North Konkan · Western Coastal Strip

The small things

A city named after a Koli goddessMumbadevi is the tutelary goddess of the Koli fishing communities who were on these islands before any of the traders, colonists or mill owners. The city is named for her, which means the least powerful group in the modern city named the most valuable real estate in the country.
Seven islands, one land massBombay was seven islands with tidal water between them. Portugal transferred them to the English crown as part of Catherine of Braganza's dowry in 1661, the crown leased them to the East India Company in 1668 for a nominal annual rent, and successive reclamations — the Hornby Vellard among them — closed the breaches. Everything below Byculla is made ground, which is why it floods where it does.
The elephant that named ElephantaThe Portuguese named Gharapuri island after a large basalt elephant standing near the landing. A nineteenth-century attempt to remove it broke the sculpture; the pieces were reassembled in the Byculla gardens, where it still stands. The island keeps a name given for an object no longer on it.
The fish that is only food once it is driedBombil holds so much water that fresh it barely survives cooking. Split, paired and hung on bamboo racks in the sea wind, it becomes a dense, pungent keeping food. The English name Bombay duck has several competing etymologies and no settled one — the story about the railway mail, the dak, is the most repeated and the least documented.
Salt made a caste and a coastlineThe Agri community's name is the salt pan, the agar. The pans along Thane and Vasai creeks are also the metropolitan region's largest flood sponge, so the argument about building on them is simultaneously about heritage, livelihood and whether the city floods in 2050.
The mills, the strike and the foodBombay's first cotton mill opened in 1854; by the mid-twentieth century Girangaon ran well over a hundred of them and employed around a quarter of a million people. The strike that began in January 1982 emptied them and they never restarted. Vada pav, pav bhaji and the cutting chai economy were built to feed that workforce, and outlived it by fifty years and counting.
Leopards, a national park and a tiger godSanjay Gandhi National Park holds one of the highest densities of leopards recorded anywhere, inside a municipal boundary. The Warli communities living at its edges have worshipped Waghoba, the tiger-and-leopard deity, at village shrines for far longer than the park has existed, and researchers now treat that shrine network as part of why the coexistence works at all.
A plant that sets the building cycleKarvi flowers en masse once in roughly seven or eight years, turning entire hillsides purple, then dies back. The dead stems are the standard wall material of hill houses here, so the rhythm at which villages rebuild their walls is set by the reproductive schedule of a shrub.
A community that renamed itself for a jubileeThe Catholic Marathi-speakers of this coast called themselves Portuguese Christians until 1887, when — for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, and to distinguish themselves from Goan and Mangalorean migrants arriving in Bombay — they adopted the name East Indian and founded an association under it. The name is an argument about employment rights, not about geography.
Saturday oil-pressersThe Bene Israel were known in Konkan villages as Shanwar Teli, the oil-pressers who would not work on Saturday. They kept the Sabbath, dietary rules and the Shema through centuries with almost no contact with other Jewish communities, while speaking Marathi and taking village surnames ending in -kar. Most emigrated after 1948; the synagogues remain, staffed by a community of a few thousand.
A sea fort nobody tookMurud-Janjira held out against Maratha, Portuguese, Dutch and English attempts for roughly three centuries. The reason is engineering, not luck — walls rising directly from a tidal rock with no beach to land on, and large sweet-water tanks inside, so a blockade could not thirst it out.
The first railway went where the cotton wasIndia's first passenger train ran from Bori Bunder to Thane on 16 April 1853, thirty-four kilometres. It was not built to move people; it was the first stage of a line meant to bring plateau cotton down the ghats to the port, and the mill district followed the same logic.

Small local details of North Konkan — customs, quirks and things that are not in any guidebook. (12)