July 14: After 50 years of freeing ourselves from colonial rule, there are still some places in the city which continue to retain their British names. The Fort area in Mumbai (or Bombay, as it was known then), for instance, with its three gates - the Bazaar Gate, Churchgate and Apollo Gate, was constructed in 1722 to protect the island city from seaborne invaders. These were mainly European pirates and patriots like the Maratha admiral Kanhoji Angre, who was at the forefront of the fight against the East India Company. Though the British derided Angre as a pirate, he was the hero of the local people as he continued to defy the alien rulers, plundering their ships at will.After independence, his country paid him the greatest tribute by naming the Naval Headquarters after him. INS Angre is located at the site where a part of the fort wall once stood.The mighty walls of the fort may have held buccaneers at bay, but it could not contain the fight against British imperialism. Within the precints of the fort, two sepoys, Hussein and Guddera were tied to the mouths of cannons and blown up after a court martial, for participating in the first War of Independence in 1857.Today, there remains little evidence of the wall which used to enclose the city from Dongri in the north to Mendham's Point in the south during the 18th and 19th centuries. Its remnants can be found at Naval Dockyard, and the area is still referred to as Fort. But the ruins have been vandalised due to neglect by successive governments after Independence.The fort lies in an irregular north-south trapezium with esplandes on its western side and the sea on the east. Governor Boone enlarged the old dockyard and established a marine force and encouraged the construction of several buildings. In 1735, L Nusserwanji, a Parsi foreman from the East India Co's shipyard at Surat, was invited to build ships and modernise the Bombay shipyard. His arrival marked the beginning of the city's permanent transformation into one of the busiest sea ports of Asia. And after the Marathas conquered Bassein in 1739, all trees within a radius of 120 ft of the fort's outer walls were cut down and a moat was dug around the walls.The area expanded as public buildings started coming up with a distinctive architectural style. In the early 19th century, the Town Hall (1833), the Mint (1824-29), the Customs House and St Andrew's Church (1819) were constructed. In 1769, an extension called Fort George was built to the east on the site of the former Dongri fort.
