Courtesy: Shapoorji Pallonji
The Reserve Bank of India entered its 90th year on 1 April. From the 1940s to 1960s it was critical in protecting India’s interests at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, and conserving India’s Forex by managing a Rupee trade with the East Bloc. Today, it is among Mumbai’s several historic financial institutions and has navigated India’s economy through turbulent geopolitical and geoeconomic events.
Courtesy: Sarmaya Arts Foundation
India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar is currently visiting Japan for the 16th India-Japan Foreign Ministers Strategic Dialogue. The bilateral, which began 130 years ago with Bombay’s cotton trade, has deepened into a Special Strategic and Global Partnership in defence, digital technologies, semiconductor supply chains, clean energy, trade and connectivity. The following book excerpt traces the origin of India-Japan trade ties.
Courtesy: The Marg Foundation
India’s famous cultural icon, Marg magazine, has turned 75 along with the nation. It has republished some of its path-breaking articles, adding an introduction with a contemporary rethink. The outcome is an intellectual inquiry, with clues on how a confident 21st-century India must shape its global and regional positioning.
Courtesy: Zabel Joshi
Bombay was once an important Armenian settlement in the 18th and 19th centuries, as the English East India Company was keen to relocate the successful Armenian merchants of Surat to the Company’s new outpost of Bombay. Today, no Armenians from Bombay’s historic community remain, but their church and cemetery survive, the subject of study for Armenian expatriates keen to rediscover their history.
Mumbai has a deep legacy as an international financial hub from the 19th to early 20th century. It was the central node of trading communities in a globalised colonial world, the remnants of which are seen today. The author describes the city's heyday and advances the prospect of Bombay's revival as a global city of enterprise. This excerpt traces the history of the Bombay Burmah Trading Co., which played a role in the onset of the final Anglo-Burmese War.
Courtesy: Town Mumbai
There is no better way to celebrate the winter festive season in Mumbai than to visit the many Bombay East Indian enclaves dotting the metropolis, urban villages that once made up the city before the 17th century. Attending Midnight Mass in the Bombay East Indian dialect of Marathi in a parish church and feasting on a traditional Christmas lunch is the best way to experience Mumbai before Bombay.
Courtesy: Dr. Jehangir Sorabjee
Prior to the Second World War, Bombay had established merchant networks with several Japanese port cities and they drove an enormous global trade in cotton and textiles between the Indian subcontinent and Imperial Japan. Business has become a renewed priority for both countries today, offering fresh opportunities for collaboration
Courtesy: Consulate General of France in Mumbai
All eyes are on the outcome of the French elections next month with its portents of a far right president being the people’s choice. But it was 200 years ago that Bombay forged its French connection. Trade with France ushered in cultural influences while the city’s early nationalists were drawn to the French Revolution’s political philosophy of ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’
Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons
The historic role of Bombay (as it was then called) as a hub for banking, commerce, trade, and shipping, and its financial clout a 100 years ago, are little known today. With the city scheduled to soon open an international financial services centre, it is worthwhile to recall and integrate this legacy with Mumbai’s present strengths in order to attract global capital to its IFSC
Courtesy: Chemould Prescott Road Archives
Germany’s presidency of G20 in 2017 comes at a time when the country is in a state of deep flux. But its relations with India have always been unshaken. Even 80 years ago, German-speaking immigrants, fleeing the Second World war, greatly enhanced Bombay’s cultural life
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