We finally know where to send our souvenir-seeking, budget-bound, out-of-town friends to shop, a place less chaotic than Colaba Causeway and less musty than the Bombay Store, where they can find prints and puppets, books and bracelets, enamel boxes and earth bags, all displayed against a breathtaking view of the former Prince of Wales Museum.

Mumbaikars though, will find little that they haven’t seen before at the newly opened Museum Shop at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangralaya (formerly Prince of Wales Museum). Bright and linear, the space is dotted with the usual carved elephants and colourful enamel boxes, woven durries and sepia prints of Old Bombay. But there is pleasure to be had in the familiar, the Museum shop showed us on the rainy afternoon we visited, while also bringing us some surprises.

Picture This

Take for instance sepia toned re-prints of old maharajas, bejewelled, pointy-shoed and majestically fat (Rs 2,250); or a collection of greeting cards (much nicer than the banal postcards) limned with a slender kohli woman carrying her catch and an etcher at work. Also check out letter paper sketched with different representations of the female form in miniature paintings and cheap, convenient pocket diaries stamped with coins.

The kiddie collection here is particularly good – we loved a set of glossy wooden aeroplanes and whistles, brightly hued paper clips, the selection of books (leaf through My Mother’s Sari by Sandhya Rao for two minutes of pure pleasure), as well as hand painted wall mobiles made from thin, papery leather (crazy coloured fish, a string of big-winged butterflies).

They also stock music and DVDs, the usual Mahabharata and Ramayan mixed with bizarre picks like Three Idiots, Deepa Mehta’s Earth-Fire-Water trilogy, Shilpa Shetty’s yoga instructions and even The Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore.

The jewellery collection is currently small and unexciting, but they hope to add more stock soon, dedicating the entire second floor to necklaces, bracelets, earrings and more. 

Farewell!

The Museum Shop is mainly geared towards tourists and it serves them well, especially if they make a pit-stop here after a big lunch at Samovar, gorged on biryani and art, enchanted by the colourful streets of Kala Ghoda and Colaba, and keen to take a piece of all that they have seen home.

Getting there: 159-161 M.G. Road, Shahid Bhagat Singh Marg, Kala Ghoda, Fort, open from 11 am to 6 pm, Tuesday through Sunday, start at Rs 25 for a diary.