JOHN SIMPSON

The worst thing about sightseeing is that you often only find out what you’ve seen when you read about it afterwards.

We were in Mumbai for a conference and only had a few hours to look around. My travelling companion was my PA (and sister-in-law) Gina. As charming as she is competent, she bought a guidebook and flicked through it. ‘This Crawford Market might be good,’ she said. ‘Apparently Rudyard Kipling’s father designed the reliefs on the outside.’ Gina knows my interests.

There’s a lot about Kipling that I don’t like: the noisy imperialism, the hectoring manner, the irritating rhymes, the sentimentality. But sometimes he isn’t an imperialist at all. He has a wonderful ability to get into the skin of people very different from himself and his caste, and understand them. And he certainly adored the seething complexity of India, which he knew from being born in Bombay, from Simla, and from his nocturnal wanderings in Lahore.

I like Kipling’s father, Lockwood, too. He was a little bald man with a great bushy beard, a hard-up art teacher with family links to fashionable artists such as Edward Burne-Jones back home, and a passion for encouraging the arts and crafts of India.

So Crawford Market it was. ‘Now it has an Indian name,’ said our taxi driver chattily, ‘but everyone still says ‘Crawford Market.’ And Mumbai itself? ‘The older people are still calling it Bombay, sir.’ Bombay is Portuguese for ‘good bay’; Mumbai comes from the name of one of the goddesses worshipped by the fisher-folk who lived here before the Portuguese arrived, and then gifted the port to the British in the 1660s, when the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza married Charles II.

We left behind us our wonderful hotel, the Taj Mahal Palace, built in 1903 and once the largest and most luxurious in the entire British Empire. We left the Gateway to India, the triumphal arch built to celebrate the arrival of George V and Queen Mary after the coronation of 1911. And we left the huge, colourful crowds wandering around on the Apollo Bunder, watching the little boats that bring passengers backwards and forwards from Elephanta Island. The traffic swallowed us up, swirling around us with a logic entirely of its own. No one collided, though it was impossible to believe they could keep on missing each other. There was a general air of cheerfulness and acceptance.

In spite of the change of name, Mumbai is as Victorian as Manchester. Six great avenues, laid out in 1865 (the year Kipling was born) come together at a vast roundabout marked by a fountain celebrating the victories of the Duke of Wellington. The 1860s and 70s were boom years in Bombay. Indian merchants, fabulously rich, competed with each other and with the city authorities to put up bigger, newer and more ornate buildings: wonderful and absurdly medieval or Italianate structures like the police headquarters (formerly the Royal Alfred Sailors’ Home), Bombay University and Victoria Terminus, the grandest railway station in the world, through which three million people still pass twice a day. Nowadays the Victoria Terminus is called the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, but many people often still prefer ‘VT’.

In all sorts of ways, Mumbai has reached an accommodation with its colonial past. Now the state of Maharashtra, of which it is the capital, has decided to turn the house where Kipling lived as a child into a museum to him. The writer Charles Allen, in a new biography of Kipling, makes it clear that this wasn’t really the place where Kipling was born; at first the family had to live in a kind of tent because the School of Arts where John Lockwood Kipling worked ran out of money after the financial crash of 1865 and couldn’t afford to build any accommodation for its staff. Rudyard was born in the tent. The house, a lovely rambling construction, came a little later, and it’s this that will be the museum.

‘There is Crawford Market,’ said our driver proudly. It was both grand and ramshackle, the biggest vegetable market in the city, an island in the middle of all the traffic. Getting to it was like swimming a river. Over the entrances were the two reliefs the guidebook had told us about; but they were awkward and rather pompous, and not at all like the kind of work Kipling was capable of.

The market was magnificent, its stalls and shops piled ten feet high with fruit and vegetables as beautifully presented as if they were in Fortnum & Mason in London. Half of the things on display I couldn’t recognise, but we bought a couple of breadfruit, ugly and warty on the outside but tasting sensational. I took pictures of everything: stallholders sleeping, stallholders offering us their wares, stallholders proudly posing for us.

As we were leaving, I noticed the delightful little fountain near the grand doorway. It was covered with carved birds and animals as lavishly as the Kiplings’ house was covered with foliage, absurd and exuberant and spectacular like Mumbai itself. I took a quick snapshot of it. It was only when I got back to London that I found that the fountain was Lockwood Kipling’s own work; the reliefs over the doors, though ascribed to him by the guidebooks, were in fact done by his students. The fountain had all his freedom of style and his love of India built into it. Like a short story by his son.

As I say, the problem with sightseeing is that at the time, all too often, you don’t know the value of the sights you’re seeing.

John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on the BBC World news channel. BBC World is available in 200 countries and territories worldwide and on selected British Airways flights.