Seven Islands, One City

On 16 April 1853 a crowd at Bori Bunder watched the first passenger train in India leave for Thane. This episode tells how the railway remade Bombay's trade, its land and its sense of what it could become.

In the 1740s the great port of Surat was decaying, its quays full of goods nobody came to buy. This episode follows how lawlessness and collapse in Surat sent merchants, capital and ambition south to Bombay.

For most of its early history, Bombay kept flooding. Beginning with the Great Breach at Worli in 1782, this episode tells how the sea was walled out and the islands slowly stitched together into a single city.

Before there was a city, there was water: seven malarial islands, the Koli fishermen who knew them, and the Portuguese and English who barely wanted them. This prologue shows how Bombay beat its fever not with medicine but by building over the conditions that produced it.

In a personal note, Sidharth Jain explains why he wrote this book: a childhood spent walking through Churchgate, Fort and Marine Drive, and the questions that followed. Who built Bombay, who paid for it, and how did seven malarial islands become India's great city?