3-017-286 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The new Oriental Bank and Share-Market, Bombay, 1865. 'The style of architecture is Italian; but, while the lower portion is wholly built of stone and rusticated, the upper stories are of pointed brick...It has been erected from the design of the late Mr. William Tracey, civil engineer...The building on the right is the one which was temporarily occupied by the Bank of Bombay...The Share Market is held in the vicinity of the Oriental Bank, which is the most suitable locality, not only because it is contiguous to most of the banks, but also because here the crowd or mob of brokers, composed for the most part of Hindoos of the Banian caste, have ample space to indulge in the violent exhibition of various passions excited by the chances of a business in which gigantic fortunes have lately been won and lost with the most astonishing rapidity. The scenes, indeed, that were daily enacted in the Bombay Share Market till the crisis of speculation a few months ago - the fighting, scrambling, shouting, and yelling, almost always inseparable from Oriental bargain-making, presented a great contrast to the quiet, business-like mode of transacting matters of this nature in our own Stock Exchange'. From "Illustrated London News", 1865.