The Asiatic Society of Mumbai is located in this building. It was established in the year 1804 by James Mackintosh, who was the the Recorder (chief judge) of Bombay . Mackintosh was fascinated with India and soon after arriving in Bombay he and other like-minded Britishers established the Literary Society of Bombay. The purpose was the ‘promotion of literary and scientific investigations connected with India and the study of literature, antiquities, arts and sciences of the East, generally’. The Literary Society of Bombay is considered the second oldest institution of its kind in existence anywhere in the world, only preceded by the Bengal Asiatic Society.

This was the time when the British were trying to understand the ways of the natives in order to create an empire “on which the sun never sets”. This entailed a detailed analysis and recording of all aspects of the colonised country. The society’s efforts of presenting what it had discovered of the orient to the West were appreciated by people like Joseph Boden, founder of the Boden professorship of Sanskrit at Oxford, John Briggs, who translated the autobiography of Nana Phadnavis and William Erkine, who wrote the life stories of Babar and Humayun. Ironically, the Literary Society of Bombay, formed to encourage Indic studies, excluded Indians from membership till 1840.

In 1829 the Literary Society of Bombay merged with the Asiatic Society of Britain and became the Bombay branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. When the Town Hall building was constructed in 1831 the Society shifted its office there from Parel. It had to share space with the University of Bombay (established in 1857) and Elphinstone college.

As part of its activities, the society collected material for a statistical account of Bombay. Mackintosh also wanted a public fund in England for translating and publishing Sanskrit works. The society also founded a public library — which now has over two lakh books, manuscripts and periodicals of which 15,000 have been classified as rare. One of only two known copies of Dante’s original manuscript of the Divine Comedy is with the Asiatic Society. In fact, Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator, offered the Society a million pounds for its return, an offer which was refused.

Other rare manuscripts include an illustrated Aranyakaparvam of the Mahabharata in Sanskrit dating to the 16 th Century, a 19 th century German translation of the Rig Veda and a Persian translation of the Mahabharata by Faizi.