Mumbai Tours

Mumbai originally consisted of seven islands, inhabited by small Koli fishing communities. At different times, various dynasties held this insignificant outlying district; the city of Puri on Elephanta is thought to have been the major settlement in the region, until King Bimba, or Bhima, built the town of Mahim on one island, at the end of the thirteenth century. Hindus controlled the area until it was captured in the fourteenth century by the Muslim Gujarat Sultanate.

In 1534, Sultan Bahadur of Ahmedabad ceded the city to the Portuguese, who felt the land to be of little importance, and concentrated development in the areas around Mahim and Bassein. They handed over the largest island to the English in 1661, as part of the dowry when the Portuguese infanta Catherine of Braganza married Charles II four years later Charles received the remaining islands and the port, and the town took on the anglicized name of Bombay from the Portuguese "Buan Bahia" or Good Bay. This was the first part of India that could properly be termed a colony, elsewhere on the subcontinent the English had merely been granted the right to set up "factories", or trading posts. Because of its natural safe harbour and strategic position for trade, the East India Company, based at Surat, wanted to buy the land, in 1668 a deal was struck, and Charles leased Mumbai to them for a pittance.

Mumbai is the fast paced commercial, financial, industrial and celluloid capital of India. Lured by its glamour and the prospects of 'streets paved with gold', a large number of people from different parts of the country come to settle in this city every year. And Mumbai continues to grow, to absorb and most importantly to prosper. Just when you begin to wonder how you're ever going to cope with Mumbai, you arrive at Worli and see Haji Ali Mosque standing proudly on a raised walkway in the middle of the sea giving you the feeling that the Gods are there if everything else fails. If you arrive at night, there will be a backdrop of twinkling lights from the skyscrapers that are so much a feature of Mumbai's skyline.

The scenes change as you drive past Chowpatty Beach, ablaze with the lights of stalls selling fruit-juice, ice-cream and snacks to the crowds thronging the beach. By the time you reach Marine Drive, your spirits will be restored and the rush of traffic won't seem half so daunting as it might have been earlier, and the sedate horse-drawn landau will seem a charming anachronism. Once a tiny island overrun by swaying palm trees, Mumbai used to belong to the native Koli fisher-folk, who still live here in their little villages surrounded by soaring skyscrapers. Portuguese came here in the seventeenth century and dotted the place with several forts, which stand even today. Later Mumbai came under the British rule and eventually became one of the largest ports in the British Empire.