Mumbai
India's financial capital and Bollywood's home
Mumbai runs on ambition and tidal rhythm, a peninsular megacity of more than twenty million squeezed onto a narrow finger of reclaimed land jutting into the Arabian Sea. It is India's commercial engine, home to the country's stock exchange, its biggest banks, and the dream factory of Hindi cinema. Slum and skyscraper press against each other here with a density and energy that visitors find at once exhausting and exhilarating.
The modern city stands on what were once seven separate islands, gradually joined by centuries of land reclamation that filled the channels between them. The result is a long, thin metropolis hemmed by water on three sides, with a deep natural harbor on its eastern flank that made its fortune. The annual southwest monsoon dumps prodigious rain on the low-lying city between June and September, regularly testing its drainage and its nerves.
Marathi-speaking Koli fishing communities lived on the islands long before the Portuguese ceded them to the English crown in 1661 as part of Catherine of Braganza's dowry. The British leased the harbor to the East India Company, and the opening of the Suez Canal and a cotton boom turned Bombay into a great imperial port. Renamed Mumbai in 1995, the city today generates a vast share of India's tax revenue and corporate wealth while remaining a magnet for migrants chasing a foothold in the country's richest economy.