City by the sea 
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Sign of the times |
Mumbai is a young town: its development into the city we know today started in the 1600s. The site of the modern city was originally an archipelago of seven islands: Colaba, Mazagaon, Old Woman’s Island, Wadala, Mahim, Parel and Matunga-Sion. The earliest known settlers were the Kolis, tribal fishermen whose descendants still exist in scattered coastal communities (notably the Worli fishing village in the northern suburbs). The islands came under the tutelage of Ashoka’s Buddhist Mauryan Empire from about the 3rd century BC.
From the 6th to the 13th centuries, Hindu dynasties such as the Chalukyas and, later, the Siharas were ascendant, a legacy still visible in the carved caves on Elephanta Island and the Walkeshwar temple on Malabar Point (both dedicated to Shiva, a Hindu deity). Islam appeared in 1343, when the sultanate of Gujarat annexed the archipelago—the dramatic Haji Ali mosque on Mahim Bay (present midtown Mumbai) dates from this period.
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Making maps |
By the 16th century, Europe’s imperial powers were taking an interest in the subcontinent. Portugal made the first move. In 1508, Francis Almeida dropped anchor, and dubbed the deep natural harbour “Bom Bahia” (“Good Bay”). An early attempt at conquest of the sultanate failed, but in 1534 a 21-ship Portuguese invasion forced Bahadur Shah, the Gujarati ruler, to cede control to Portugal. Mumbai was not a priority for the Portuguese—they regarded it as a way station for control of the spice trade, further east. But the spreading of Christianity was enthusiastically pursued by Portuguese Jesuits: the Kolis were subject to both forcible conversion and intermarriage. An inquisition was established in India in 1560. Churches (St Andrews, at Bandra, is one of the few Portuguese-style churches remaining) and forts (at Sion, Mahim, Bandra and Bassein, on the mainland to the north) were built. Administration of the archipelago was carried out by Garcia da Orta, a vazador (possessor), who rented the islands until his death in 1568, when control passed to his sons. Coconuts and coir (a fibre derived from the coconut palm) were exported on a small scale.
Enter the British
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The Fort was first |
During the 17th century, Portugal’s imperial significance declined, while Britain’s was on the ascendant. Bom Bahia was included in the dowry of Catherine of Braganza, the king of Portugal’s sister, for her strategic marriage to King Charles II of England in 1661. After some resistance from the Portuguese garrison, the other islands came under British control by 1665, and the name of the tiny port was anglicised to "Bombay". Like the Portuguese, Mumbai’s new masters had little use for the islands. However, the terms of ownership were favourable: this was Britain’s first proper “colony” in India. The East India Company, which had a monopoly over trade under royal warrant, saw the potential of the fine harbour: its position on the Arabian Sea was convenient for trade routes both east and west. In a canny deal, the company acquired the islands for an annual lease of £10 in 1668, and began to develop the port. Sir George Oxenden, a company man, was appointed the first governor.
At first, the company took a relaxed approach to developing its new prize. Eventually, governor Gerald Aungier (1672-1677) kicked off efforts to turn Mumbai into a trading post to rival the mainland kingdoms. His promises of land holdings and religious freedom attracted skilled workers and merchants—among them Gujaratis, Brahmins, Jews, Armenians, Bohras and, in particular, the Parsis, persecuted elsewhere for their Zoroastrian beliefs. The Parsis, along with the Kolis, were instrumental in defending the islands in 1689-90 when the Siddi, a mainland kingdom, made several attempts to seize Mumbai whenever the British were laid low by cholera and malaria (outbreaks were frequent).
Building up Mumbai
By 1675, Mumbai’s population had reached 60,000 (from 10,000 at the time of Portuguese handover). The East India Company moved its headquarters from Surat to Mumbai in 1687. Construction on the Fort itself started in 1715, under the governorship of Charles Boone, who oversaw the creation of St Thomas Cathedral. Trade in salt, rice, ivory, fabrics, lead, iron and gold grew steadily. Shipbuilding was also established, and Mumbai became a stopover for slave-trade ships. Yet throughout the 18th century, the town remained something of a backwater. Battles and disputes with the neighbouring Maratha kingdoms, which controlled most of western India, meant that Britain’s presence on the subcontinent was tentative.
In 1740 the Marathas seized the island of Salsette (now incorprated into Mumbai's landmass). The British responded by moving native settlements further north in order to expand the port’s defences. Current place names reflect the sites of the (long disappeared) battlements: Apollo Gate, Church Gate and Bazaar Gate, to name a few. Sporadic military conflict and diplomatic manoeuvrings between the British and the Marathas and their allies continued. The British were able to exploit their rivals’ disunity, but they lacked the military advantage. In the Treaty of Salbai of 1782, British control of Mumbai (including Salsette and some other islands) was established in return for giving up land Britain had won on the mainland.
In the gradual run-up to British control of India, Mumbai continued to grow. Land-use laws and housing laws, designed to segregate the British and Indian populations, were established in 1772. In 1777, the city’s first English newspaper, the Mumbai Courier, was published. 1784 saw the completion of the first land reclamation project. The Hornby Vellard (named after William Hornby, the governor), where Breach Candy now stands, joined the main island to Mahim. The first causeway between islands (the Sion Causeway) was completed in 1803. By the turn of the century, the first civil administration outside the control of the East India Company had been founded. Migrants (such as the Kamathis from Andhra Pradesh) fleeing the inter-kingdom wars on the mainland, flowed in, many to find employment in the reclamations.
In 1803, a huge fire devastated much of the settlement, prompting an ordinance in 1812 that stipulated the planning of settlements. With the defeat of the Maratha empire in 1818, the British annexed most of western India and the scene was set for Mumbai’s takeoff as the west coast's trade and communications hub. Under Governor Mountstuart Elphinstone (1819-1827), wealthy residents moved to new neighbourhoods such as Malabar Hill. The completion of the Colaba Causeway between Mumbai and Colaba in 1838 established Colaba as a centre of commerce, and the Cotton Exchange opened there in 1844.
Reclamations and causeway building continued apace, and by the time the Mahim Causeway (between Mahim and Sion) was finished in 1845, the city’s present-day landmass had more or less taken shape. Space, however, remains at a premium in Mumbai. The continuing hunger for land was demonstrated in the 1920, when many investors lost fortunes in speculation surrounding plans for reclamation around Back Bay (now ringed by Marine Drive). Today, Mumbai’s real-estate prices rival those of Tokyo and Hong Kong.
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End of the line |
The advent of steamships and the railways consolidated Mumbai’s status as India’s trading hub. In 1849, the British government founded the Great Indian Peninsular Railway project. In 1853, a 21-mile track (India's first), built by the East India Company, connected Mumbai to Thane. But the company’s days were numbered: the first war of Indian independence in 1857 was instigated by discontented sepoys (soldiers, mainly from northern India) in the company’s militia. The British government expressed its displeasure at the company’s mismanagement by cancelling its monopoly over trade, and control of Mumbai reverted to the Crown. With the railways came the cotton trade. The soil on Mumbai's neighbouring mainland was ideal for cultivating the crop, and the first cotton mill opened in 1854. Many more followed, along with an influx of Maharatha labourers. Capitalising on the gap in the cotton supply to Britain created by the American Civil War, cotton merchants ramped up prices: but the boom turned to bust as the war ended. By then, Mumbai’s status as the main trading port between India and Britain was established, and was boosted further by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.
A booming economy created problems of overcrowding in the fast-growing city, and slums sprang up around the mills. Under the governorship of Sir Bartle Frere (1862-67), the walls of the old fort were removed, clearing the way for the creation of magnificently overwrought Victorian edifices such as Flora Fountain (1869) and the neo-Gothic Victoria Terminus (1887, pictured above). The Mumbai Port Trust, founded in 1870, oversaw massive expansion of the waterfront. The Mumbai Municipal Corporation was formed to govern infrastructure in 1865, and the city's first stock exchange (forerunner of the Mumbai Stock Exchange) was founded in 1875, with early meetings held under a banyan tree opposite the town hall, still standing in present-day Horniman Circle. Large water-supply projects, including the Vihar Water Works and a series of reservoirs, continued into the 1890s. They have nevertheless proved inadequate to meet the demands of the present-day megalopolis.
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Street life |
Other elements of the extremes of wealth that still bedevil the city were making themselves felt. The rapid growth of the textile industry accelerated migration to Mumbai during the 1890s, and the city’s overworked infrastructure was unable to cope. Epidemics of plague came on top of already high mortality rates, and industrial waste from the mills made life in the old neighbourhoods increasingly unhealthy. In 1906, the population reached the 1m mark. Authorities responded by founding an agency, the City Improvement Trust, charged with developing new suburbs and road and transport networks. By 1925, electric trains ran into the new northern localities. Grandiose imperial development of Mumbai continued downtown, with the Indo-Saracenic architectural style replacing the Gothic-revival epitomised by Victoria Terminus. Icons of the style, such as the Taj Mahal Hotel, the General Post Office and the Prince of Wales Museum were completed, and in 1911, to mark the visit of George V and Queen Mary, the foundation stone of the Gateway of India was laid, with the edifice complete by 1924.
Time for a change
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The Mahatma and followers |
Despite the grandeur, time was running out for the imperial masters. As the wealthiest city in India, Mumbai was home to the cotton-enriched Indian elite, increasingly dissatisfied with its second-class status under the empire. Many of the leading lights and financiers of the first Indian National Congress (hosted in Mumbai) in 1885 and the subsequent independence movement were wealthy Mumbai-based Parsis, such as Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, who, legend has it, opened the Taj in 1903 after being denied entry to a British-run hotel. Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi returned to Mumbai from South Africa in 1915, and made Mani Bhavan the base for some of the key points in his long campaign to end British rule. He made his "Quit India" call from the Gowalia Tank Maidan at the base of Malabar Hill in August 1942, at the culmination of the All India Congress Committee meeting. He was arrested soon after. India became independent at midnight on August 15th 1947, and the Gateway of India was the scene of the last departure of British troops when the First Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry marched through it on February 28th 1948.
• During the second world war, Mumbai's harbour was an important link in the supply line for Britain's campaign against Japan. On the afternoon of April 14th 1944, it seemed to the city's inhabitants that the war had come to them when fire broke out aboard the “Fort Stikine”, a merchant ship with a cargo of dried fish, cotton, timber, explosives, ammunition, aeroplane parts and gold bars (to stabilise the sagging wartime rupee). Two massive explosions caused carnage in the harbour: the “Fort Stikine”, more than 20 other ships and many waterfront buildings were destroyed; over 1,000 died; and Mumbai was swept by panic as thousands tried to flee the city. For many years afterwards, gold bars were regularly discovered in the harbour's mud during dredging operations.
After independence, communal tensions began to surface in Mumbai, as job-seeking migrants swelled the population to unprecedented levels. At first, the city was capital of the new state of Mumbai. But in 1960, the state was divided on linguistic grounds into Gujarat (Gujarati-speaking) and Maharashtra (Marathi-speaking), with Mumbai the capital of the latter. Marathas remain the city’s largest ethnic group.
Following the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque at Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh in December 1992 (over claims that it had been built on the site of the birthplace of Rama, a Hindu deity), the city was swept up in nationwide Hindu-Muslim strife, with over 800 dying in Mumbai in riots that ran into January 1993. On March 12th 1993, a dozen bomb blasts around the city killed more than 300 people, with damaged sites including the Air India building and the Mumbai Stock Exchange. Muslim elements in the local underworld, allegedly funded by Pakistan, were blamed. Further blasts in 2003 (one near Gateway of India) were linked to communal riots in Gujarat.
In 1995, Shiv Sena (after winning power that year in Maharashtra state also, in coalition with the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party) renamed the city "Mumbai", after Mumba Devi, a Koli goddess, as part of a campaign of official renaming of public places. The party’s influence has been tempered somewhat by the victory of the secular centrist Congress Party in state elections in 2000. Congress subsequently won the national elections of 2004, providing a rare instance of political unity between Maharashtra and the nation.
Looking ahead
Mumbai has had to deal with many challenges after independence. The textile industry has declined—and controversy about how to develop land left vacant by the mills dominates the local political scene. In its place has come a new economy based on finance, services, information technology, business process outsourcing, entertainment (epitomised by the "Bollywood" film-making industry), and construction, which boomed through the 1970s and 1980s. The city continues to attract swathes of immigrants from elsewhere in India, Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh, with corresponding growth in slums and congestion. As the business heart of the nation, Mumbai epitomises India’s hopes of attaining the tiger status of its east Asian neighbours: thus debate about the city's crumbling infrastructure and poor governance—both of which were starkly underlined by the lack of readiness for and the aftermath of particularly devastating monsoon floods in July 2005 and lack of space for development has reached frantic levels. These issues are now the city's most pressing concerns
Facts and figures
Land area: 437.71 sq km
Population: 12m (Mumbai municipality); 17.7m (Greater Mumbai)
Languages: Marathi, Hindi (the local variant is called Bambaiya Hindi), Gujarati and many other Indian languages. English is widely spoken.
Telephone codes:
Country code: +91
City code: (0)22
Currency:
The Indian currency is the rupee, which is divided into 100 paise. Notes are available in denominations of 5 rupees (no longer printed), 10, 20, 50, 100, 500 and 1000 rupees, coins in 1, 2 and 5 rupees and in 25 and 50 paise.
Business hours:
Shopping hours vary, but most shops in the centre are open six days a week (Monday-Saturday 10am-8pm), and are quietest during weekdays. The hawkers along streets like Colaba Causeway are active until somewhat later. Official business hours are 9:30am to 5:30pm. Banks open 10am-2pm Monday to Friday and 10am-12pm every second Saturday. Post offices are open 9:30am-5:30pm Monday to Saturday.
Numbering:
Particularly when money and data are being discussed, some Indian terminology is commonly used, such as lakh (one lakh = 100,000) and crore (one crore = 10m).
Electricity:
230-240 volts AC, 50 Hz. Three-point round-pin sockets are in use.
Economic profile:
Commerce determined Mumbai’s history. As India's largest trading port, it has long served as the country's gateway: open and welcoming to foreigners, and offering the promise of opportunity to fortune-seekers from the country’s hinterland. Rudyard Kipling, who was born in Mumbai, wrote of the city: “she lent me worth, and gave me right to pride”.
Mumbai's economy took off in the 19th century, when the British annexed western India and the British East India Company was losing its monopoly over trade between Britain and India. Merchants flowed in as restrictions on immigration were loosened. Ships were built to export raw cotton, silk, opium and ivory. In 1854, the city's first cotton textile mill opened, and the boom in cotton trade, sparked in part by the American Civil War which cut off American supplies to Europe, earned Mumbai its reputation as the “Manchester of the East”.
By 1865, Mumbai had 31 banks, 20 insurance companies, and 62 joint stock companies. The first stock exchange was established in 1875. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 consolidated the port’s status. Cotton remained an economic bedrock well into the 20th century, which also saw the arrival of an eclectic mix of creative people, leading to the creation of Mumbai’s cosmopolitan culture, and the profusion of the Hindi (so-called “Bollywood”) film industry, the largest in the world.
Today, Mumbai has the buzz of a city on the move. It is the base for India’s leading companies, such as Reliance, Tata and Air India, and its largest banks and financial institutions, such as ICICI Bank, Housing Development and Finance Corporation and Life Insurance Corporation. The Bombay Stock Exchange, which moved from open-outcry to computerised trading in 1995, and the National Stock Exchange, which opened in 1994 are India's top trading floors. The textile industry has given way to the new economy of financial services, call centres and other business process outsourcing services, information technology and entertainment companies. A construction boom has created a new skyline of shopping malls, hotels and office complexes. As the city’s cheerleaders position Mumbai for Asian-tiger status, three concerns override all others: the groaning infrastructure, lack of space and a chronic housing shortage.
Mumbai is an island and restrictions on both new building and rent levels have combined to send real-estate prices to levels rivalling those of Tokyo and Hong Kong and discussion of whether to increase the city’s floor-space dominates local media. Housing shortages as immigrants flow in from all over the subcontinent (population is predicted to reach 27m by 2010) have led to the growth of slums: Dharavi, Asia's biggest slum, sits alongside Bandra, the city’s new centre of business. Poverty afflicts millions. A symbiotic relationship has developed between the city’s elite and the slum-dwellers, many of whom are employed in the domestic sector and in the huge informal economy (which is estimated to contribute between 25% and 40% to Mumbai’s output). In 2005, the biggest debate about the city’s future concerned how to develop 600 acres of land left vacant by former textile mills at midtown.
Mumbai's infrastructure is another problem. Roads are inadequate and the rail system clogged. East-west linkages (current corridors have a north-south bias) are sorely needed. Traffic congestion is especially bad between the airport and the downtown business area. Lobby groups such as Bombay First are trying to encourage companies to relocate to suburbs such as Bandra, and calling for development of satellite towns on the mainland. There are signs that both the state and national governments are prepared to address the problem. Some lobby groups argue that a unified city government (at present, governance is spread across several agencies at state level) is what is needed. Governance and infrastructure problems were both starkly underlined by the lack of readiness for and the aftermath of particularly devastating monsoon floods in July 2005 .
Despite its problems, Mumbai remains India’s biggest business centre and has plenty of potential: the influx of air routes to and from Europe and America is itself evidence of its growing importance as both a tourist destination and a site of investment.
