Mumbai

• 1. Introduction

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  Mumbai has more billionaires than any other city in Asia. Seven islands once sat here, home to Marathi-speaking Koli fishermen who prayed to a goddess named Mumbadevi. Today those islands have been stitched into one peninsula holding an estimated 12.5 million people, with more than 23 million across the wider metropolitan region. The city generates 6.16 percent of India's entire GDP and handles 70 percent of the country's maritime trade. How did a scattering of fishing islands become the financial capital of a nation of over a billion people? Why did its name change from Bombay to Mumbai in 1995, and why is calling it the wrong thing now controversial? And how does a place this rich also hold one of the largest slums on Earth, where nearly a million people live packed into 2.39 square kilometres?

• 2. A Goddess And A Name

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  Mumbadevi was the patron Hindu goddess of the Koli community, and her name gave the city its modern identity. The word joins Mumba or Maha-Amba with ai, the Marathi word for mother. The oldest known names for the place were Kakamuchee and Galajunkja, both still occasionally used.

  Gaspar Correia, a Portuguese writer, recorded the name Bombaim after 1512 in his work Lendas da India, or Legends of India. Some English-speaking authors later traced the name to a supposed phrase meaning good little bay, a claim the source notes has no scientific basis. In 1516, the explorer Duarte Barbosa used the form Tana-Maiambu, with Tana pointing to the nearby town of Thane.

  Louis Rousselet, a French traveller who visited in 1863 and 1868, dismissed the good bay theory entirely. He wrote that the island's tutelary goddess had been Bomba, or Mumba Devi, from remote antiquity, and that she still possessed a temple. The British officer John Briggs agreed, calling Bombay a corruption of Mumby after the temple to Mumba Devi.

  In November 1995, the Government of India officially changed the English name to Mumbai. The change came at the insistence of the Shiv Sena party, which had just won the Maharashtra state elections and argued that Bombay echoed British colonial rule. A resident is now called a Mumbaikar, a Marathi term where the suffix kar means a resident of.

• 3. Islands Into A City

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  Pleistocene sediments found near Kandivali suggest people lived on these islands during the South Asian Stone Age. In the 3rd century BCE, the islands formed part of the Maurya Empire under the emperor Ashoka. The Kanheri Caves in Borivali, excavated in the first century CE, became a centre of Buddhism in Western India. The Greek geographer Ptolemy named the cluster Heptanesia, meaning seven islands, in 150 CE.

  King Bhima founded a kingdom here in the late 13th century and set his capital at Mahikawati, present-day Mahim. The Pathare Prabhus, among the earliest known settlers, arrived from Saurashtra in Gujarat around 1298 CE. The Delhi Sultanate annexed the islands between 1347 and 1348, and the independent Gujarat Sultanate later took control, building mosques including the Haji Ali Dargah in Worli, erected in 1431.

  Bahadur Shah of Gujarat signed the Treaty of Bassein with the Portuguese Empire on the 23rd of December 1534, and the seven islands were handed over on the 25th of October 1535. The Portuguese leased the islands to their officers and helped Catholic orders build churches, among them St. Michael's at Mahim in 1534 and Gloria Church at Byculla in 1632.

  The marriage treaty of Charles II of England and Catherine of Braganza on the 11th of May 1661 gave most of the islands to the English as part of her dowry. England leased them to the English East India Company in 1668 for ten pounds per year. The population jumped from 10,000 in 1661 to 60,000 in 1675.

• 4. Engineering The Land

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  From 1782 onward, the English began merging the seven islands into one through a causeway called the Hornby Vellard, completed by 1784. The reclamation of the land between the islands, finished in 1845, turned Mumbai into a major seaport on the Arabian Sea. On the 16th of April 1853, India's first passenger railway line opened, connecting Bombay to the neighbouring town of Thana.

  The American Civil War, fought between 1861 and 1865, made the city the world's chief cotton-trading market and triggered an economic boom. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 turned Bombay into one of the largest seaports on the Arabian Sea.

  In September 1896, a bubonic plague epidemic struck, killing over 20,000 people and driving much of the population to flee, which harmed the textile industry. Decades later, the Indian independence movement found a base here, fostering the Quit India Movement in 1942 and the Royal Indian Navy mutiny in 1946.

  The Samyukta Maharashtra movement to create a separate Maharashtra state peaked in the 1950s. After protests in which 105 people died in clashes with law enforcement, Bombay State was split on linguistic lines into Maharashtra and Gujarat on the 1st of May 1960. Flora Fountain was renamed Hutatma Chowk, meaning Martyr's Square, to honour those who died.

• 5. The Money Engine

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  The Bombay Stock Exchange, established in 1875, is the oldest stock exchange in Asia and sits on Dalal Street. Mumbai accounts for 25 percent of the nation's industrial output, 70 percent of capital transactions to India's economy, and is home to the Reserve Bank of India and the National Stock Exchange of India. Five of the Fortune Global 500 companies are based here.

  Until the 1970s, the city owed its prosperity largely to textile mills and its seaport. The Great Bombay Textile Strike in 1982 involved nearly 250,000 workers across more than 50 mills and brought down the sector. Since then the economy has diversified into finance, engineering, diamond-polishing, healthcare, and information technology, with a boom following the liberalisation of 1991.

  In 2019, Mumbai stood among the world's top ten cities by number of billionaires. With total wealth around 960 billion dollars, it is the wealthiest Indian city, ranked an alpha world city, third in its category of global cities. It is also the third most expensive office market in the world.

  Yet the same city is among the world's most unequal in wealth distribution. About 41.8 percent of its population lives in urban slums, though those slums occupy just around seven percent of the total land. In the slums, per capita residential area drops to 2.73 square metres, and residents often endure long commutes southward to the central commercial district.

• 6. Bollywood And Beyond

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  Mumbai is the birthplace of Indian cinema and the home of Bollywood, the Hindi film industry whose name blends Bombay and Hollywood. It produces around 150 to 200 films every year and is considered the second-largest film industry after Hollywood. Studios in Goregaon, including Film City, host most movie sets.

  Ganesh Chaturthi is the biggest and most important festival of the city, with almost 5,000 Ganpati Pandals set up across it for the celebrations. The Elephanta Festival, held every February on the Elephanta Islands, is dedicated to classical Indian dance and music and draws performers from across the country. The Banganga Festival, a two-day music event organised by the Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation, takes place each January at the historic Banganga Tank.

  Booker Prize winners Salman Rushdie and Aravind Adiga have carried the city's literary traditions onto the international stage. Asia's oldest newspaper, Bombay Samachar, has been published in Gujarati since 1822, and Bombay Durpan, the first Marathi newspaper, was founded by Balshastri Jambhekar in 1832.

  The city's architecture blends Gothic Revival, Indo-Saracenic, and Art Deco styles, and it holds the second highest number of Art Deco buildings in the world after Miami. Mumbai counts three UNESCO World Heritage Sites: the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the Elephanta Caves, and the Victorian and Art Deco Ensemble.

• 7. Moving Millions

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  The Mumbai Suburban Railway, known to locals simply as the locals, forms the backbone of the city's transport system. It carried 6.3 million passengers per day in 2007, with twelve-car trains rated for 1,700 passengers often carrying nearly 4,500 during peak hours. The Mumbai Monorail opened in early February 2014 and the first line of the Mumbai Metro opened in June 2014 to relieve the crush.

  The Bandra-Worli Sea Link, along with the Mahim Causeway, links South Mumbai to the western suburbs. The 21.8 kilometre Mumbai Trans Harbour Link was inaugurated on the 12th of January 2024, connecting Mumbai with Navi Mumbai. The Mumbai-Pune Expressway, opened in 2000, was the first expressway in India.

  Black-and-yellow meter taxis and auto rickshaws serve hire passengers, all legally required to run on compressed natural gas. The bus system run by Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport once used red buses based on London's Routemaster, and introduced air-conditioned buses in 1998.

  The Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport handled 52.8 million passengers in 2023 to 2024, making it the second busiest in India. The Navi Mumbai International Airport, built in the Ulwe suburb, opened in December 2025 as the metropolitan region's second international airport.

• 8. Scars And Pressures

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  More than 1,000 people were killed in the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1992 to 1993, which followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. In March 1993, a series of 13 coordinated bombings at city landmarks killed 257 people and injured over 700. In 2008, ten coordinated attacks over three days killed 173 people, injured 308, and severely damaged several heritage landmarks and hotels.

  The 2005 Mumbai floods caused between 500 and 1,000 deaths, with the single heaviest rainfall on record, 944 millimetres, falling on the 26th of July 2005. The World Bank attributes the city's frequent floods to unplanned drainage and informal settlements. Mumbai also sits on a seismically active zone with 23 fault lines.

  Air pollution is a major issue, with an annual average fine-particle concentration in 2013 measured at 6.3 times the World Health Organization guideline. The Central Pollution Control Board has also ranked Mumbai the noisiest city in India.

  Dharavi, in central Mumbai, houses about a million people across just 2.39 square kilometres, making it one of the most densely populated areas on Earth. It is also home to a large recycling industry and around 15,000 single-room factories, a reminder that the city's pressure and its productivity have always grown from the same crowded ground.