Mumbai

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Mumbai

Mumbai (Bombay) has a population of 15.7 million (2004) and, like Manhattan, is located on a rocky peninsula. Together with adjacent municipalities, the Mumbai urban agglomeration exceeds 20 million and is thus India's largest metropolis; it is also India's most important port. "Bombay" is a corrupted form of the Marathi name Mumbai, derived from the name of a local goddess, Mumba Ai (Mother Mumba). After several other Indian cities had assumed their precolonial names, Bombay was also officially renamed as Mumbai by an act of the Indian Parliament in 1997.

Originally it consisted of seven small islands inhabited by fishermen. Its large natural harbor attracted the Portuguese, who established a trading post at Mahim in 1534. When the Portuguese princess Catherine Braganza married King Charles II in 1661, he was given Mumbai as a wedding present; he then transferred it to the East India Company in 1668.

As Mumbai could be more easily defended than Surat, it eclipsed that port in the eighteenth century. But unlike Surat, Mumbai had no good connections with its hinterland, from which it was cut off by a steep mountain range (Western Ghats). Only when the railway crossed the Ghats and reached as far as Solapur in 1860 did this change, with Mumbai emerging as the export outlet for raw cotton, which was in great demand during the U.S. Civil War. After that war, cotton was once more cheap, and a cotton textile industry that was built up in Mumbai by Indian entrepreneurs expanded rapidly. The port also experienced a rapid expansion when steamships reached it via the Suez Canal after 1869. British coal was then cheaper in Mumbai than Indian coal mined in Eastern India.

By 1900 Mumbai had a population of about one million and was thus twice as large as Madras (Chennai). In addition to being a center of trade and industry, it was also the capital of the Bombay Presidency, which at that time included Sindh in the north and a large part of present Karnataka in the south, in addition to Gujarat and Maharashtra. Sindh became a separate province in 1936, but the rest of the state retained its old structure. When India became independent in 1947, there was not much of a change in this respect. Even the reorganization of states in 1956 did not change the contours of the Bombay state, mainly because Mumbai as a multilingual metropolis (dominated by Gujarati capitalists and inhabited by Marathi workers) remained a bone of contention. Finally in 1960 Gujarat was separated from Maharashtra, which secured Mumbai as its capital. This did not lead to an exodus of the Gujaratis, who continue to dominate trade and industry in the city.

The current problems of the Mumbai Port Authority are just the same as those of Madras (Chennai). A new container port has been constructed on the other side of the harbor, but being managed by the state-owned Indian Railways, its efficiency is also not up to the mark. Similarly the airport, the busiest in the country, could probably be much improved under private management.

SEE ALSO Agriculture; Cargoes, Freight; Cargoes, Passenger; Chambers of Commerce; Containerization; Cotton; East India Company, British; Empire, British; Empire, Mughal; EntrepÔt System; Ethnic Groups, Gujarati; Factories; Free Ports; Gujarat; Harbors; India;Indian Ocean;Madras;Port Cities;Shipbuilding;Tata Family Enterprises;Textiles.