A Short History of Mumbai: From Seven Islands to Megacity

Stand on Marine Drive at high tide and it is hard to believe the ground under your feet was ever the sea. Yet most of the city you are looking at simply did not exist a few centuries ago. Mumbai is a made place — literally reclaimed from water, one causeway at a time — and its history is the story of how seven marshy islands became the densest, most ambitious city in India. This is the short version, told the way I wish someone had told me: as a walk through the neighbourhoods where you can still see the joins.

Before the city: the Koli and the seven islands

Long before there were skyscrapers or stock exchanges, there were fishermen. The Koli community are the original inhabitants of this coast, and they were here casting nets when the land was still a scattered archipelago. The name “Mumbai” itself is usually traced to Mumbadevi, the goddess whose small temple still stands near Bhuleshwar in the crowded lanes of the old town.

The seven islands are worth knowing by name, because their ghosts are everywhere in modern geography:

• Colaba and Old Woman’s Island (Little Colaba) at the southern tip
• Bombay Island (the harbour-facing spine that became the Fort area)
• Mazagaon, Parel, Worli and Mahim running north

Between them lay tidal creeks and swamp. When you hear locals talk about “the island city” versus the suburbs, this is the deep memory underneath the phrase.

See it today

The clearest surviving window into Koli Mumbai is Worli Koliwada, a working fishing village tucked below the Bandra–Worli Sea Link, and Sassoon Dock in Colaba at dawn, where the night’s catch is auctioned in a roar of ice, gulls and Marathi bargaining. Go early — the fish auction at Sassoon Dock winds down by about 8am. Entry is free; just be respectful and ask before photographing people at work.

The Portuguese century

In 1534 the Portuguese took the islands from the Sultan of Gujarat, and for over a hundred years this was a minor Portuguese possession — useful for its harbour, not much developed. They called it “Bom Bahia,” the good bay, and that name, worn smooth by other tongues, is one theory for how “Bombay” arrived. The Portuguese left less architecture here than in Goa, but they planted the coconut groves, the churches and a Catholic community that endures.

See it today

Head to Bandra, where the East Indian Catholic community traces its roots to this era. Mount Mary Basilica perched above Bandra Bandstand draws huge crowds during the September Bandra Fair, and the quiet villages of Ranwar — with their tiled cottages, crosses at street corners and hush that feels a world away from the traffic — are a lovely free morning wander. Reach Bandra easily on the Western Line; alight at Bandra station and take an auto to the Bandstand side.

The British turn: a wedding gift that changed everything

The hinge of Mumbai’s history is oddly domestic. In 1661 the islands came to the British Crown as part of the dowry when Catherine of Braganza married Charles II. A few years later the Crown leased them to the English East India Company — for a famously trivial rent — and the Company saw at once what the Portuguese had underused: a deep, sheltered, all-weather harbour on India’s west coast.

The Company got to work. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a series of engineering projects — the Hornby Vellard among them — walled off the sea and joined the islands into a single landmass. Reclamation is the recurring verb of this city’s biography. Every time Mumbai runs out of room, it tends to answer by taking a little more from the water.

See it today

The old business district is still called Fort, after the walls the Company built (long demolished). Wander from Horniman Circle, a graceful colonial crescent around a garden, past the neoclassical Asiatic Society library steps, and you are walking the Company’s Bombay.

Cotton, mills and the making of a working city

The nineteenth century turned Bombay from a trading post into an industrial powerhouse, and the fuel was cotton. When the American Civil War in the 1860s choked off supplies of American cotton to the mills of Britain, Bombay’s traders stepped into the gap and grew spectacularly rich almost overnight. The boom was wild, speculative and briefly disastrous when it crashed — but it left behind capital, confidence and a taste for grand building.

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 shortened the sea route to Europe and cemented Bombay’s role as India’s gateway. Cotton money and civic pride produced the extravagant Victorian Gothic skyline you still see today.

Then came the mills themselves. Central Mumbai — Girangaon, literally “the village of mills” — filled with textile factories and the chawls (tenement housing) of the workers who ran them. For a century, this was the beating industrial heart of the city, and the source of a fierce labour and political culture. The great textile strike of the early 1980s effectively broke the industry, and the mills fell silent.

See it today

The mill lands have had a dramatic second life. Lower Parel and Kamala Mills are now full of restaurants, offices and nightlife built inside old industrial shells. Phoenix Mills became one of the city’s landmark malls. Best time to visit is evening, when the crowds arrive; a coffee or a meal here will run anywhere from a few hundred rupees to a proper splurge, depending on where you land. For the human history behind the glamour, walk the surrounding chawls and you can still read the older city in the brickwork.

The monuments of empire

The Victorian and Edwardian building spree gave Mumbai an architectural inheritance that is genuinely world-class, so much so that a cluster of it is now a UNESCO World Heritage ensemble.

• Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) — the extravagant Gothic railway station, still one of the busiest in India. Admire it from the outside for free; it is stunning when lit up after dark.
• The Gateway of India in Colaba — built to mark a royal visit, and later, poignantly, the point through which the last British troops departed in 1948. Free to visit; go early morning to beat the crowds and the hawkers.
• Bombay High Court, the University of Mumbai with its Rajabai Clock Tower, and the museum now named Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (the old Prince of Wales Museum). Museum entry for Indian visitors is modest, typically a few hundred rupees for foreigners; allow a half day.

A walking tip

The whole ensemble is compact and best done on foot. Start at CSMT, walk to Horniman Circle and Fort, then down to the Gateway — a gentle two to three hours. Do it in the cooler months (November to February) or early on a monsoon morning when the stone glistens.

Freedom, renaming and a changing self-image

Bombay was central to India’s freedom struggle — the Quit India movement was launched here in 1942 at what is now August Kranti Maidan. After independence in 1947 the city kept growing at a furious pace, absorbing migrants from every corner of the country.

In 1960 it became the capital of the new state of Maharashtra. And in 1995 the city was officially renamed Mumbai, reclaiming the older Marathi and Gujarati name over the anglicised “Bombay.” Both names are still used affectionately, and which one a person reaches for often says something about their generation and politics.

Dream factory and money machine

Two industries define modern Mumbai’s global image, and both are pure twentieth-century inventions.

The first is the movies. Bollywood — the Hindi film industry — grew up here and turned Mumbai into the dream factory for a billion people. The studios of Film City in Goregaon and the star bungalows of Bandra and Juhu are part of the city’s mythology. If you want a taste, an evening at a single-screen classic or a plush multiplex is one of the great cheap thrills of the city, with tickets ranging from very affordable to premium recliner prices.

The second is money. Mumbai is India’s financial capital: the Reserve Bank of India, the Bombay Stock Exchange on Dalal Street (Asia’s oldest stock exchange), and the newer corporate towers of the Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC) all sit here. The old cotton-trader instinct for risk and reward never really left; it just changed clothes.

See it today

Dalal Street and the BSE area buzz on weekday mornings — go during market hours to feel the energy, though the exchange itself is not a casual tourist site. For the newer face of finance, BKC is all glass and ambition.

A city still being built

What ties five hundred years together is that single restless habit: Mumbai keeps remaking its own ground. The Bandra–Worli Sea Link curving across the water, the new Coastal Road, the expanding Metro — these are the Hornby Vellard’s descendants, the latest chapters in a very old argument between this city and the sea.

Practical wrap-up

To feel the whole arc in a single day, start at Sassoon Dock at dawn for the Koli city, walk the Fort and Gateway heritage cluster through the morning, break for lunch, then head to Bandra for the Portuguese-Catholic villages and film-star glamour in the afternoon. Travel by local train and auto rather than fighting traffic in a cab, keep small cash for entry fees and snacks, and pick the cooler months of November to February if you can. Mumbai does not preserve its past in glass cases — it lives on top of it, layer over reclaimed layer. Once you can read those layers, the whole chaotic, magnificent city starts to make sense.