How many islands do you see?

History talks about Bombay’s seven islands. But the Portuguese saw only four, while the British saw two. The real number will surprise you

Study the picture alongside carefully and answer this question—how many islands do you see? It’s not a trick question and your first answer, seven, will be correct.

Old timers and students of Mumbai history will recognise this number and remember the fairy tale. Once upon a time, circa 1600, most of the Konkan coast was ruled by the Portuguese, including an archipelago with several islands, one of them Bombaim, which is Portuguese-speak for Bombay.

The British, also in the area, had their eyes on those islands. The British East India Company, headquartered in Surat, thought the bay would be perfect for a fort and a port. They had been negotiating with the Portuguese viceroy since 1652 but the talks were going nowhere.

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Then came a royal wedding. Portugal’s King John IV offered the hand of his daughter, Catherine of Braganza, to King Charles II. Although other brides were on offer from countries such as France and Spain, Charles II chose Catherine’s hand and, we assume, the rest of her. As dowry, King John IV promised the British king jewels worth 400,000 crowns, bills of exchange to double that amount, the rights to free trade with Brazil and the East Indies, Tangiers—and, as tadka, the island of Bombaim and its dependencies on India’s North Konkan coast. The word “dependencies”, unfortunately, was left undefined.

According to the usual beginner’s history of Mumbai, the history of this city officially started when the British acquired Bombay.

That’s poppycock, of course. For some months now, I’ve been rooting around in Mumbai history for the book I’m working on, Bombai: The Many Lives of a Megalopolis—and a surprising little factoid jumped out. Not only did the British not get the island in 1661 but they couldn’t agree with the Portuguese on how many islands there were in the archipelago, and which ones were included in the dowry.

It’s a problem of enumeration. During high tide, the Brits argue, many islands disappear under water and their number goes down. But when the sea recedes, there’s land everywhere and you cannot tell some islands apart from their neighbours. In many places you can walk over from one island to the next.

According to the Portuguese, there are only four islands—Coleo (Colaba); Bombaim (Bombay); Varel (Worli); and Mahim. In their interpretation, the dowry offers just one of these islands, Bombaim, to the British. 

The British, however, can see only two islands here and want both: Colaba (with its nearby Old Woman’s Island) and one large island they called Bombay, which contains Colaba, Old Woman’s Island, Bombay, Worli, Mahim, Parel, Mazagon. Bombay, to them, was a single large island interwoven with tidal creeks and inlets.

The quibbling goes on for four years. In 1665, Humphrey Cooke, the wily British governor, adopted a bait-and-switch strategy. He agreed to all the Portuguese terms and definitions, and took possession of just Bombay island—but almost at once marched into Mahim, declaring it to be part and parcel of Bombay. “I never took boat to pass our men when I took the possession of it,” he argued. “And at all times you may go from one place to the other dry shod; I cannot imagine how they can make them two islands.”

The viceroy protested loudly that just because Cooke can walk to Mahim from Bombay does not make it English property. He can see where the governor is going with this: at low tide you can also walk from Bombay to Salsette, crossing Mahim and Bandra.

It took seven years to reach an agreement but finally, the British got their seven-islands-which-are-actually-one-island in 1668. 

Charles II had no idea what to do with these little pearls in a distant ocean. Administering them from a continent away was proving costly. On September 21 that year, as broke as only a king can be, he struck a deal with the East India Company to lease all seven islands to them for a mere £10 a year, provided they lent him £50,000 at 6 per cent interest.

Governor Cooke’s stubborn insistence that the sea around the islands should be treated as land is the logic that has been creating Mumbai for the next three centuries and into the fourth. Mumbai has found its greatness through the real-estate miracle of turning water into land. The most ambitious land grab of them all is happening before our eyes as the sea is banished yet again, further back than it has ever been, to make way for slick coast-hugging expressways that will link Colaba to Versova, touching every ward in between.

About the number of islands: it was not two or four or even just seven. The British added seven more to the seven islands in the dowry, and reclaimed the sea in between to create one crowded, restless city, our Mumbai. But nine islands remained. According to one old map, they were Madh, Muriksa, Manori, Sheva, Nhava, Karanja, Cross Island. Butcher Island and Elephanta Island.

Do the math—that’s 23 islands in all, not seven.

You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com

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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper

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