Who ruled Mumbai?

Mumbai, called Bombay in English until 1995, stands on what was once an archipelago of seven small islands off the Konkan coast of western India, enclosing one of the finest natural harbours on the Arabian Sea. For most of its history the islands were a modest home to fishing villages and shrines. Their transformation came under British rule, when land reclamation joined the islands into one and the harbour made Bombay the great port, cotton market and industrial city of western India. It has been India's commercial capital ever since.

The Koli fishing community is the oldest known population of the islands. Across the harbour on Elephanta Island, rock-cut cave temples dedicated to Shiva were carved around the sixth century CE, one of the masterpieces of Hindu art. The region passed through the hands of many regional dynasties, and from the ninth century the Shilahara kings ruled the coast. In the fourteenth century the islands passed under Muslim rule, and in the fifteenth they belonged to the sultans of Gujarat.

In 1534 Sultan Bahadur Shah of Gujarat, under pressure from the Mughals, ceded Bassein and its islands to the Portuguese Empire. The Portuguese built forts and churches, and the name Bom Bahia, "good bay", may derive from their period, though the name Mumbai comes from the local goddess Mumbadevi. In 1661 the islands passed to England as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza on her marriage to Charles II, and in 1668 the king leased them to the East India Company for £10 a year.

Governor Gerald Aungier, in the 1670s, laid the foundations of a trading city, inviting Parsi, Gujarati, Armenian and other merchants with promises of religious freedom. The company moved its western headquarters from Surat to Bombay in 1687. Though the neighbouring mainland was held by the Maratha Empire for much of the eighteenth century, Bombay itself stayed in British hands and became the capital of the Bombay Presidency. From the 1780s, beginning with the Hornby Vellard causeway, a series of reclamation projects merged the seven islands into a single landmass.

India's first passenger railway opened in 1853, running from Bombay to Thane, and the first cotton mill followed a year later. When the American Civil War cut off supplies of American cotton to Britain in the 1860s, Bombay enjoyed a frenzied boom, and the wealth paid for the grand Victorian Gothic buildings of the Fort area, such as the railway terminus completed in 1888. The city also suffered a devastating plague epidemic from 1896.

Bombay was a centre of the national movement. The Indian National Congress held its first session there in 1885, and in August 1942 Mahatma Gandhi launched the Quit India campaign at a meeting in the city. In February 1946 sailors of the Royal Indian Navy mutinied in its harbour, one of the last shocks to the British Raj.

Independent India kept Bombay as a provincial capital, first of Bombay State and then, from 1960, of Maharashtra, the new state drawn for Marathi speakers. Its textile mills declined after a long strike in 1982, but finance, trade and the Hindi film industry boomed. The city was officially renamed Mumbai in 1995. It has also known violence, including the communal riots of 1992 to 1993, the bombings of March 1993 and the attacks of November 2008. Today Mumbai has over 12 million people in the city and more than 20 million in its metropolitan region, and it remains the financial centre of India.