A Story Without Architecture: The Mythical Origins of Mumbai Pushkar Sohoni* Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education Research, Pune, India Stories that explain the origins of cities are often memorialised in architectural or natural monuments. Often, these man-made or natural formations are created or imagined respectively, to suit a particular narrative. In the case of Mumbai, the story of the city goddess Mumbadevi is central to the early imagined history of the city. Her canonical story is a relatively late creation, representing a literary and religious solution in the absence of an architectural marker. The shrine dedicated to her today anchors the narrative of the foundation of the city, but historically was built around the same time as the Sanskrit telling of the foundation of the city. In the Mumbai-Mahatmya, several storytelling strategies are used to create a synthetic city-goddess, but the form of the narrative is the trope of the timeless epic. The narrative is more important than the architectural creation for the foundation of Mumbai, and supplants any physical vestige as the centre of the city, including the shrine of Mumbadevi. This article will demonstrate that the history of the city and the goddess are deeply intertwined, with strands of multiple narratives that combine elements which would otherwise seem incongruous, much like the architectural pastiche that is seen at the site of the goddess temple. Keywords: Mumbai; foundation myths; Devimahatmya; British colonial; urban history Introduction There exist several traditions in which relatively stable narrative structures and tropes are used to record new histories and stories. In the Persian world of South Asia, we know of Amir Khusro Dehlavi’s use of Nizami Ganjavi’s Khamsah as a model to create his own homonymous work. 1 In Sanskritic literary culture, the re-use and re-working of popular narrative struc- tures to include new and recent historic and popular memories is also common. For example, a celebrated study of diferent versions and tellings of the same narrative in South and South-Eastern Asia is A. K. Ramanujan’s “Three hundred Rāmāyaṇas.” 2 Larger Puranic tales have often been broken into sev- eral smaller topoi which could be used in diferent combinations to tell the story of new dynasties and parvenu rulers. Establishing literary connections with familiar narratives conferred greater legitimacy upon new political players, habilitating them into the cultural and social landscape. 3 Just as identifcation of estab- lished sculptural typologies with new deities was a visual strategy to appropriate the past, the re-telling of established story-types was a literary strategy to ensure the domicile of new political players in the cultural terrain of South Asia. It is in this context that we examine a text called the Mumbai Mahatmya, as it harmonizes various English, Persian, and Sanskrit tropes to synthesize a proto-history of Mumbai city. 4 The story of early Mumbai has been retold several times in its stock form, and this text allows for a diferent understanding of the foundation of the city. Mubarak, Mumbadevi, and Mumbai A visitor to the Mumbadevi in Jhaveri Bazaar in South Mumbai today goes through a maze of streets. Inside the small courtyard, the neo-classical columns on the façade of the temple, the European-style shuttered win- dows, neo-Mughal multifoil arches, and an eighteenth- century idol complete the ensemble of elements that make this composite temple. Architecturally ersatz, the importance of the shrine is because of the status it has as home to the goddess that found the city. According to people in the area, Mumbadevi the city goddess is credited granting a boon to the city of Mumbai, whereby no one who works hard will ever go hungry, showing that the goddess has been steadily adapting to the changing anxieties, needs, and social realities of the contemporary city. The city of Mumbai, like many metropolises, has been extremely dynamic in terms of it demographic and social composition, leading to sev- eral social fault-lines and tensions. 5 *E-mail: psohoni@gmail.com South Asian Studies, 2022 Vol. 00, No. 00, 1–9, https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2022.2137974 © 2022 The British Association for South Asian Studies