The battle of the clocks: In 1905, if the clock tower of Crawford Market struck 12 noon, it meant it was 12.39 pm at railway stations in Bombay City. That was the difference between Bombay Time and Indian Standard Time. It was also the city’s way of refusing to bow down to the coloniser. Photograph of crawford market (2004). Photographs courtesy/Chirodeep Chaudhuri

In the 1960s, when Australian scholar James Cosmas Masselos came to Mumbai to study its urban history, a phenomenon that piqued his curiosity would unravel a serious yet comical facet from the city’s past. Back then, if you turned up late for appointments, it was not uncommon to blame your tardiness on “Bombay Time”. While the Indian sense for punctuality (or the lack thereof) has been the rue of countless meetings and the subject of many jokes, the excuse-makers didn’t quite know the back-story to their excuse. Only half-joking, Masselos says that he dug deep into documents at the Maharashtra State Archives at Kala Ghoda, and, in London, at The India Office Records — the archives of the East India Company and pre-1947 government of India.