THE CITY THAT INVENTED ITSELF
Mumbai is not an ancient metropolis. It is a relatively recent invention — seven islands joined by land reclamation in the 18th and 19th centuries to create a peninsula that became the financial capital of one of the world's largest countries. Before the Portuguese arrived in 1534, the area was home to the Koli fishing communities who still haul nets in Versova and Worli today. The city that grew up around the colonial harbour was designed to move cotton and opium, and its architecture — Gothic, Venetian, Mughal, Art Deco — reflects the successive commercial ambitions of those who funded it.
SOUTH MUMBAI: WHERE THE CITY STARTED
The precinct running from Colaba to Churchgate is the city's original quarter — the one that foreigners most often mean when they say "Mumbai." It contains the largest collection of Victorian Gothic and Art Deco buildings in Asia outside of the UK, most of them still in daily use as courts, universities, railway termini and office blocks. The neighbourhood of Kala Ghoda ("black horse," named after the equestrian statue removed in 1965) became the city's arts district in the 1990s and remains its gallery, bookshop and café centre. South Mumbai's streets are walkable and relatively uncrowded by the standards of the rest of the city — a quality that has become its main asset as the financial district migrated north to Bandra Kurla Complex and Lower Parel.
DHARAVI: WHAT THE CITY ACTUALLY IS
Dharavi is routinely described as Asia's largest slum, a phrase that misrepresents it badly. It is a working urban neighbourhood of roughly one million people covering 2.4 square kilometres between the Western and Central railway lines. It produces leather goods, recycled plastics, pottery, garments and food products for export across India and internationally. Its per-acre GDP is among the highest in Mumbai. The buildings are low and dense, the lanes are narrow, and public infrastructure is inadequate — but calling it a slum frames it as a problem rather than a city within a city that functions, largely, on its own terms. Reality Tours and Travel, founded in 2005, created a guided-walk model that channels 80% of its income into community programmes; it remains the only operator worth visiting with.
THE MONSOON CITY
Between June and September, Mumbai receives more rain than London gets in a year — concentrated into four months that transform the city. The rains arrive each year with an event the city calls the monsoon onset, marked by a day when the entire sky goes dark and the rainfall does not stop for 24 hours. The Gateway of India terrace floods; the Haji Ali causeway submerges; Marine Drive, facing west into the Arabian Sea, takes the full force of the swell. The city does not close. Trains still run (usually), restaurants fill, and the Bollywood industry — which has its studios in Goregaon and Andheri — continues working. The rains are the city's private pleasure, something it endures and enjoys simultaneously.
BOLLYWOOD AND THE CITY IT BUILT
India's Hindi-language film industry, headquartered in Mumbai since the 1930s, is the largest film industry in the world by number of films produced annually. Its studios are in the northern suburbs, its stars live in Juhu and Bandra, and its influence on the city is pervasive — the industry employs an estimated 500,000 people in Mumbai alone and drives the city's music, fashion, advertising and restaurant culture. The word "Bollywood" was coined by a British journalist in the 1970s as a portmanteau of Bombay and Hollywood; the industry has never entirely embraced it, preferring "Hindi cinema." The Prithvi Theatre in Juhu, founded by Shashi Kapoor of the film dynasty, remains the city's most important venue for stage performance and the place where new film talent is most often first seen.
FOOD: THE CITY THAT EATS OUTSIDE
Mumbai's street food culture is among the richest in India — and India's street food is among the richest in the world. The city invented or popularised vada pav (the spiced potato fritter in a bread roll, often called Mumbai's burger), pav bhaji (a thick spiced vegetable curry served with buttered bread), bhel puri (puffed rice with chutneys assembled in seconds at the beachside stalls), and the Bombay sandwich, a layered affair of boiled potato, cucumber, beetroot, green chutney and bread that exists in hundreds of variations across the city. The sit-down restaurant scene has evolved dramatically since 2010 — The Bombay Canteen, which opened in 2015 in a Kamala Mills warehouse, is widely credited with demonstrating that Indian regional cooking could be treated with the same ambition and technical rigour applied to French or Japanese cuisine. The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel's Wasabi by Morimoto is currently the city's most serious sushi address.
THE CITY'S NAME
The city has had two official names. Bombay was the Portuguese rendering of the Koli phrase meaning "good little bay" — adopted by the British, used for four centuries, and still used widely by older residents and the city's diaspora. Mumbai is the Marathi and Gujarati name derived from Mumba Devi, the patron goddess of the Koli fishing community whose temple stands in the Byculla neighbourhood. The state government renamed the city Mumbai in 1995; the central government followed in 1996. International airlines and most Indian transport systems use Mumbai. Most of the city's residents use both names interchangeably, switching mid-sentence.