Read the text on the right and then review the Documents below:

•	Bombay/Mumbai has emerged as a highly influential city during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For an overview, read Document 1 and Document 2. For the location of Bombay/Mumbai see Image 1. How did Bombay/Mumbai become an influential city? Where was its influence felt? What cross cultural forces have mixed in Bombay/Mumbai? What global development have shaped the evolution of the city?
•	Bombay/Mumbai continues to be transformed by global and local trends crossing through it. Read Document 3 and Document 4. Explore the cities unique economy at Document 5 and Document 6. For images of the city today see Image 2. How does Bombay/Mumbai reflect the forces of globalization in the last quarter of the twentieth century? how has it remained such an influential city? What potential problems might recent trends in globalization create or exacerbate for a city such as this?
•	In many ways, Bombay/Mumbai, faces an identity crisis as it enters the twenty first century. As in many places around the world, the forces of globalization have uprooted local, regional, and national identifies. In Maharashtra province, where Bombay/Mumbai is located, Shiv Sena, a political and cultural movement, has benefited from this crisis. For more on the competing identifies in Mahrashtra and Bombay/Mumbai, read Document 7 and Document 8. What are the multiple identities in this region of the world? What cultural influences had shaped the region? For more on the Shiv Sena movement, go to Document 9. Continue reading all the links at the bottom of the page. What kind of identity does Shiv Sena propose for the region? How has the movement benefited from the forces of globalization? How does the movement propose to resolve the region's identity crisis?

Bombay/Mumbai

Bombay, more than any other Indian city, has always been connected to the world economy. Acquired by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, who then transferred its control to the East India Company, Bombay developed as a colonial creation. Composed of seven islands joined by lands taken back from the sea, Bombay developed as a port city for colonial commerce, becoming an economic powerhouse during the nineteenth century. It profited from the cotton trade, developed a vibrant textile industry, attracted migrants, and took on a cosmopolitan image. The twentieth century brought it unprecedented growth as Indian-owned economic institutions achieved dominance and nationalist politics won popular support. After India’s independence in 1947, Bombay came to epitomize the modern face of the nation, and its heterogeneous population became the ur (prototypical) symbol of the Indian melting pot.

Beginning with the 1980s, however, the nature and effects of integration into the world economy started to change. The cotton textile industry, which had served as Bombay’s economic backbone since the late nineteenth century, went into a steep decline. Industrial employment fell sharply, the era of the trade unions ended, and the share of the informal sector of household enterprises, small shops, petty subcontractors, and casual laborers, along with the financial services sector of banking and insurance, rose. Economic liberalization transformed Bombay further, removing hurdles against the entry of foreign businesses and integrating the city into the global economy.

Even as Bombay continues to be a part of the nation, it now occupies, as do other global cities, a strategic place in transnational geography. It serves as a center for the servicing and financing of international trade, investment, and corporate office functions. The global constitution of Bombay is evident in the increasing presence in the city of financial institutions, trading organizations, insurance companies, telecommunications corporations, and information technology enterprises with worldwide operations. Forces of change can be observed even in its vibrant film industry, which produces roughly 120 films a year. Its trademark is spectacular melodramatic fantasies. But since the 1980s, Bombay films are increasingly addressed to a global, not only national, audience of Indians. In addition, many of the most successful and glossy productions can be characterized as "placeless," that is, the narrative is not pinned down to a definable place but situated in a global locale. Reflecting its increasingly global location, Bombay cinema has acquired the moniker "Bollywood" in recent years.

A striking effect of the concentration of global economic operations in the city is the high economic value that these activities command. Finance, banking, telecommunications, software industry, and corporate headquarter operations generate profits and offer remunerations to employees on a much richer scale than other sectors of the economy. On the other hand, low-skilled and unskilled workers, lacking union organization, receive low wages. The city still attracts a large number of poor migrants who live in slums, when they are lucky to have a roof over their heads, or call the pavements their "home." The gap between the rich and the poor, which has always been legendary in Bombay, has grown alarmingly. A tiny, rich elite connected to the global economy is dwarfed by millions who eke out a miserable living. This inequality also affects governance. The government is asked to protect global capital from the encroachment of squatters and pavement dwellers, and municipal services have been increasingly deployed to clear illegally constructed slums.

Globalization has also affected the very name of the city and sparked a contest over the identity of its residents. In January 1996, Mumbai became the official name of Bombay, which serves as the capital of the Maharashtra province. The government represented the renaming as an act of indigenizing the colonial name. The political party then in power in Maharashtra was the Shiv Sena, a nativist regional party named after the seventeenth-century Maratha chieftain Shivaji, who was an adversary of the Mughal empire. Since its inception in 1966, the Shiv Sena has campaigned militantly for the reservation of jobs and economic opportunities for Marathi speakers, who constitute a little over 40 percent of the city’s heterogeneous population of 15 million. It was only in the 1980s, however, that the Shiv Sena grew rapidly. The timing is significant because it was then that the city’s economy and society began to change dramatically. As the industrial economy and trade unions gave way to the service sector and unorganized labor, and as globalization uprooted identities located in the framework of the secular nation-state, a space opened for alternative mobilizations. It was in this context that the Shiv Sena emerged triumphant. It did so, not by opposing economic globalization, but by utilizing the social and political fluidity produced by deindustrialization and globalization to win support for its nativist and Hindu chauvinist ideology. Bombay’s cosmopolitan image went up in smoke in 1992– 1993, when the Shiv Sena directed and led pogroms against the city’s Muslim residents.

Bombay/Mumbai today manifests the contradictory, conflictual, and uneven effects of globalization. The society is sharply divided, economic disparities are great, and its politics is a cauldron of conflicting identities. These are the local forms in which globalization is experienced in this vast and influential city.