Mumbai’s famous Crawford Market area… You see a yellow building on one side of a busy road. This building is crowded like other buildings in Mumbai. With thousands of people below, so many shops, vendors, it looks like any other building.
You have to find an elevator with trash everywhere, spray paint the walls. If you don’t have it, you have to use the stairs.
You had to stop at one-room matches as you climbed four floors through the crowd of workers carrying boxes and bundles of cheese. Then we know that this is the room of Lokmanya Tilak. And this address is room number 198 Sardargriha.
For more than a hundred years, this building and the entire area have been very important to India’s freedom movement. But with the passage of time and the new pace of the city, no one has time to look towards him.
This Sardargriha Bhavan of Kalbadevi is an important building of the Indian freedom struggle. Lokmanya Tilak, Mahatma Gandhi and many great leaders have touched this building.
Lokmanya Tilak died in this building on August 1, 1920. The leader who led the freedom struggle for many years served imprisonment for the country, ignited the spark of discontent in the Indian society with his ideas and penned his last breath here.
Thousands of men and women thronged here on 1 August 1920 for the last darshan of Lokmanya. Many people including important leaders of freedom struggle were present here. Tilak was cremated at Girgaon Chowpatty.