Journal of Historical Geography 59 (2018) 27e39

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Journal of Historical Geography

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg

‘Making Bombay Island’: land reclamation and geographical

conceptions of Bombay, 1661e1728
Tim Riding
Queen Mary University of London, School of History, Arts 2 Building, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS, UK

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This article examines the connection between geographical conceptions of the Bombay archipelago and
Received 17 November 2016 the uniting of the islands through land reclamation. The modern assumption is that before reclamation,
Received in revised form Bombay consisted of seven islands. No early modern observers understood Bombay in this way, however.
21 August 2017
Its geography was hotly contested during the Anglo-Portuguese transfer in the 1660s. While the Por-
Accepted 30 August 2017
tuguese thought of the archipelago as four distinct islands, the English reinterpreted it as two, and this
perception informed their attitudes to Bombay’s environment. Highlighting the importance of this factor
Keywords:
offers a revised understanding of Bombay’s early land reclamation. By focusing on the build-up to the
Bombay
Mumbai
first major reclamation in 1710, this article argues that reclamation was a reaction to the region’s harsh
Heptanesia geopolitical climate. The aggressive programme of environmental transformation was an attempt to
South Asia remove Bombay’s dependence on imported provisions. It also sought to bolster English claims to the
Land reclamation islands by physically eliminating the Portuguese argument that Bombay consisted of distinct islands. By
Drainage considering the interplay between geographical conceptions and political imperatives, this article revises
East India Company our understanding of what motivated early modern environmental change. Finally, the article discusses
Portuguese empire the imperial origins of the idea that Bombay was once seven islands, revealing the extent to which
Colonialism
geographical conceptions and the meaning of environmental intervention changed over time. This
Environmental history
challenges simple distinctions between urban and agricultural reclamation.
Cartographic history
Geosophy © 2017 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Bombay was originally d not one island d but seven separate
and amorphous isles … For many a year the Heptanesia, as old
Ptolemy called them in A.D. 150, were destined to glance at one
another across the intervening waters; but the Providence
which decreed their original dispersion willed also that, in after
time [sic], they should be once more united by the genius and
energy of man.1
Stephen M. Edwardes presents an imperial vision of Bombay's
environmental transformation. He describes how the islands were
originally one unit, connected to the mainland. Geological up-
heavals split them into seven islands, named Heptanesia by
Ptolemy, until the British undertook reclamation and ensured that
they became ‘once more united’. This vision of seven islands
morphing into a metropolis has outlived the British Raj, being
picked up and made their own by modern historians and d along
with the project of reclamation d by Mumbai's residents.2 It is not
generally noted, however, that the archipelago had never been
defined as seven islands by anyone before the nineteenth century.
The people carrying out the work of reclamation did not share
current geographical understandings: they did not see themselves
as uniting separate islands. Instead, they were recovering what they
thought of as drowned land in the centre of a unitary island.
This article examines the connection between such assumptions
and the beginning of reclamation in the eighteenth century. It
highlights two unconsidered motivations for this reclamation, and
in so doing hopes to revise our current understanding of early
modern environmental intervention. Firstly, English geographical
conceptions of Bombay encouraged reclamation, allowing them to
frame the project within understandings of wasteland and agri-
cultural improvement. Secondly, political imperatives caused by
long-lasting disputes with the Portuguese were a major motivation.

2
Bombay changed its name to Mumbai in 1995. To correspond to contemporary
E-mail address: t.riding@qmul.ac.uk. sources, I will use Bombay to refer to the colonial city and Mumbai to the post-
1
S.M. Edwardes, The Rise of Bombay: A Retrospect, Bombay, 1902, 2e3. independence city.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2017.08.005
0305-7488/© 2017 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
28 T. Riding / Journal of Historical Geography 59 (2018) 27e39
Reclamation, it was hoped, would eliminate the Portuguese argu-
ment that Bombay consisted of distinct islands; it would also
remove the colony's dependence on imported provisions.
This article contributes to studies of early modern environ-
mental change in the Indian Ocean by adopting approaches from
the study of the Americas and Europe. There is a large literature on
South Asia's colonial environmental history, but forestry has been
the dominant topic.3 Land reclamation is discussed as a nineteenth
century urban phenomenon, particularly in relation to the port
towns of Hong Kong, Singapore and Macau.4 The early modern
period has been seen as one of passivity towards the Indian envi-
ronment, with adaptation favoured to intervention.5 New work on
the English East India Company (EIC) demonstrates that this
viewpoint is changing.6 However, the assumption of passivity re-
mains in the recent literature on Bombay, which focuses on Euro-
pean perceptions of health and climate rather than the physical
transformations of Bombay's landscape.7
Indian Ocean historiography, therefore, tends to assume that
early modern Europeans did not undertake radical environmental
intervention. This is not an assumption in the historiography of
Europe and the Americas, which ranges from detailed reclamation
case studies to general models of colonial landscape trans-
formation. The findings and approaches of this literature can be
fruitfully applied to other contexts. In particular, this article ac-
knowledges the importance of geographical conceptions (some-
times called geosophy). Martyn J. Bowden's discussions on how
geographical myths can develop into invented traditions help us to
understand the creation of geographical conceptions and their
resonance over time.8 Others have connected this to environmental
change: Hugh Prince has argued that people's interventions in the
environment were informed by their mental images of the land-
scape, while Andrew Sluyter has emphasised conceptual changes in
his model of landscape transformation.9 This article argues that
political imperatives shaped geographical conceptions, and that
both shaped environmental interventions.
Aspects of this literature can be disputed and refined. I
challenge the tendency to categorise reclamation into agricul-
tural and urban forms, arguing that the significance and purpose
of landscape transformation could change over time. Addition-
ally, most studies of reclamation in the Americas place conflicts
over differing land use practices, usually between indigenous
and colonial actors, at the centre of their analysis.10 This
3
J.V. Swami has highlighted this, arguing that ‘environmental history needs to
broaden its reach’; Environmental history and British colonialism in India: a prime
political agenda, CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (2003) 128. For an overview of
this literature, see J. Beattie, Recent themes in the environmental history of the
British Empire, History Compass 10 (2012) 129e139.
4
R. Glaser, P. Haberzettl and R.P.D. Walsh, Land reclamation in Singapore, Hong
Kong and Macau, GeoJournal 24 (1991) 365e373; B.J. Hudson, Cities on the Shore:
The Urban Littoral Frontier, London, 1994.
5
M. Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British
Imperialism in India, 1600e1850, New Delhi, 1999, 21.
6 merged, others consisted of mangrove forests, tidal flats and
V. Damodaran, A. Winterbottom and A. Lester (Eds), The East India Company and
the Natural World, Basingstoke, 2015.
7
R. Markley, ‘A PUTRIDNESS IN THE AIR’: monsoons and mortality in
seventeenth-century Bombay, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10 (2010)
105e125; G.C.D. Adamson, ‘The languor of the hot weather’: everyday perspectives
on weather and climate in colonial Bombay, 1819e1828, Journal of Historical Ge-
ography 38 (2012) 143e154.
8
M.J. Bowden, The invention of American tradition, Journal of Historical Geog-
raphy 18 (1992), 3e26.
9 12
H. Prince, Wetlands of the American Midwest: A Historical Geography of Changing
Attitudes, Chicago, 1997, 1, 337; A. Sluyter, Colonialism and Landscape: Postcolonial
Theory and Applications, New York, 2002, 4e5.
10
M.G. Hatvany, Marshlands: Four Centuries of Environmental Change on the Shores
of the St. Lawrence, Sainte-Foy, 2003, 2, 160; V.S. Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land:
Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City, Stanford, 2014, 309e312.
approach is best summarised by Sluyter's framework for colonial
landscape transformation, which envisages a triangular rela-
tionship between native, non-native and landscape.11 This article
will not adopt this approach because in Bombay the chief conflict
was a political and conceptual one between two colonial powers:
the Portuguese State of India and the EIC. Bombay's indigenous
population used seasonally inundated areas far less extensively
than in the Americas. This was not agricultural land; instead, the
evidence we have suggests that it was perceived as sea before
the English arrival. In presenting a conflict in geographical con-
ceptions between two European colonial powers, this article
offers a new case study on early modern environmental
intervention.
These events took place within a context of expanding Euro-
pean interest and expertise in reclamation. Certainly the growing
knowledge of such practices in Britain, such as the draining of the
fens which was taking place concurrently, was a factor in the EIC
supporting the project.12 Britain was at this time exporting an
ideology of agrarian improvement, with colonies in Ireland and
the Americas being founded on such principles.13 To a large
extent, however, the impetus for reclamation came from the
colony rather than the metropole. EIC correspondence seldom
referred to similar experiences in Europe, and at no point were
individuals supplied to Bombay with specific expertise in recla-
mation. This article, therefore, presents a localised case study,
focusing on the perceptions and motivations of agents on the
ground.
The first section will consider Bombay under the Portuguese,
showing that they perceived the archipelago as four islands. I will
then examine the transfer of Bombay to the English in the 1660s, a
process which revealed starkly different understandings of what
Bombay signified. The third section continues to narrate the tense
situation between the two powers throughout the rest of the
seventeenth century, during which time the idea of land reclama-
tion grew. The forth section considers the reclamation itself, which
took place between 1710 and 1728. Finally, I seek to reconcile the
rest of the article with the modern assumption that Bombay was
once seven islands. I examine the nineteenth-century origins of this
notion and discuss the extent to which it served to glorify the
colonial project of reclamation.
Bombay under the Portuguese
The area known as Bombay consisted of a small archipelago in
a harbour on the west coast of India (Fig. 1). The number of distinct
islands was open to interpretation since large areas were under-
water at high tide and during the monsoon season (June to
September), when water discharged from Thane and Panvel
Creeks to raise the harbour's sea level. At other times it was
possible to cross between the islands on foot. This space contained
a range of ecosystems: while some areas were entirely sub-
artificial salt pans.
People at the time estimated that about a third of Bombay was
‘eaten up’ through this natural formation.14 The area today, after
extensive reclamation, covers sixty-five square kilometres. The
11
Sluyter, Colonialism and Landscape, 23.
R.P. Masani, Evolution of Local Self-Government in Bombay, London, 1929, 60e62;
H.C. Darby, The Draining of the Fens, Cambridge, 1940.
13
R. Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’
of the World, New Haven, 2000, 55e59.
14
Bombay to London, 15 December 1673, India Office Records, British Library,
London [hereafter IOR/] G/3/6, pt. 4, 24.
T. Riding / Journal of Historical Geography 59 (2018) 27e39 29

Fig. 1. The Bombay archipelago in its regional context.

30 T. Riding / Journal of Historical Geography 59 (2018) 27e39

Fig. 2. Geographical conceptions of Bombay.

modern assumption is that seven islands existed: Colaba, Old
Woman's Island, Bombay, Mazagaon, Parel, Worli and Mahim.
However, in this context what constituted distinct islands was
largely subjective (Fig. 2). The English interpreted the central space
as land, not sea, thereby forming Bombay Island, but this was a
rewriting of previous understandings. For the sake of simplicity and
to correspond with contemporary sources, the archipelago will be
referred to collectively as Bombay in this article.
What Bombay signified was vaguely defined prior to the English
arrival. From 1534 the islands formed part of the Northern Province,
a Portuguese territory along the western Indian coast. The Portu-
guese referred to one of the islands as Monbaym or Bombaim, and
the crown rented it out to noblemen.15 Since property records are
the main source on how the Portuguese divided up this territory, it
is unclear whether places such as Mazagaon were considered
separate islands or simply separate estates. This is complicated by
the fact that Bombaim, along with Mahim, contained a custom
house which levied customs duty on a wider area. This made other
islands subordinate to it, or even included within the designation
Bombaim.
15
S.M. Edwardes and J.M. Campbell, The Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island,
volume 2, Bombay, 1909, 31e32.
 T. Riding / Journal of Historical Geography 59 (2018) 27e39
Fig. 3. Detail of Ilha de Bombaim e zonas limítrofes.
Source: used with permission from the Arquivo Histo rico Ultramarino, Lisbon, CARTm 058 D.694.
It is likely that there was no uniform understanding of the ge-
ography of these islands during the Portuguese period. The carto-
graphic evidence, however, suggests that the archipelago was
generally thought to consist of four islands. One of the only sur-
viving Portuguese maps of Bombay depicts four islands (Fig. 3), and
similar depictions survive in two English copies of Portuguese
maps.16 Crucial for later disputes with the English, Mahim is shown
as a separate island from Bombay. In addition to Portuguese sources
a number of Marathi bakhars (chronicles) assume that Mahim and
Bombay were separate islands, while a Mughal account of Siddi
Yaqut Khan's 1689 invasion seems to treat Mazagaon as a separate
island from Bombay.17
Significantly, the Portuguese named the entrance to the harbour
Barra de Bombaim (Inlet of Bombay), and the harbour itself was often
given this name.18 It was possible, therefore, to understand Bombay in
broader terms. EIC servants, who began to take an interest in Bombay
in the 1620s, certainly did so. Searching for a location for a settlement
in western India, they identified Bombay's harbour as perfect for the
wintering of their ships. Islands 3e7 in Fig. 1 were described as one
island.19 This was a maritime interpretation, since the tidal waters
between the islands were not navigable.
There is no evidence that land reclamation took place before the
English arrived, although it was briefly considered by the Portu-
guese. In the 1540s Sima ~o Botelho, a colonial administrator, sug-
gested to John IV that he grant inundated land to individuals. He
16
Bombay Harbor, 1678, John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Blathwayt Atlas,
43; William Hack, Bombahem, in: Manuscript describeing the coasts of India &c.,
1700, British Library [hereafter BL], Maps 7.Tab.125, 17vd18r. The Hack map is
clearly copied due to its use of Portuguese place names. It shows three, not four
islands.
17
R. Murphy, Remarks on the history of some of the oldest races now settled in
Bombay, in: Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society from 1836 to 1838,
Bombay, 1844, 132e138; M. Ranganathan (Ed), Govind Narayan's Mumbai: An Urban
Biography from 1863, London, 2008, 66; A.J. Syed (Ed), Aurangzeb in Muntakhab-Al
Lubab, Bombay, 1977, 373.
18
The entrance is given this name in two Portuguese maps: Ilha de Bombaim,
Fig. 3; and Mombaim, in: Pedro Barreto de Resende, Livro do Estado da India Oriental,
BL, Sloane MS. 197, 225vd226r.
19
For example, Richard Tuck's 1628 description, in: S.A. Khan, Anglo Portuguese
Negotiations relating to Bombay, 1660e1677, London, 1922, 425e426.
31
hoped that this could serve as an alternative to the widespread
practice of parcelling out lands, villages, and whole islands to of-
ficers and noble families, retaining only a small quit rent for the
crown. Restricting this generosity to inundated areas would oblige
the recipients to make them profitable, while retaining the crown's
other revenues.20 This idea was never acted upon, and there was no
widespread discourse by the Portuguese about reclamation.
One might ask why the Portuguese barely considered land
reclamation, when from the arrival of the EIC it was a much dis-
cussed and debated topic within the company. A major factor was
Bombay's entirely different political and economic situation under
the English. When the islands were under the Portuguese they
formed part of the Northern Province. There was no pressure for
land, while the region's agricultural system was interconnected.
Bombay's landowners devoted the majority of its arable land to
coconut trees. Their produce was profitably traded in the region:
the rest of the Northern Province was reliant on these islands for its
supply of coir and cadjan.21 Bombay's food supply was largely met
by Salsette, the much larger neighbouring island.
Rather than engage in reclamation, therefore, various attempts
had been made to adapt to and profit from Bombay's environment.
Two causeways existed between Mahim and Parel.22 It is unknown
when these were constructed, but they connected the two most
profitable towns during the Portuguese period, and seem to be
unrelated to any attempts at reclamation.23 Seasonally inundated
20
J.G. Da Cunha, The Origin of Bombay, Bombay, 1900, 93.
21
Bombay to Surat, 6 October 1668, in: W. Foster, The English Factories in India,
1668e1669, Oxford, 1927, 65. Coir is a fibre derived from coconut husks and had
multiple uses, including boat construction, while cadjan (palm leaves) was an
important local building material.
22
Two causeways are marked in Fig. 3. Additionally, John Fryer recorded that
‘from Parel to Mahim, are the Ruins of a Stone Causeway’ in A New Account of East-
India and Persia, London, 1698, 67. In this and all subsequent quotations from early
modern sources, the orthography has been modernised and abbreviated words
expanded.
23
M. Dossal has suggested that ‘the reclamation of some land from the sea and
the construction of causeways had reduced the seven islets to four, by the time the
British acquired them’ but does not offer a reference. While this theory would
reconcile the seven islands model with Portuguese sources, the location of the
causeways does not support it. M. Dossal, Mumbai, Theatre of Conflict, City of Hope:
1660 to Present Times, Oxford, 2010, 5.
32 T. Riding / Journal of Historical Geography 59 (2018) 27e39
areas were also put to use, since they were perfect for the pro-
duction of salt. As we shall see, various imperatives made such
adaptation impossible for the English. Instead, land reclamation
seemed an attractive solution to several intractable political and
economic problems.
The Anglo-Portuguese transfer, 1661e1665
The vague nature of Bombay's geography and place names was
insignificant while it remained a peripheral location. This changed
in 1661, when Bombay was transferred to the English Crown in the
treaty accompanying the marriage of Charles II and Catherine of
Braganza. The EIC had discussed the acquisition for decades, and
Lisbon was unconcerned with giving up such a marginal location.
The transfer came to prove permanently contentious, however, due
to differing geographical definitions. The English saw the map
supplied by the Portuguese during the negotiations as misleading.
A member of the English party who arrived to take over Bombay in
1662 suggested that it encouraged the ‘presumption that [Bombay]
contained from the bay to the north as far as the entrance of Bas-
sein, as also to the east all Trombay’.24 This would mean that the
whole area south of the Vasai Creek, 30 km north of Bombay, was
represented as one island. No known map has ever done so. It may
be that the Portuguese did not submit a chart with the marriage
treaty. An imperial, ornamental collection of maps had been pro-
duced in the 1630s and 1640s for Philip III, with topographical
accuracy not a central concern, and this might have been seen as
more appropriate for the negotiations.25 In any case, the repre-
sentation resulted in a fundamental disagreement over the extent
of Bombay. By the time news of the dispute reached London the
map had already been lost, so it could not be used to argue that
more had been meant in the treaty.
It is clear from the negotiations and events that followed that
the Lisbon court knew little about Bombay's regional context. In
India, both the crown's imperial representatives and the Indo-
Portuguese permanent population were hostile to the transfer.26
The islands were connected in every possible way with the rest of
the Northern Province (in terms of politics, land ownership, reli-
gion, ethnicity, trade and agriculture) and could not be separated
without major consequences. The new viceroy, Antonio de Mello de
Castro, expressed this in clear terms to his king, writing that ‘India
will be lost the same day in which the English nation is settled in
Bombay’.27 He took a hard line, and the English only took posses-
sion of Bombay in 1665 through the pragmatic concessions of their
new leader, Humphrey Cooke. In the 1665 agreement, Cooke
accepted the viceroy's definitions of Bombay. Specifically, it
removed all mention of handing over Bombay's dependencies, an
undefined statement in the marriage treaty; instead, only Bombay
Island was mentioned.28 The island was not defined, but it did not
include the whole area later designated as Bombay. Crucially, it
excluded Mahim, the island that contained the main custom house
in the region and therefore the rights to important duties and
customs.
24
Arnold Brown, 20 September 1662, in: W. Foster, The English Factories in India,
1661e1664, Oxford, 1923, 133.
25
Mombaim, in: Resende, Livro do Estado da India Oriental, 225vd226r. This
representation of Bombay is topographically barely recognisable. It does not cover
the area claimed by the English, but there may have been a misinterpretation of
scale.
26
G.J. Ames, Renascent Empire? The House of Braganza and the Quest for Stability in
Portuguese Monsoon Asia, c. 1640e1683, Amsterdam, 2000, 169e174.
27
Antonio de Mello de Castro to Afonso VI, 5 January 1665, in: Khan, Anglo Por-
tuguese Negotiations, 460.
28
Terms for the transfer of Bombay, 26 February 1664/5, IOR/E/3/28, 268rd283r.
Cooke, however, had no intention of keeping to this agreement,
writing that ‘now [that] I have the possession [I] shall observe no
more [of the Portuguese viceroy's] articles than what is conve-
nient’.29 He immediately started to contest the Portuguese claim to
Mahim. His argument rested on the assumption that the two places
were the same island: ‘They would have Mahim and Bombaim to be
two several islands, but cannot well make it out, I never took boat to
pass our men when I took the possession of it, 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’.30 Cooke quickly took possession
of Mahim. The viceroy objected, arguing that the ability to pass on
foot did not confer English sovereignty. He wrote to his king, with
an edge of desperation, that ‘if this is conceded your Majesty will be
unable to defend the right to the other northern islands, as at low
tide it is possible to go from Bombay to Salsette’.31 This had no effect
since his superiors in Lisbon did not want to disrupt the new Anglo-
Portuguese alliance, and nothing was done to win back Mahim.
The 1660s, therefore, saw geographical understandings of
Bombay suddenly take on a central importance. English pre-
conceptions of Bombay saw it as a much larger island. This was
based on the EIC's nautical observations from the 1620s and
confusing and misleading treaty negotiations. The realities of
Bombay's environment confounded these expectations, but it
became essential to maintain the viewpoint that Bombay was one
island. As Cooke discovered, doing so effectively combated
competing Portuguese arguments and secured more territory for
the English. This ensured that Bombay was to some extent a
cohesive territorial unit even though the fact that more land was
not transferred became a source of bitterness for decades. The
question of whether Mahim was a separate island, however, was
kept alive for many decades by the Portuguese. These disputes
coincided with the EIC's growing interest in land reclamation.
The build-up to reclamation, 1661e1704
The title of this article borrows a phrase used by Samuel T.
Sheppard in 1932, who wrote that the first reclamation proposal in
1668 began ‘the still unfinished work of making Bombay Island’.32
What Sheppard did not appreciate was that Bombay Island already
existed in the minds of the English in 1668, long before reclamation
was to physically create the island. Cooke deliberately attempted to
enforce this geographical conception in his efforts to secure terri-
tory. Such a process has been observed by Bowden, who describes
deliberate and formal attempts in early colonial America to erase
existing conceptions in favour of those that suited the colonisers'
interests.33 Bowden examines small social groups that are not
analogous to the EIC, but the formalisation of the geographical
conception of Bombay Island is similar to the contemporaneous
developments in North America that he describes. This section will
examine this formalisation and relate it to the project of land
reclamation.
In 1668 the crown transferred the islands to the EIC. The com-
pany was headed in London by a Court of Committees, consisting of
directors who established a council of employees in Bombay under
a governor. They maintained Cooke's position that Mahim was part
29
Humphrey Cooke to the Earl of Arlington, 3 March 1664/5, in: Khan, Anglo
Portuguese Negotiations, 466.
30
Cooke to Arlington, 23 December 1665, in: Khan, Anglo Portuguese Negotiations,
475.
31
Mello de Castro to Afonso VI, 5 January 1666, in: Edwardes and Campbell,
Gazetteer of Bombay City, 52.
32
S.T. Sheppard, Bombay, Bombay, 1932, 60.
33
Bowden, The invention of American tradition.
 T. Riding / Journal of Historical Geography 59 (2018) 27e39
of Bombay, arguing that it had been considered as such under the
Portuguese.34 This was not the case, as we have seen. In the EIC's
correspondence Bombay is consistently described and considered
as one island. Colaba and Old Woman's Island were generally
excluded from Bombay Island, but there are several maps that
depict the whole archipelago as united.35 Bombay Island became a
geographical marker used to designate the colony and its territory.
It did not escape EIC servants, of course, that the central space of
this island was underwater, and the idea of reclamation was first
put forward in 1668.36 Gerald Aungier, who became governor the
next year, strongly advocated the project to his superiors. A major
reason for this interest in environmental change was the vulnera-
bility of the fledgling colony. The intended role for Bombay within
the EIC's wider network was to act as a secure location. It was to be
a magazine in times of war and a safe harbour for the wintering of
ships.37 Once it was fortified, the headquarters of the presidency
could be moved from Surat, and it was hoped that trade would
follow.38 Bombay was particularly unsuited for this role. We have
already seen that its existing agricultural and economic system was
geared towards the wider Northern Province, from which it was
now cut off. The Portuguese retained their neighbouring posses-
sions and frequently banned the exporting of provisions to Bombay.
Furthermore, the region was unstable due to the rise of the Maratha
Empire, which acquired the mainland opposite Bombay Harbour
from the Mughal Empire in the 1670s. The EIC had close links to the
Mughals, but had to engage in a balancing act between the two
empires due to the Marathas' proximity to Bombay. This unstable
situation led to encroachments into Bombay Harbour by both
empires, culminating in an invasion of Bombay by Siddi Yaqut Khan
d the Mughal admiral, referred to as the Siddi d in 1689. Though
Bombay was retained, the EIC rarely had secure relations with their
neighbouring Portuguese, Maratha and Mughal powers. This saw
them frequently resorting to importing food from the Malabar
Coast over the following century, leading to consistently high food
prices that proved a barrier to much sought-after immigration.
Bombay's Indo-Portuguese landowning class retained its hold on
the islands' land for coconut exports and was hostile to agricultural
changes. The archipelago was in any case too small to support the
existing population, let alone the intended growth of the town.
Land reclamation was seen as a potential solution to these
problems. As Bombay Council put it in 1672, reclaimed lands would
‘produce a vast quantity of rice yearly, which will … put us in a
condition to maintain the island with provisions of our own … so
that we shall not be [beholden] to our neighbours’.39 This was
initially a far more significant motivation than that of improving
health. In fact, although the high mortality rate of Europeans in
Bombay was an immediate issue, this was not connected to the
inundated areas during Aungier's governorship. The first connec-
tion between health and reclamation was raised by the directors in
1679, and their concern was that draining the area would render
34
Bombay to Surat, 13 March 1675/6, IOR/G/3/7, pt. 2, 27.
35
Edward Barlow, The Maner of the port & harbour of Bumbay, c. 1670, in: C.
Fawcett, The English Factories in India, 1670e1677, volume 1, Oxford, 1936, 16; Hack,
A Description of Bombay, in: Manuscript describeing the coasts of India, 13rd14v;
John Seller, A draught of Bombay, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris, CPL GE SH
18E PF 207 DIV 8 P 1 RES. In either case, Colaba and Old Woman's Island were
always seen as united with each other.
36
Surat to London, 2 November 1668, in: Foster, English Factories in India,
1668e1669, 78.
37
London to Surat, 28 October 1685, IOR/E/3/91, 5v.
38
Surat to London, 3 February 1671/2, Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai
[hereafter MSA], Surat outward letter book no. 1A, 98.
39
Bombay to London, 21 December 1672, IOR/G/3/6, pt. 2, 37. This opinion was
repeated on 15 December 1673; pt. 4, 27.
40
London to Surat, 28 February 1678/9, IOR/E/3/89, 54r.
33
Bombay less, not more healthy.40 It was not until 1684 that it was
hoped that reclamation would improve the colony's health, and the
idea was pushed by the directors, not their servants in Bombay.41 It
then became an important motivation, complementing the existing
reasons for reclamation.
Aungier employed an engineer, Herman Bake, who prepared a
map of the island specifically designed to highlight the inundated
areas and the inlets that caused them.42 Bake delivered the map to
the directors in person, arriving in London in 1675.43 His presence
coincided with a number of factors that served to solidify the EIC's
understanding of Bombay's geography. All the information the di-
rectors had received from their servants in India suggested un-
equivocally that Bombay was one island. The closest to an alternate
interpretation was made by Aungier in 1673, who wrote of ‘the
Island Bombay’ that ‘by the breaches & overflowings of the sea in
several places, it seems to make four small islands in spring tides’.44
He may have been aware that Portuguese maps showed Bombay as
four islands, and was trying to explain this discrepancy to his
superiors.
Bake arrived just as the EIC were presenting their arguments
against the Portuguese to Charles II. In 1674 they had petitioned the
crown to intervene in the disputes taking place with the Portu-
guese. The main dispute had been over customs rights rather than
competing definitions of the islands, but in India matters escalated
to the point where the Portuguese were directly questioning
whether Bombay was a cohesive territorial unit. In 1676 the captain
general of the north, the regional Portuguese authority, took up the
issue of Mahim, which he described as ‘a distinct island by itself and
no part of Bombay’. He demanded its surrender and mustered men
at Salsette, threatening to invade.45 Though he did not act on this
threat, when the directors heard of it in 1677 they formulated ar-
guments to show that Mahim was part of Bombay. Interestingly,
they avoided specifically stating that the two places were one is-
land, instead arguing that they had always been one political unit,
and ‘that both those places are, in the general style and way of
speaking, comprehended in the name of Bombaim’. They
acknowledged that they were divided by the tides, but argued that
‘when any spot is separated from the rest (as Mahim itself seems to
have been by the tides) every storm may beget a new title, and his
Majesty's dominion of the land may be destroyed by what he holds
in the sea’.46
The matter was referred to the Committee for Trade and Plan-
tations, who were to examine the treaty and assess exactly what
rights the crown and the company had over the islands. In order to
carry out their work they acquired a map of Bombay, now included
in the Blathwayt Atlas (Fig. 4). Very few English maps of Bombay
had been made by this point, and none of them were printed or
widely available. The committee, therefore, acquired a copy of a
Portuguese map, showing Bombay as four islands.47 The map bears
the marks of the committee's workings, presumably as they
struggled to reconcile this depiction with the company's de-
scriptions. Ultimately they rejected the Portuguese vision which
41
London to Surat, 7 April 1684, IOR/E/3/90, 169r.
42
Bombay to London, 15 December 1673, IOR/G/3/6, pt. 4, 28e29. The map has
not survived.
43
Bombay to London, 16 December 1674, IOR/G/3/7, 12.
44
Bombay to London, 15 December 1673, IOR/G/3/6, pt. 4, 24. The four islands
were Colaba, Bombay, Mahim and Worli, the same four depicted in Portuguese
maps.
45
Bombay to Surat, 16 March and 13 March 1675/6, IOR/G/3/7, pt. 2, 29, 27.
46
The EIC's answer to the Portuguese Ambassador's memorial, 4 September 1677,
in: Khan, Anglo Portuguese Negotiations, 542, 543.
47
J.D. Black suggested that the Blathwayt map was copied from a Portuguese
original, in: The Blathwayt Atlas: Commentary, Providence, 1975, 214.
34 T. Riding / Journal of Historical Geography 59 (2018) 27e39

Fig. 4. Detail of Bombay Harbor, 1678.

Source: used with permission from the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, Providence, Blathwayt Atlas, 43.

Fig. 5. Detail of A New Mapp Of the Island of Bombay and Sallset.

Source: used with permission from The British Library Board, BL, MS 57030(4).

the map represented. Their conclusions were fully supportive of the Cooke's 1665 settlement.
company's claims, and led to Charles II officially repudiating The EIC and the English government, therefore, emerged out of
 T. Riding / Journal of Historical Geography 59 (2018) 27e39
the disputes of the 1670s with an official position on Bombay's
geography, one that had been informed and shaped by their agents
on the ground. Pre-existing interpretations of multiple islands were
replaced by a vision of one, united Bombay Island. The years that
followed saw the first surviving English maps of Bombay, and they
affirm the conclusions of the EIC and the committee. The most
significant of these is John Thornton's in 1685 (Fig. 5).48 As one of
the first printed maps of Bombay, it proved long-lasting and
influential: there are several copies and variations, and it was still
being described as ‘a new Mapp’ in a 1750s reprint. Thornton styled
himself as the EIC's hydrographer, and though this was never a
formal position, he seems to have had close connections with the
company. He offers little detail of Bombay's land, and the only
indication of the inundated areas is his inclusion of ‘salt ponds’.
These are depicted as orderly rectangles, giving the impression that
they are entirely artificial, rather than taking advantage of Bom-
bay's natural features.
The vision of a united Bombay Island informed company atti-
tudes to reclamation. The inundated area separating the islands
was described as land (variously called drowned, overflown or
waste land). The inlets dividing the islands were called breaches.
This language could not, of course, overcome realities: people
regularly travelled between the different parts of Bombay Island
by boat.49 Such language, however, helped make reclamation
seem eminently plausible: rather than uniting islands by
reclaiming from the sea, the project would simply render the
wasteland in the centre of Bombay Island fit for cultivation. The
difficulty and cost of the project, consequently, was consistently
underestimated.
The directors, nevertheless, were cautious about entering into
such a project given Bombay's already high costs. They hoped
that it could be undertaken by private individuals, rather than on
the company's account.50 This was undoubtedly inspired by the
example of the draining of the fens, which was achieved through
numerous different projects. Indeed, kunbis (agricultural worker
castes) did undertake small-scale reclamation, cultivating the
highest patches of land by raising banks against the sea.51 This
was in line with Indian practices of reclamation for rice pro-
duction.52 Bombay Council had little interest in such work,
believing that substantial and profitable reclamation could only
be achieved by blocking off the archipelago's inlets. They courted
Indian experts to achieve this: in the 1670s the hope was that
some desais from Chaul would undertake it, while in 1708e1711
the company were assured that artisans from Calicut could do
the work.53 Such experts stated to company servants that the
work was possible, but seemed to have a much more realistic
sense of the scale of the project. They were therefore only willing
to take on the risk on terms that were unacceptable to the
company. Non-EIC agents, whether European or Indian,
conceived of reclaimed land as the property of the reclaimer. The
48
The version reproduced here is from the 1700s, identical to the 1685 version
but with an updated title.
49
Murphy, Remarks on the history, 138.
50
London to Surat, 5 March 1674/5, IOR/E/3/88, 166.
51
Bombay to Surat, 8 March 1676/7, IOR/G/3/8, 21; Bombay to London, 7
December 1679, IOR/E/3/40, 185r. Much of this work was destroyed during the
Siddi's siege of Bombay in 1689; Bombay to London, 12 January 1697/8, IOR/G/3/14,
pt. 4, 14.
52
M.N. Pearson, Littoral society: the concept and the problems, Journal of World
History 17 (2006) 361e362.
53
Bombay to Surat, 1 December 1676, IOR/G/3/7, pt. 2, 72e73; London to Bombay,
20 April 1708, IOR/E/3/96, 183r; Bombay to London, 19 January 1710/11, IOR/E/4/
449, 154. Desai was a widespread title that indicated administrative or honorary
authority. Unfortunately the EIC's archive gives no more indication of who these
individuals were.
35
directors, on the other hand, maintained the principal that
Bombay's land, submerged or otherwise, should not be alienated
from the company. They were only prepared to lease recovered
land for ninety-nine years, terms which failed to attract any
investors.54
Meanwhile, the dispute over Mahim resurfaced. In 1681 the
captain general once again mustered men opposite Mahim,
claiming the island for the Portuguese.55 Bombay Council respon-
ded by asking him ‘If a house should be given you [would you] not
account all the rooms in it yours, why then will you pretend to
Mahim’?56 The dispute died down, but the idea of land reclamation
gained even more favour. From 1684 the directors began to give
detailed advice on how to undertake it, though still with the
intention that it be done by private individuals.57 Unfortunately this
coincided with a period of turmoil in Bombay, culminating in the
Siddi's invasion in 1689, which the settlement took years to recover
from. The directors continued to encourage the project, but it was
not until 1704, when Nicolas Waite took over as governor, that
momentum started gathering again in Bombay. Once again, pres-
sures from their Portuguese neighbours would provide a major
motivation for environmental change. This time, it would be
decisive.
Reclamation achieved, 1704e1728
The first decade of the eighteenth century saw Bombay's
reclamation move from discussion to reality. Waite explored the
possibilities of the project immediately after taking office, esti-
mating that blocking the largest inlet between Worli and Bombay,
called the Great Breach, would cost £1500.58 These steps were
being taken during a troubled period in Bombay's relations with
the Portuguese. For several years the captain general had limited
the supply of provisions to Bombay, pushing food prices to
dangerous levels. Waite exacerbated these tensions by enforcing
the Mahim customs, breaking the informal truce under which
each side ignored the other's custom house. In December 1706 he
discovered that Mahim's inhabitants had been accepting Portu-
guese passports for their vessels, the wording of which suggested
that Mahim was part of Salsette's jurisdiction, ‘distinct from
Bombay’. Waite was concerned that this practice could support
the old Portuguese claims ‘that Mahim was a distinct island from
Bombay … though it is visible to every eye that will see, was never
yet separated by nature’.59
It is doubtful whether the Portuguese were really reigniting
their claims to Mahim Island: they had not done so for more than
two decades, instead focusing on shoring up the customs rights
of Bandra, the settlement opposite Mahim, and claiming juris-
diction over the inlet dividing the two. This incident, however,
demonstrates the paranoia of the EIC's servants, and the extent
to which they were still very much aware of the idea that Mahim
was a separate island. William Aislabie, who was to start the
reclamation work in three years' time, was present on the island
as deputy governor during this dispute. EIC servants saw these
actions as provocative, and generally saw their neighbours as a
major barrier to the colony's prosperity. The directors,
conversely, had consistently ordered that their servants only
54
London to Surat, 8 March 1675/6, IOR/E/3/88, 273.
55
Bombay consultation, 13 May 1681, IOR/G/3/2, pt. 6, 8e9.
56
Bombay to Captain General Rodrigo De Costa, 2 June 1681, IOR/G/3/9, pt. 2,
47.
57
London to Surat, 7 April 1684, IOR/E/3/90, 167r.
58
Bombay to London, 1 February 1704/5, IOR/E/4/449, 15.
59
Bombay consultation, 19 December 1706, IOR/P/341/2, pt. 3, 70.
36 T. Riding / Journal of Historical Geography 59 (2018) 27e39

were at peace.60 Waite and Aislabie, therefore, may have seen

land reclamation as a way of countering Portuguese claims
without any overt political act.
At some time between 1709 and early 1710, Aislabie ordered
reclamation work to begin.61 It was to be undertaken by the com-
pany, something which he had not received permission for: the
directors had maintained the position that it should be attempted
by private individuals.62 They had pushed the project for so long,
however, that they welcomed the move.63 The work began with the
inlets to the north of the islands d with Mahim. There are very few
details in the archive, but it consisted of constructing five em-
bankments with sluices to allow water to drain from the land at low
tide (Fig. 6).64 By March 1711 three had been finished: two at the
north end of Parel and one between Parel and Mahim. By January
1712 the embankment between Mahim and Worli was also
completed.65 This left only the Great Breach between Worli and
Malabar Hill, but attempts to close this failed, and it was abandoned
by Charles Boone when he took over as governor in 1715. Boone
found the work on the breaches to be ‘in a lamentable condition’
due to ‘improper methods’, and he spent his governorship rein-
forcing the existing works.66 The work of the 1710s, therefore,
connected Mahim to Parel and Worli.
Land reclamation was not explicitly connected to the disputes
with the Portuguese in company correspondence. However, after
Mahim was physically united with Bombay the nature of the debate
changed. It weakened the Portuguese legal position, making it
impractical for the Portuguese to claim Mahim or its customs. In
1716 General Dom Jo~ ao Fernandes de Almeida made certain capit-
ulations, essentially withdrawing any Portuguese claim to Mahim.67
A new embankment at the Great Breach, proposed by Elias
Bates, was begun in 1720. Though Bates originally predicted it
would take nine months, it was not finished until 1728.68 A Hindu
engineer, Ramji Shivji Purvoe, was involved in the work intermit-
tently throughout this period.69 It is likely that he, rather than
Bates, was in charge of the work on a daily basis, overseeing the
mixed labour of sepoys and lascars (Indian soldiers and sailors,
respectively), itinerant workers from Maharashtra and Gujarat, and
local Kolis, a littoral fishing society indigenous to the islands. The
reclamation work therefore combined European and non-European
labour and knowledge, much in the same vein as V.S. Candiani has
recently outlined for the Desagu€ e in Mexico City.70 A crucial
distinction between these two cases is that in Bombay the recla-
mation did not seek to replace indigenous with European agricul-
tural practices. The recovered land was only suitable for rice
production, which required the labour and expertise of the kunbis.
It proved difficult, however, to induce them to undertake this
cultivation. The land recovered in the 1710s had been parcelled out
under the toka tenure system, by which the produce was divided
between the company d which owned the land d and the kunbi

61
Bombay to London, 11 February 1709/10, IOR/E/4/449, 138.
62
London to Bombay, 24 March 1709/10, IOR/E/3/96, 371v.
63
London to Bombay, 17 April 1711, IOR/E/3/97, 114r.
64
Much of the information for Fig. 6 is derived from Thomas Dickinson's survey in
the 1810s; Dickinson, The Island of Bombay, 1812e1816, BL, Maps 57030(2).
65
Bombay to London, 1 March 1710/11 and 14 January 1711/12, IOR/E/4/459, 10.
66
Charles Boone to London, 12 January, and Bombay to London, 14 January 1715/
16, IOR/E/4/449, 218, 219.
67
Fig. 6. Bombay after reclamation. F.C. Danvers, The Portuguese in India, Being a History of the Rise and Decline of
their Eastern Empire, volume 2, London, 1966, 380; Bombay to London, 7 January
react defensively to Portuguese actions, since the two countries 1716/17, IOR/E/4/449, 245.
68
Bombay consultation, 17 January 1727/8, IOR/P/341/6, 683. Reinforcement of
the work, additionally, carried on for years: Bombay to London, 22 September 1732,
IOR/E/4/450, 444.
60 69
The only exception was the period 1686e1689, when the directors encouraged Bombay consultation, 26 July 1723, IOR/P/341/5, pt. 3, 149.
70
Bombay to invade Salsette. See IOR/E/3/91, 49r, 163v, 168r, 297r. Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land.
 T. Riding / Journal of Historical Geography 59 (2018) 27e39 37

cultivators and tenants.71 The kunbis refused to take up the ten-

ancies, judging that the land would require too much labour over
too extended a period to be profitable. It was only in 1723 that they
agreed to do so, due to Boone persuading them ‘partly by good
words and partly by threats’.72
In most respects the reclamation was a failure. Between 1737
and 1781 the company made around 94,000 rupees in revenues
from paddy fields in the recovered area, an insignificant amount
that was far smaller than the costs of reclamation: the work of
closing the Great Breach alone between 1720 and 1728 cost
320,000 rupees.73 A substantial area, as indicated in Fig. 6,
remained uncultivated since it was inundated with sea water dur-
ing the monsoon. The reclamation failed to meet Bombay's food
requirements, which only grew as the town started to expand. The
EIC generally saw the project as a costly mistake, writing that they
would never have consented to the work if they had known the true
costs.74 Over time, however, this mistake would be transformed in
the minds of British colonialists into an ‘epic struggle’, unparalleled
in ‘the history of British achievement overseas’.75 The final section
will examine this mythologising, which emerged alongside the
notion that Bombay was once seven islands.

Heptanesia: the emergence of the seven islands model

We have seen how the English contested existing un-

derstandings of the Bombay archipelago, creating Bombay Island as
a designation. This island was largely made a physical reality be-
tween 1710 and 1728. How, then, did the British perception shift so
decisively, to the point where Edwardes could talk in 1902 of ‘the
historical and unassailable fact that Bombay was originally d not
one island d but seven separate and amorphous isles’?76 The
notion of the seven islands of Bombay still has a powerful appeal in
modern scholarship and popular culture. Its origins lie in the
nineteenth century, in both colonial science and in Bombay's
shifting geopolitical climate.
Reclamation had failed to resolve Bombay's fundamental food
insecurity. This continuing problem became a major motivation for
territorial expansion, as company servants argued that Bombay
required a hinterland to meet its resource requirements.77 The EIC
finally achieved dominance over Bombay Harbour between 1774
and 1782, when the Maratha Empire ceded a number of islands,
including Salsette. Much more substantial territorial gains followed
in the early nineteenth century. The reclamation's purpose of
creating agricultural land and revenue was largely irrelevant in this
new context. Instead, a new imperative had taken over: that of
meeting the requirements of urban expansion. Once Bombay's
population began to expand exponentially, previous reclamation
work took on a retrospective importance.
In the early nineteenth century imperialists took an increasing
interest in Bombay's history. It was noted that Marathi bakhars,
detailing the pre-Portuguese history of the region, described
Mahim and Bombay as separate islands.78 This came as something Fig. 7. The Island of Bombay and Colaba. Source: used with permission from the British
of a surprise, given that the English had thought of Bombay as one Library Board, Materials Towards a Statistical Account, volume 3, 648.

island for almost three hundred years. The disputes with the Por-
71
Edwardes and Campbell, Gazetteer of Bombay City, 348.
72
tuguese regarding Mahim had been largely forgotten: they had
Bombay consultation, 7 June 1723, IOR/P/341/5, pt. 4, 113.
73 been irrelevant since 1739, when the Marathas successfully
Materials Towards a Statistical Account of Bombay, volume 3, Bombay, 1894, 299,
501e503; Elias Bates to Robert Cowan, 23 May 1729, IOR/P/341/6, 1028. This invaded the whole Northern Province. Robert Murphy, a newspaper
roughly equates to £40,000, twenty-six times higher than Waite's 1705 estimate. editor active in Bombay's public life, took up this topic in the 1830s.
74
London to Bombay, 25 March 1724, IOR/E/3/102, 131v. Through examining the etymology of Bombay's place names he
75
Sheppard, Bombay, 60. concluded ‘that the present island consisted originally of four,
76
Edwardes, The Rise of Bombay, 2.
77
Mr. Warden's Selections No. 2, MSA, Miscellaneous Records, 172e173.
78
M.K. Ferishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India till the Year
A.D. 1612, volume 4, trans. by J. Briggs, New Delhi, 17.
38 T. Riding / Journal of Historical Geography 59 (2018) 27e39
which have gradually been united into one’.79 Colaba and Old
Woman's Island, not included in his calculations, would make the
total six.
Murphy also prepared a map to illustrate his hypothesis. This
was not deemed publishable by the Bombay Geographical Society,
but they eventually produced a map ‘constructed from actual survey
and documents of old date in the office of the Collector of Land
Revenue, illustrating and verifying much of Mr. Murphy's theory’.80
This was published in 1843 (Fig. 7). It differs from Murphy's article
in depicting seven islands, not six: Murphy seems to have originally
assumed that Mazagaon and Parel were not separated. This confu-
sion points to the fact that the map was remarkably speculative, but
the theory that Bombay was once a larger number of islands was
given scientific exactitude by numerous studies of the region's ge-
ology throughout the nineteenth century.81 At no point was the
seven island model suggested with confidence, or assigned a spe-
cific period. In 1851 George Buist suggested that when the English
arrived at Bombay, it consisted of either five or six islands. Under
Buist's scheme the Murphy map represented an earlier period,
before a geological upheaval joined some of the islands together.82
Nevertheless, the notion of seven islands took on a life of its
own. They were linked to Heptanesia, a place located in Ptolemy's
Geographia on the west coast of India.83 This claim was based on the
fact that Heptanesia means seven islands, but it was unsubstanti-
ated. Bombay's islands formed part of a wider archipelago of
islands, and could not be understood as a unit of seven until they
were politically united by the EIC.84 Bombay's connection to this
ancient location has been sustained by the enduring popularity of
the Murphy map. It has been ‘the basis of all subsequent map re-
productions’ of Bombay's seven islands.85 It was reprinted in 1894;
a raised relief version of it was produced in the early twentieth
century; and there are numerous modern variations.86 Edwardes'
description of Heptanesia as ‘amorphous’, therefore, is in a sense no
longer accurate: it has, through the Murphy map, taken on a uni-
versally accepted shape.87
Coinciding with the map's continual reproduction, the
assumption has grown that Bombay consisted of seven islands on
the English arrival. In 1933 the Hakluyt Society adapted the map to
illustrate John Burnell's 1710 account of Bombay, embellishing it
with his observations. This was despite the fact that Burnell, like all
79
Murphy, Remarks on the history, 139.
80
Murphy, Remarks on the history, 139.
81
Da Cunha lists these works in The Origin of Bombay, 24e26.
82
G. Buist, Geology of Bombay, in: Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society
from September 1850 to June 1852, Bombay, 1852, 175e176.
83
The claim is often repeated in popular culture, but is also mentioned in academic
accounts; for example, M.D. David, History of Bombay, 1661e1708, Bombay, 1973, 8.
Based on Ptolemy's figures for latitude and longitude, Heptanesia has been identified
as the Vengurla rocks, almost 350 km south of Bombay; C. Abshire, D. Gusev, I.
Papapanagiotou and S. Stafeyev, A mathematical method for visualizing Ptolemy's
India in modern GIS tools, e-Perimetron 11 (2016) 33. Serious scholars in the nine-
teenth century were aware of this, so the origin of the Bombay-Heptanesia myth is
unclear; J.W. McCrindle, Ancient India as described by Ptolemy, London, 1885, 187e188.
84
Da Cunha refuted the Heptanesia hypothesis on similar grounds; The Origin of
Bombay, 23.
85
Ranganathan, Govind Narayan's Mumbai, 315.
86
The relief map is at the Dr. Bahu Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, and is roughly
dated to 1903e1918, http://www.bdlmuseum.org/collections/bombay-history.html,
last accessed 1 September 2016. The Murphy map is often reproduced in modern
publications: for example, David, Bombay, the City of Dreams: A History of the First
City in India, Bombay, 1995, 9; G. Prakash, Mumbai Fables: A History of an Enchanted
City, Princeton, 2010, 32.
87
Edwardes probably intended ‘amorphous’ to refer to the archipelago's geolog-
ical upheavals, but it is a recurring theme: Gillian Tindall wrote of the islands that it
was ‘almost as if, like Prospero's Isle, they had been insubstantial, assuming
different forms for different visitors'; City of Gold: The Biography of Bombay, London,
1992, 25.
other English observers, wrote as if he was describing one island.88
Placing Murphy's map within the timespan of English Bombay
implies that the process of uniting the islands was an entirely hu-
man achievement. This assumption has had a lasting legacy, with
academic accounts regularly assuming that Bombay was seven
islands in 1661.89 Reclamation, additionally, continues to inspire a
certain degree of awe, with Gillian Tindall writing that in Bombay
‘man has created far more than he has obliterated … he has in fact
assembled new landscape, by a series of prestidigatory tricks, over
the course of time, inventing it and inventing it from the very slight
original material d from marshes, salt flats, isolated islands, open
sea, seemingly from the air itself’.90
Praise of the work was not limited to western accounts. Marathi
print culture and shlokas (songs) from the nineteenth century
approved of the environmental change. One bakhar argues that
since the work led to the improvement of the island it was an act of
dharma, concluding that ‘even though they are mlechha [non-
Indians], they have been able to gain religious merit’.91 The same
account narrates a much-repeated story of the role of the goddess
Lakshmi in the environmental change, reframing the reclamation
within Hindu religious understandings. The story attempts to
explain the failure of the first ventures in the 1710s and the sub-
sequent successes: it was only the recovery of Lakshmi's effigy from
the Great Breach that ensured that the embankment would
succeed.
Just like the British, however, Bombay's lively Marathi print
culture in the nineteenth century was the product of a prosperous
immigrant population that benefitted from the city's expansion.
The Koli people may have taken a different view of the trans-
formations. Their salt production was unaffected by the reclama-
tion, but they fished in the waters between the archipelago and
almost certainly suffered from the changes.92 The Indo-Portuguese
landholders, who controlled the majority of Bombay's land in the
early period, would have seen their power diminish as the company
opened up new land that could be managed directly. The EIC did so
through collaboration with the kunbi caste, who were forced to
cultivate the unprofitable reclaimed land. The kunbis attempted to
reap some benefit by making their own claims to proprietorship
and carrying out land transactions, successfully flouting English law
well into the nineteenth century.93 Eventually, however, they were
marginalised by the expanding city. These alternative experiences
of the reclamation have been absent in the city's history and are
extremely hard to reconstruct.
Murphy's image of seven islands retains its relevance, of
course, because land reclamation has continued in modern
Mumbai. This has led to the story of reclamation being one of
urban growth, which perhaps helps to explain the most wide-
spread misconception about early reclamation: that it began un-
der Governor William Hornby in 1782e1784. Joydeep Sen has
traced this assumption back to nineteenth century accounts.94 It is
88
One island, that is, excluding Colaba; J. Burnell, Bombay in the Days of Queen
Anne, London, 1933, 90.
89
For example, M. Kosambi, Commerce, conquest and the colonial city: role of
locational factors in rise of Bombay, Economic and Political Weekly 20 (1985) 33; P.
Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture
in Bombay, 1890e1920, Aldershot, 2007, 17; P. MacDougall, Naval Resistance to
Britain's Growing Power in India, 1660e1800: The Saffron Banner and the Tiger of
Mysore, Woodbridge, 2014, 47.
90
Tindall, City of Gold, 25.
91
Ranganathan, Govind Narayan's Mumbai, 73e77, 84.
92
Edwardes, The Rise of Bombay, 226. Salt production was unaffected because the
salt pans were concentrated on the east side of Parel, not in the reclaimed area; see
Fig. 6.
93
Edwardes and Campbell, Gazetteer of Bombay City, 359e362.
94
J. Sen, The goddess, the breach and the scholars, Viewpoint 104 (2014) 9.
 T. Riding / Journal of Historical Geography 59 (2018) 27e39
repeated in modern academic works, though sometimes qualified
by the statement that small-scale reclamation took place before-
hand.95 Not only, as we have seen, did extensive work take place
from 1710, but there is no evidence that any reclamation work was
undertaken under Hornby. Nothing is mentioned in the EIC's re-
cords aside from small repairs to the embankments in 1776, and
Thomas Dickinson's 1816 map shows the Great Breach in much
the same condition as in maps from the 1760s.96 The embankment
blocking the breach began to be called the Hornby Vellard in the
nineteenth century, and the name has caused lasting confusion.
The effect of shifting the reclamation work to the 1780s is to link it
to a period of prosperity and expansion. This was when Bombay
City was bursting over its boundaries. Reclamation, therefore, is
presented as part of Bombay's urban history, in which a rapidly
expanding population required more space.97 While this is true
for the reclamations of the nineteenth century, this article has
demonstrated that the context for the earlier projects could not
have been more different.
Conclusions
This article has explicated a web of myth and misconception
that has built up around Bombay's land reclamation. At the centre
of this confusion is the issue of how to define the archipelago's
topography. The purpose of the Murphy map was to mark out areas
of land that were permanently above sea level, thereby identifying
distinct islands. In leaving the intervening spaces blank, indistin-
guishable from the sea, it conceals complex topographical realities.
It is easy, from this map, to say that Bombay was reclaimed from the
sea. Such a statement is a simplification, however, since the area
reclaimed was neither sea nor land, but something in between. In
the early modern period, this fact was concealed through the
blanket designation of Bombay Island. This supported the English
claim in their dispute with the Portuguese, namely that Bombay
was a coherent territorial unit, and helped to make reclamation
seem more plausible. By the nineteenth century the political im-
peratives that encouraged such a viewpoint had disappeared.
Instead, understanding Bombay as seven distinct islands served to
95
D. Karmarkar, Towards a colonial urban space of Bombay: a perspective in
historical geography, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 67 (2007) 7; Pra-
kash, Mumbai Fables, 44; N. Murphy, Evolutionary Mumbai: making of the ‘Island
City’, 2013, http://www.noel-murphy.com/rotch/2013/08/19/evolutionary-mumbai-
making-of-the-island-city, last accessed 5 August 2016.
96
Bombay consultation, 30 January 1776, in: Materials Towards a Statistical Ac-
count, volume 2, 401; Dickinson, The Island of Bombay; French Plan of Bombay Island,
1767, and Niebuhr's Map, 1764, in: Materials Towards a Statistical Account, volume 3,
129, 648.
97
N. Murphy, Evolutionary Mumbai.
39
glorify reclamation as a colonial project. Understanding this pro-
cess cautions against generalisations in the field, such as the
widespread distinction between urban and agricultural reclama-
tion or native and non-native actors: in Bombay, reclamation
seamlessly crossed over the distinction between urban and agri-
cultural land uses and derived from a conflict between two non-
native groups.
The imperial period then co-opted Bombay's reclamation,
relocating it to the 1780s and stripping it of its early modern
context. This needs to be highlighted in order to counter the his-
toriographical focus on the nineteenth century and assumption of
early modern passivity. While environmental intervention accel-
erated in the nineteenth century, early modern projects were
capable of inflicting dramatic transformations.
By revealing the distinctly early modern motivations of Bom-
bay's land reclamation, we can see how geographical conceptions
could be a driving factor in environmental transformation, just as
landscape concepts and discourses related to material landscape
transformations in the Americas. Moreover, while fundamental
cultural, religious or philosophical beliefs, or deep-rooted land-use
practices of colonisers remain fundamental, the case of Bombay
demonstrates the impact that localised factors have on geosophy.
England and Portugal shared roughly similar cultural un-
derstandings and a European tradition of land reclamation, yet the
political imperatives of these two colonial powers resulted in
distinct understandings of Bombay.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Miles Ogborn, Simon Layton and Martyn
Frampton for their generous comments and suggestions on a first
draft of this paper. I am also grateful to my university, Queen Mary,
for funding me through my PhD and funding a research trip to
Mumbai. I presented several versions of this paper in London in
2015, so my thanks to the IHR's Corporate History Seminar and
Colonial/Postcolonial Workshop, and my own university's History
and Geography Schools for hosting those early readings and
providing valuable feedback.