Mumbai
(2002 est. pop. 12.1 million). Bombay, renamed Mumbai in June 1981, is on the western coast of India. Endowed with a natural harbor and a wide bay facing Africa and East Asia, the city is partly on Bombay Island and other smaller islands in the harbor (originally seven main islands comprised Bombay; in 1784 these were merged through land reclamation), and the archipelago is a natural shipping and trading center. Around the third century BCE, fishermen living here worshiped the goddess Mumba Devi, after whom the city is named.
From the ninth to thirteenth centuries, the Arabian Sea (the part of the Indian Ocean between Arabia and India) played an integral role in world commerce, and heavy freight traffic occurred between Aden, Calicut, Cambay, and cities on the west coast of Africa. The caves of Elephanta (a small island in the harbor) and part of the Walkeshwar temple complex that was built at this time indicate that Elephanta belonged to the Silhara dynasty, ruled by the sultan of Gujarat in western India. The mosque in Mahim in the northern part of Bombay also dates to this period.
In 1534, Bahadur Shah of Gujarat was forced to cede the islands of Bombay to the Portuguese. Saint Andrew's church in Bandra, a suburb of modern Mumbai, dates from this period. In 1661, Catherine of Braganza (1638–1705) brought the islands to Charles II (1630–1685) of England as part of her dowry. The British East India Company received them from the crown in 1668, built the city, and moved its main holdings to Bombay from Surat, a city to its north. Gerald Aungier (d. c. 1677), the second governor of the city (1672–1675), capitalized on the Mughal empire's lack of interest in developing its naval strength and developed the islands into a center of commerce. Skilled workers and traders—Parsis (Zoroastrians), Bhoras (a branch of the Ismaili sect of Shiʿa Islam), Jews, and banias (a Hindu merchant caste) from Surat and Diu, northwest of Bombay—migrated to Bombay. The population increased from 10,000 in 1661 to an unprecedented 60,000 in 1675. The influx of skilled workers continued with the migration of goldsmiths, ironsmiths, and weavers who came from Gujarat. The Hornby Vellard refers to the landmass created by the merging of the seven islands of Bombay. The Mahim Causeway (1845) was another British engineering feat. In 1853, a thirty-five-kilometer-long railway line between Thana, a suburb of the city, and Bombay was inaugurated, the first of its kind in India, and in 1854 the first cotton mill was founded, drawing large-scale migration of Marathi workers from south-central India.
After the First War of Indian Independence in 1857, Bombay came under the control of the crown, as the East India Company was accused of mismanagement. Increased commercial enterprise necessitated improved communication within the country, and imperial Bombay evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bombay played a key role in the Indian independence movement. The business capital of India and the nerve center of India's economy, Mumbai today boasts the largest and busiest port of India and has the country's largest stock exchange, the third largest in the world. The gigantic Indian film industry, Bollywood, is located in Mumbai and churns out hundreds of Hindi films yearly.
Kokila Ravi
Further Reading
Enthoven, Reginald Edward. (1924) The Folklore of Bombay. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press.
Gupchup, Vijaya V. (1993) Bombay: Social Change, 1813– 1857. Mumbai, India: Popular Book Depot.
Moraes, Dom F. (1979) Bombay. Time-Life Books. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Time-Life.
Patel, Sujata, and Alice Thorner, eds. (1995) Bombay: Metaphor for Modern India. Mumbai, India: Oxford University Press.
Rohatgi, Pauline, Pheroza Godrej, and Rahul Mehrotra, eds. (1997) Bombay to Mumbai: Changing Perspectives. Mumbai, India: Marg.
Subramanian, Lakshmi. (1996) Indigenous Capital and Imperial Expansion: Bombay, Surat, and the West Coast. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Tindall, Gilliam. (1982) City of Gold: The Biography of Bombay. London: Templesmith.
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