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LARGEST CITY OF INDIA, MUMBAI
Mumbai was formerly known as Bombay, is the capital of the state of Maharashtra, and the most populous city of India, with an estimated population of about 13 million. Mumbai is located on Salsette Island, off the west coast of Maharashtra. The city has a deep natural harbour and the port handles over half of India's passenger traffic and a significant amount of cargo.Mumbai is the commercial and entertainment capital of India, and houses important financial institutions, such as the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), the National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) and the corporate headquarters of many Indian companies. The city is home to India's Hindi film and television industry, known asBollywood. Mumbai is also one of the rare cities to accommodate a national park, the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, within its city limits.
Present-day Mumbai was originally an archipelago of seven islands. In the 3rd century BCE, the islands formed part of the Maurya Empire, ruled by the Buddhist emperor, Asoka. In 1534, the Portuguese appropriated the islands from Bahadur Shah of Gujarat, naming them Bom Baia, Portuguese for "good bay". The population quickly rose from 10,000 in 1661, to 60,000 in 1675; In 1687, the British East India Company transferred its headquarters from Surat to Bombay. The city eventually became the headquarters of the Bombay Presidency.
From 1817 onwards, the city was reshaped with large civil engineering projects aimed at merging all the islands in the archipelago into a single amalgamated mass. The population of the city swelled to one million by 1906, making it the second largest in India after Calcutta. After India's independence in 1947, it became the capital of Bombay State. In the 1950 the city expanded to its present limits by incorporating parts of Salsette island which lay to the north.
After 1955, when the State of Bombay was being reorganised along linguistic lines into the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat, there was a demand that the city be constituted as an autonomous city-state. However, the Samyukta Maharashtra movement opposed this, and insisted that Mumbai be declared the capital of Maharashtra. The late 1970s witnessed a construction boom and a significant influx of migrants, which saw Bombay overtake Calcutta as India’s most populous city. A few months later, on March 12, simultaneous bombings at several city landmarks by the Mumbai underworld killed around three hundred people. In 1995, the city was renamed Mumbai by the Shiv Sena party government of Maharashtra, in keeping with their policy of renaming colonial institutions after historic local appellations.
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