, and in November 2008 attackers who had landed nearby by sea struck the Taj hotel and other targets in the city.
Further reading
- Metcalf, Barbara D. A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press, 2012
- Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. Oxford University Press, 2009
- Guha, Ramachandra. India After Gandhi. Macmillan, 2007
See also
- Bombay — Bombay, renamed Mumbai in 1995, is the port city on the west coast of India built on seven islands that passed from the Portuguese to the English crown in 1661, grew into the commercial capital of British India, and is now the capital of Maharashtra.
- British Raj — The British Raj was the period of direct Crown rule over India from 1858 to 1947, following the East India Company's dissolution after the rebellion of 1857.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.