Heritage enthusiasts and art lovers would have cringed at the front-page report in this paper yesterday, which highlighted how a statue of King George V has been languishing in a Public Works Department (PWD) shed.

This piece of Mumbai’s history lies stowed away in a decrepit shed behind Elphinstone College in Fort, waiting to find its rightful place in a museum. It was removed from its original address opposite the Gateway of India during the statehood movement in the 1960s, and has since been replaced by a Shivaji statue. Crafted by pre-Independence sculptor Rao Bahadur GK Mhatre, the statue is now being sought by the artist’s great-grandson Dr H Pathare and a historian called S Dahisarkar. All they want is to give it a respectable home which is a museum. The report stated how Dahisarkar has visited the shed several times, and written to civic authorities and the PWD to extricate the statue, but in vain.