Mumbai

Mumbai was built on seven islands, later joined by landfill into a single peninsula that juts south into the Arabian Sea. This geographic fact determines the city's material culture: it has always been defined by what comes in and goes out by water. The port, the fishing community, the cotton trade — all of it is maritime.

The Koli people were the original inhabitants of the seven islands. Their fishing settlements — called koliwadas — still exist at Versova, Madh, Malad, and Colaba, surrounded now by apartment towers and traffic. The Koli material culture: wooden boats, woven nets, terracotta figures for the Narali Purnima festival, and a distinctive cooking tradition.

The Koli fishing community of Mumbai has maintained a material culture adapted to the sea across centuries. Boat carpentry — the construction and maintenance of fishing vessels — is the primary male craft. The boats are wooden, flat-bottomed, fitted with outboard motors now but built by hand using local timber knowledge.

Koli women weave fishing nets from nylon twine — replacing the older cotton nets — in a process that hasn't changed structurally in centuries. The net is the essential material object of Koli fishing life: its construction, maintenance, and repair are all community craft activities.

• Boat carpentry
• Net weaving
• Coconut craft
• Terracotta votive figures
• Koli textile (padar)
• Narali Purnima ritual objects

Dharavi is one of Asia's most densely populated neighbourhoods and simultaneously one of India's most productive manufacturing districts. Its economy is not informal — it is differently formal: structured by community networks, specialised by lane and block, and producing goods that enter mainstream commercial supply chains. Leather goods, garments, recycled plastics, pottery — all made here, all leaving daily in trucks.

The pottery cluster at Kumbharwada produces terracotta objects primarily for festivals — Diwali diyas, Ganesh Chaturthi idols, and decorative pots. The potters are from the Kumbhar community, originally from Gujarat, and they have maintained their craft in this location since the community settled here in the 19th century.

• Kumbhar pottery
• Diwali diyas
• Festival terracotta
• Leather goods
• Garment stitching
• Recycling craft

The mill district of central Mumbai — Girangaon, "village of mills" — once held 58 cotton textile mills and employed over 250,000 workers. The mills transformed raw cotton from Gujarat and Maharashtra into cloth that was sold across India and exported to Britain. From the 1850s to the 1980s, this was the industrial engine of the city.

The mills closed gradually through the 1980s and 1990s, unable to compete with cheaper power-loom production in Surat and Bhiwandi. The mill lands were redeveloped into offices and malls. But the textile knowledge did not disappear — it migrated to the unorganised garment sector, to the small workshops of Dharavi, to the fabric markets of Kalbadevi and Mangaldas Market that still sell textiles from across India.

Mumbai's craft markets are a compressed index of the city's trading connections. Chor Bazaar in Bhendi Bazaar holds antique furniture, colonial-era objects, old clocks and cameras, and the remnants of a dozen material cultures. Kalbadevi and Zaveri Bazaar hold textiles, jewellery, and the wholesale fabric trade. Mangaldas Market is the city's textile wholesale centre — a grid of narrow lanes where every textile tradition in India is available by the metre.

The Thieves' Market is a misnomer — most of what is sold here is genuine antique or surplus stock. The silver items, the brassware, the carved wooden objects are goods whose production chains extend across India. Mumbai is the collector, not the maker — but the collecting requires its own expertise, its own material knowledge.

• Chor Bazaar antiques
• Kalbadevi textiles
• Zaveri Bazaar jewellery
• Mangaldas wholesale fabric
• Crawford Market provisions
• Bhendi Bazaar woodwork