East India Company

The East India Company is presented as a decisive agent in Bombay’s colonial transformation: it took possession of the island in 1668, after earlier Portuguese involvement and the development of a British vision of the harbor as a strategic stronghold. In Saleem Sinai’s account, the Company’s Fort and land reclamation help turn a scattered island landscape into the city that later generations inhabit, placing the company within the novel’s long, contested history of Bombay.

Before the Company

The narrative reaches back beyond the Company to a Bombay composed of seven islands, with Koli fishermen sailing in Arab dhows and catching pomfret and crabs. Coconuts, rice, and the goddess Mumbadevi belong to this earlier landscape; the city’s name may itself preserve the goddess’s name. Portuguese newcomers called the place Bom Bahia, invoking the harbor, and used it as a refuge for merchant ships and warships. The sequence establishes that the Company entered a place already inhabited, named, and connected to maritime trade.

Vision and Acquisition

In the narrator’s account, an East India Company officer named Methwold saw a vision of a British Bombay in 1633: a fortified city defending India’s western coast. The vision is treated not merely as an individual notion but as one that set historical events in motion. Methwold later died, but the prospect of British control advanced when Charles II’s marriage to Catharine of the Portuguese House of Braganza brought Bombay into British hands as her dowry. On September 21, 1668, the Company finally acquired the island.

Building a Colonial City

After acquiring Bombay, the Company established its Fort and pursued land reclamation. These changes joined islands that had once been separated by water, converting the older geography into a long peninsula extending toward the Arabian Sea. The novel’s account places such works between the fishermen’s world and the later urban landscape of clocktowers and modern development: the city did not simply appear, but was made through successive acts of occupation and construction.

Historical and Narrative Significance

The Company’s brief appearance belongs to a broad, deliberately layered history in which local memory, colonial ambition, and national storytelling overlap. The narrator moves from precolonial fishing communities to Portuguese rule, Methwold’s imagined British stronghold, and the Company’s acquisition, compressing centuries into a story whose details are shaped by recurring objects and images, including the possibility that Bombay arrived in Catharine’s dowry in a green tin trunk. Elsewhere, the novel describes India as a collective fiction sustained by shared belief and renewed through ritual. Against that idea, the Company’s founding acts show how political power also makes history materially: it claims territory, fortifies a harbor, and alters the land on which later visions of the nation will be built.