The seven islands
The site of Bombay was a group of seven islands off the Konkan coast, home to Koli fishing communities and to the shrine of the goddess Mumbadevi, from whom the city's Marathi name, Mumbai, is derived. The sultan of Gujarat ceded the islands to the Portuguese in 1534. In 1661 Portugal gave them to Charles II of England as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza, and in 1668 the king leased them to the East India Company for a nominal rent. Under Gerald Aungier, governor in the 1670s, the Company invited merchants and artisans, Parsis, Gujaratis, Bohras and others, with promises of religious freedom. In 1687 the Company moved its western headquarters from Surat to Bombay.
Making the city
From the eighteenth century the islands were joined by causeways and land reclamation into a single island. The city grew as a port for the trade in cotton and opium to China, and its Parsi, Gujarati and Baghdadi Jewish merchants became rich. During the American Civil War, when cotton from the American South was cut off, Bombay's cotton boom transformed the city; the collapse in 1865 ruined many speculators. India's first passenger railway ran from Bombay to Thane on 16 April 1853, and textile mills, financed largely by Indian capital, made Bombay an industrial city. Its Victorian Gothic buildings, among them the Victoria Terminus railway station of 1888, date from this period.
The nationalist city
The Indian National Congress held its first session in Bombay in December 1885. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Pherozeshah Mehta and Muhammad Ali Jinnah were among its leading figures. The Quit India resolution was passed at the Gowalia Tank maidan in August 1942, and in February 1946 ratings of the Royal Indian Navy mutinied in Bombay harbour.
Modern Mumbai
After independence the city was the subject of the Samyukta Maharashtra movement, which demanded that it be the capital of a Marathi-speaking state, and in 1960 it became the capital of Maharashtra. It remained India's financial and commercial capital and the home of the Hindi film industry. The communal riots of 1992–93 and the bombings of March 1993, and the attacks of November 2008, were among the worst events of its recent history. The city was renamed Mumbai in 1995.
Further reading
- Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. Oxford University Press, 2009
- Metcalf, Barbara D. A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press, 2012
- Guha, Ramachandra. India After Gandhi. Macmillan, 2007
See also
- East India Company — The East India Company (EIC) was an English joint-stock trading corporation, chartered in 1600, that expanded from a monopoly on Asian trade into the paramount political and military power on the Indian subcontinent before its dissolution in 1858.
- Portuguese India — Portuguese India was the first and the last European territorial presence in the subcontinent, from Vasco da Gama's arrival in 1498 until the Indian annexation of Goa in 1961.
- Indian National Congress — The Indian National Congress is India's oldest political party, founded in 1885 as a forum for Indian political opinion under British rule and later the principal organization leading the country's independence movement and, after 1947, its dominant governing party for most of the following seven decades.
- Quit India Movement — The Quit India Movement was a mass civil disobedience campaign launched by the Indian National Congress in August 1942 demanding an immediate end to British rule, met with swift, extensive government suppression that included the arrest of the entire senior Congress leadership within a day of the call.
- Royal Indian Navy mutiny — A five-day uprising by Indian ratings of the Royal Indian Navy in February 1946, beginning in Bombay and spreading to other ports, over service conditions and colonial rule.
- 2008 Mumbai attacks — A coordinated series of shooting and bombing attacks carried out by ten Lashkar-e-Taiba gunmen across Mumbai from 26 to 29 November 2008, killing at least 166 people in one of the deadliest terrorist incidents in India's history.
- Surat — Surat is a port city on the Tapti in southern Gujarat that was the chief port of the Mughal empire and its gateway for the pilgrimage to Mecca, the site of the English East India Company's first main factory in India, and twice sacked by Shivaji.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.