Welcome to Hotel in Mumbai
Mumbai is built from a group of seven islands, Bombay Island, Mazagaon, Parel, Colaba, Worli, Mahim and Old Woman's Island. The initial settlers were the Koli fishing community. In the third century BCE, Ashoka of Magadha ruled the islands and these islands were part of his Maurya Empire. The Muslim Governors of Gujarat, appointed by the Delhi Sultanate, controlled the islands from 1347 to 1407. In 1668, these islands were chartered to the British East India Company and in 1687; Bombay became the headquarters of the Bombay Presidency.
Shiv Sena's leadership pushed for the name change for many years prior to 1995. They argued that "Bombay" was a corrupted English version of "Mumbai" and an unwanted legacy of British colonial rule. Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray once installed a marble plaque with the name on the Gateway of India, a famous sandstone arch. The national government objected to the renaming, though, fearing that Bombay would lose its identity internationally.
The push to rename Bombay was part of a larger movement to strengthen Marathi identity in the Maharashtra region. The Shiv Sena party also declared their intentions to do away with the term "Bollywood," a conflation of "Bombay" and "Hollywood" that refers to Mumbai's film industry. That name, though, has stuck around.
The name change didn't impact all of Mumbai's residents. Speakers of Marathi and Gujarati, the local languages, have always called the city Mumbai. "Bombay" is an anglicisation of the Portuguese name "Bombaim," which is believed to derive from the phrase "Bom Bahia," or "Good Bay." (Portugal held territories in western India until 1961.) The financial capital of the nation, Mumbai, is situated on the west coast of Maharashtra and is the centre of the Indian entertainment industry.