Fascination with milestones, remnants of a more leisurely world that marked the distance of prominent spots in Bombay from the then zero-point St Thomas’ Cathedral in the Fountain area has led to blogs that document each milestone, with pictures and GPS locations. There is also a WhatsApp group "where members swap information, pictures and indulge in marker banter,” states a report in The Times of India (TOI) of April 9, 2017.
Dr Simin Patel, a city historian who runs bombaywalla.org has located eight such milestones. "Watch my blog,” she smiles. Heritage enthusiast Saleem Ahmadullah, whose mother was Parsi notes in the TOI report that "no one is certain how many there were originally.”
The milestones Photos: Bombaywalla.org
A milestone at Gowalia Tank, the only one to sport a number ("3”) instead of a Roman numeral as is the case with other similar markers, is "also the only one on an east-west road.” Ahmadullah notes that "those roads opened only in the 1880s after the governor’s wife died of cholera and the Government House (the current Raj Bhavan) was moved (from Byculla) to Malabar Hill.” The report states that the stones were erected after 1816. If a milestone mentions St Thomas Cathedral, it would date to the period after 1837 as that was the year the church was re designated as a cathedral. The milestone bug bit Ahmadullah after he spotted one at Dadar: he has documented a dozen in a 1987 issue of The Bombay Explorer, the journal of the Bombay Local History Society.
Many milestones, originally three to four feet in height, have ‘shrunk’ due to their bottom halves being "submerged in our ever thickening pavements.” The report states that since many milestones have gone missing, the heritage committee of the Bombay Municipal Corporation has asked that these vestiges of the past be moved to "an open space within the radius of their current location,” if they cannot be preserved at their current location. This move has not found favor with archeologist Dr Kurush Dalal as he believes "this would remove them from their historical context.” But by leaving these monuments where they are, there is a danger they may be lost forever unless the area around the monument is cordoned off.