Mumbai’s rush for development, fuelled by rapid population growth, has destroyed much of its architectural heritage. And it’s no wonder that in a city with an estimated population of 12.73 million conservation is seen as the eccentric concern of the privileged. Hardscrabble Mumbaikars have little energy to spare lamenting lost glories; most are more concerned with the desperate need for housing, collapsing railway overpasses and foetid monsoon floods.

But there is an increasing awareness of the importance of conservation and a growing number of conservation projects. Most visibly, architects such as Vikas Dilawari and Abha Narain Lambah spearheaded the restoration of a series of landmark structures. These include the Bhau Daji Lad Museum (formerly the Indian V&A Museum), the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (formerly the Prince of Wales Museum), Crawford Market, the Flora Fountain, the Royal Bombay Yacht Club, the Royal Opera House and the Asiatic Library, among others. Given that the city is home to the the world’s second largest collection of art deco buildings, there are plenty of treasures to preserve.

The Bhau Daji Lad Museum (formerly the Victoria and Albert Museum), built in 1872. Photograph: Dinodia Photo/Getty Images

Now posts about the charms of old Mumbai are spilling on to social media. Heritage walks are in vogue. And rising in the margins of this surge is a slow revival of interest in fading forms of typography and signage as a key part to the city’s history.

One of the first projects to interpret the city through typography was 2000’s Typocity, the brainchild of Vishal Rawlley and Kurnal Rawat. It attempted to document the city’s dying typographic forms and find various ways to keep them current by incorporating them into contemporary design. It also looked at emerging typographic fashions and how they characterise the city’s modern identity .

But recently the study of type has started to become more mainstream, helped by the popularity of Instagram. Wistful accounts such as Aditi Khandelwal’s Bombay Type Project record all manner of old Mumbai typography. @Artdecomumbai’s account of genteel Bombay buildings is liberally sprinkled with photographs of art deco signs (including the delightful Rivendell House), while photographer and chronicler of the city Gopal MS (@Mumbaipaused) has been charting #oldbombaytype since 2013. And Typography Day, organised by the IDC School of Design at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, has been talking about type, both old and new, since 2008.

One of those taking up cudgels on behalf of this history is type designer and typographer Tanya George, who takes enthusiasts on typography-spotting walks through the time-weary streets of Fort, once the beating heart of business and commerce in old Bombay. George points out moribund signs lying dog-eared with neglect, others eroded into ghost signs, and jarring, charmless modern signboards.

George’s tour is an education in the subtle language of signage font and imagery (not to mention the sign’s material, colours used, the placement of words and images and whether it is hand-painted or printed). Signage reveals the distinct voices of each area, road, shop, building and company as well as not just the time period in which it was created, but also who its audience is or was. We passed through one area of shops specialising in printing and industrial machinery. Each sign had painted pictures of the machines they stocked along with the shop name, sending out a clear and helpful signal to illiterate customers. By contrast, the Parsi fire temple we passed used English and Gujarati lettering of equal size, because its Parsi devotees usually speak Gujarati and English.

Left, pictures to help illiterate customers identify the right shop, while by contrast devotees attending the Parsi fire temple, right, are more likely to speak both Gujarati and English. Photographs: Meher Mirza

George explains how canny colonial companies engineered architectural signage in such a way that removing it would mean defacing the building’s frontage; points out ghost signs soon to peel off the face of the building; shows how certain restaurant signs meld together English and Devanagari (Hindi) scripts in one word, harking back to the 1990s, when India’s economy suddenly opened up to the world and signalling the gentrification of an area. We also learn why vernacular fonts used to get short shrift: the script is far harder than English and fonts aren’t readily available to everyone.

Once you know what you’re looking for, distinctive styles leap out, such as the sleek, symmetrical art deco lettering, with its high waists and drop waists, reflective of the industrial functionalism of the 1930s and 40s.

Typography evokes time and place. It reveals an area’s demographics, and reflects changing lifestyles and trends. This is why Chowpatty beach food stalls flaunt colourful, decorative typefaces and why in predominantly Muslim areas such as Dongri, even the English signage is adorned with the flourish of Arabic calligraphy, without any accompanying images, a result of Islamic aniconism, or the avoidance of representations of the natural and supernatural world. It also explains why old mill signs are etched with blocky, grand lettering: it’s meant to evoke a flourishing industrial business.

As a city evolves, so does its typography. India’s IT revolution led to the democratising of desktop publishing shops, which mushroomed everywhere. These gave free typographical rein even to people formally untrained in design – although interestingly, stodgy old Arial became an exceedingly popular choice.

“Signage has become terribly mundane now,” complains Rawlley of Typocity. “It is no longer done by hand or people with craft. It has lost all charm for me. Earlier the signage was crafted out of wood, or metal or was painted. Now it is all vinyl, flex, acrylic: factory-produced and machine-made bulk items. The promise of digital egalitarianism has unfortunately turned us into clones rather than brought out our idiosyncrasies.”

Other are less pessimistic. Rawat, now creative director at the retail and brand consultancy Fitch, points out that an entire type community has sprung up around the country. A project by art director Hanif Kureshi, Handpainted Type, has been mapping and digitising the works of street painters from around India, as well as making it possible to commission them as artists. The Indian Type Foundry (ITF) in Ahmedabad, founded in 2009 by Satya Rajpurohit and Peter Bil’ak, is committed to recalibrating the way we look at Indian typography by creating Unicode-compliant Indian fonts; these have been picked up by everyone from Google to Unicef to Disney.

Many municipal signs, including this nameplate for one of the stops on Mumbai’s local suburban railway, are still handpainted. Photograph: wassup6730/Alamy

In 2017, Shiva Nallaperumal, who worked at the ITF, was one of Forbes India’s 30 Under 30 for his achievements in Indian type. Aksharaya is a group of type-minded individuals trying to explore Indian letterforms. Ek Type has made vast inroads in the field of regional Indian font design (look for Letterbox India, its foray into experimental Indic letterforms, on Instagram).

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All this focus on design has seeped into everyday life. Certain restaurants now use handcrafted signboards. Edgy Indian font has made its way on to T-shirts. But perhaps the most prominent example comes via the Mumbai municipal authorities.

“The barricades for the metro signs are still handpainted,” smiles Rawat. “That’s the beauty of it. They are making this modern world and still someone has laboured over stencilling over these thousands of dividers across Mumbai. It’s quite something.”

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