Thirty steps to history

The restoration of Mumbai's Town Hall resurrects an old centre of debate and dissent

History sticks to the walls of old buildings like an invisible coat of paint. At the recently restored 183-year-old Town Hall inside the Asiatic Society Library building in Mumbai, it is piled up in heaps under the wooden floorboards.
 
This is where David Livingstone stopped over on his way from Zanzibar to London. Here stood the firebrand Irish journalist and staunch opponent of the British, Benjamin Horniman (after whom is named Horniman Circle, a small green patch across the road from the library), exhorting the crowds to rise against the state.
 
Standing on the city’s east-west axis, the