Place · East India Company fort · India
Bombay Castle
Also known as Fort Bombay, Bombay Fort, Castella de Aguada, Bombay Presidency
The fort at the south end of Bombay island, begun by the Portuguese and rebuilt by the East India Company after the island came to the English crown in Catherine of Braganza's dowry of 1661 and was leased to the Company in 1668. The western headquarters moved here from Surat in 1687.
- Date
- 1661–None
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 18.930, 72.844
Worth knowing
The Company paid ten pounds a year in rent for a harbour it would run an empire from. The island was a set of seven marshy outcrops; the causeways and reclamations that joined them into one landmass took two centuries, and the Fort walls came down in the 1860s.
Connections (5)
- Power passed toVasai (Bassein) Fort
Bombay was a minor dependency of Vasai until Charles II received it in Catherine of Braganza's dowry in 1661; the Company leased it in 1668 for ten pounds a year and moved its western headquarters there from Surat in 1687. Vasai fell to the Marathas fifty-two years later. The Portuguese north was divided between the two powers that inherited India.
- Contemporary capital withFort St George, Chennai
Madras and Bombay were the two subordinate presidencies under Calcutta after 1774, each with its own army, currency and civil service until the nineteenth-century consolidations. The three-presidency structure is why British India had three high courts, three armies until 1895 and three quite different urban elites — and why Indian politics grew separately in each before it combined.
- Power passed toSurat
The Company moved its western headquarters from Surat to Bombay in 1687 after Maratha raids and Mughal customs disputes, and because Bombay was English sovereign territory rather than a licensed factory. Surat kept more trade than Bombay for another forty years but lost the government, and with the government went the shipping.
- Succession in timeVictorian Gothic & Art Deco, Mumbai
The fort walls came down in the 1860s and the Victorian Gothic seafront went up on the cleared ground, paid for by the cotton boom of the American Civil War years. Bombay's two great building phases are one act of demolition apart: a defended Company town becomes an open imperial city in a single decade, and the Art Deco frontage of the 1930s completes the same reclamation.
- Site withinMumbai
Bombay Castle lies within Mumbai — the two sites sit about 1 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Bombay Castle is one of the specific sites that give Mumbai its layered character, and reads differently when seen as a stop within the larger city rather than as an isolated monument on an open map. The surrounding neighbourhoods, roads and other heritage ensembles belong to the same single urban fabric.
On these journeys
- Early modern ports & companies
- Cities through time — many civilisations, one place
- British India — 1600 to 1947
Sources
Wikipedia, “Bombay Castle”. The Royal Charter of 27 March 1668 transferring Bombay to the East India Company; S.M. Edwardes, The Rise of Bombay (1902).
Open Bombay Castle in the repository →