18 | A Tale of Two Cities: The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Surat and Bombay

By Shanaya Dastoor and Shivakumar Jolad

Published on: 27 June 2026

Two Cities, Reversed Fortunes

In 2019, Oxford Economics ranked cities worldwide by economic growth potential (Oxford Economics, 2019). All ten cities with the fastest projected growth between 2019 and 2035 were Indian. Surat topped the list, at roughly 9.2 per cent per year. Mumbai did not appear in the top ten. At the turn of the twentieth century , the picture looks entirely different. In 1901, Bombay was India's second-largest city by population, next only to Calcutta, the only million-plus city in the country at the time. Surat's population in 1901 was just 129,000. By 2011 it had grown to 4.5 million. Greater Mumbai (UA) started at 840,000 in 1901 and reached 18.3 million by 2011.

The growth-rate data sharpens the contrast. Between 1901 and 1911, Surat's population actually fell by 3.3 per cent, while Mumbai was expanding at above 22 per cent per decade. From 2001 to 2011, Greater Mumbai (UA) grew at 11.9 per cent, below the national urban average. Core Greater Mumbai grew at only 3.87 per cent over the same decade. Surat, by contrast, grew at over 50 per cent per decade from 1961 onwards, reaching 60 per cent between 2001 and 2011 (Bose, 1978). Today, Surat's annual growth rate is around 3.6 per cent; Mumbai's is 1.6 per cent.

Rise and fall of cities

Cities have always been centres of political and economic power, as well as social and cultural life. In the long course of history, great cities have had their best of times and their worst. In the early medieval period (800–1200 AD), Patan in Gujarat, Kannauj in Uttar Pradesh, and Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu were among the leading cities of India, ahead of Varanasi, Patna, and Delhi in size and influence (Chandler, 1987). Today, none of them figures in the top 100 Indian cities by population.

Hampi, capital of the Vijayanagara Empire, was among the most populous cities in the world during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with an estimated population of 400,000–500,000 (Robson, 2016). It is now a ruined UNESCO World Heritage site. The colonial port cities of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras had no significant urban history before the seventeenth century.

The growth and decline of cities is closely tied to political and economic shifts, and to the strategic importance a city holds at any given moment. Bombay and Surat have intertwined, sometimes inverse, histories over the past three centuries. The rise of one has, in important ways, contributed to the fall of the other.

Surat: Ancient Port to Colonial Backwater

Surat at Its Peak

Surat is one of the oldest trading cities on India's west coast. By the seventeenth century it had become the primary port of the Mughal Empire and a hub for both inland and maritime commerce, maintaining trade connections with Southeast Asia, the Arab world, East Africa, and Europe. Ships from across the Indian Ocean called at Surat to buy, sell, or load goods.

In 1613, Emperor Jahangir issued a farman permitting the English to establish a permanent factory at Surat. The Dutch followed shortly after. For roughly two hundred years, from Akbar's seizure of the city in 1573 to its coming under full British control in 1759, Surat was the object of persistent power struggles: Mughal regents, the Portuguese, the British, the Dutch and the French, the Siddis of Janjira, the Marathas under Shivaji, and later the Peshwas, all sought to control or exploit it. That competition itself reflects the city's wealth and commercial centrality.

Shivaji sacked Surat twice, in 1664 and 1670, reportedly taking booty estimated at around a crore of rupees — mainly gold, silver, and diamonds (Commissariat, 1957). Despite these periodic raids, Surat reached the peak of its wealth in the late seventeenth century. The Imperial Gazetteer of India (Vol. XXIII, 1908) described Surat in the 1690s as the 'prime mart of India', where all nations of the world traded (Imperial Gazetteer, 1908). The city's estimated population at that point was around 200,000.

After the British established firmer control in 1759, Surat experienced a further period of relative stability and growth driven by British protection and a flourishing raw cotton export trade with China. European travellers of the period, including Abraham Parsons (1777–1808), recorded Surat's population as somewhere between 500,000 and a million. A conservative estimate would place it at around half a million by the end of the eighteenth century.

The Long Decline: 1780–1870

Surat's decline was gradual but serious, unfolding in two distinct phases as identified by the historian Douglas Haynes (1991).

The first phase (late eighteenth century, before 1800) was driven partly by factors beyond the East India Company's doing: growing insecurity along Mughal trade routes, a contraction in trade with the Persian Gulf and Red Sea resulting from instability in the Safavid and Ottoman empires, and the displacement of Indian shipbuilding by European competitors. The rise of Bombay as a protected and commercially dynamic rival port accelerated the shift of merchants and capital away from Surat.

The second phase (1800 to 1870) coincided with full colonial rule and was considerably more damaging. A series of natural disasters, floods, earthquakes, famines, and fires, compounded structural economic decline. The fire of 1837 burned for days, destroying 7,000 homes and causing damage estimated at five million rupees. The Tapi River gradually silted up, making the city inaccessible to larger vessels.

Structural economic changes aggravated matters: the colonial government's shift away from financial dependence on local merchant-bankers deprived the city's traditional sharafs (money-dealers) of a major source of revenue; the agrarian depression of the 1820s and 1830s depressed the countryside; declining Mughal gentry, who had been important consumers of Surati luxury goods, lost their purchasing power; and changing patterns of international trade reduced demand from West Asia while increasing competition from European industrial manufacturers.

A western observer, Marianna Postans (1839), captured the mood of the city in the early nineteenth century: "(Surat was) humbled to dust — its bazaars depopulated, its mansions abandoned, and its fabulous wealth only a distant memory."

Population figures tell the story plainly. Haynes, drawing on Das Gupta, estimates that in 1816 Surat had around 150,000 inhabitants — itself a significant fall from a century earlier. A local census of 1851 recorded only 89,505 (Surat District Gazetteer, 1962) (Population figures cross-checked with Das Gupta (1979) and the Census of India, 1872). Even accounting for likely underreporting, the city had lost at least a third of its population in the first fifty years of Company rule. Residents abandoned entire neighbourhoods after fires and floods; little new construction took place; few foreign traders chose to maintain local outposts any longer.

By the middle of the nineteenth century Surat had about 80,000 inhabitants and had become, in Haynes's words, a city whose 'demographic characteristics approximated those of the general, predominantly rural, population of Bombay Presidency.' By the time of the first imperial census in 1872, the population had stabilised at just over 100,000, where it remained for roughly six decades.

The Parsi Exodus: Surat's Loss, Bombay's Gain

No community illustrates the shift between the two cities more clearly than the Parsis. By the seventeenth century, Surat had become a significant centre for Parsis who had migrated from nearby Navsari, Khambat, and Bharuch. The city's decline changed all of this. From the 1780s, driven by famine and the collapse of commerce, Parsi families began moving to Bombay in substantial numbers. The Parsi population of Surat shrank from around 20,000 households in the early nineteenth century to roughly a tenth of that by the century's end.

Those who left went on to play a central role in transforming Bombay into India's industrial, educational, and cultural capital — much as they had once done in Surat. One such family was that of Dadabhai Naoroji, who would become the 'Grand Old Man of India.'

Revival: Railways and Industry

Surat did not remain stagnant indefinitely. The arrival of the railways in the mid-nineteenth century connected the city to wider markets and revived its traditional industries. Surati silks, brocades, fine muslins, and gold and silver work found new buyers. But the nature of Surat's economy had changed: it was now predominantly a city of small-scale and home-based manufacturing, with very little large-scale industrial capital. As late as 1921, 47 per cent of Surat's workforce was employed in industry — more than Bombay's 39 per cent — but virtually all Surati manufacturing was cottage-based.

The city's real demographic and economic revival came in the second half of the twentieth century, driven by the diamond-cutting, textile, and petrochemical industries. From around 317,000 in 1961, Surat's population grew to nearly 4.6 million by 2011, at rates consistently above 50 per cent per decade — and reaching 88 per cent in the 1981–1991 period (see Figures 1 and 2). The city also demonstrated institutional capacity: its response to the 1994 plague outbreak, which caused a brief national panic and migration, became a widely cited example of municipal recovery and urban governance improvement.

Bombay: From Obscure Islands to Imperial City

The Early Decades: Company Town

Bombay's pre-colonial history offers little hint of what it would become. The seven islands of Bombay — Mazagaon, Parel, Worli, Mahim, Little Colaba, Colaba, and the main island — came under Portuguese control after the Treaty of Bassein in 1534. Under Portuguese rule they were considered more a liability than an asset: Goa, Diu, Daman, and even Surat were more valuable possessions.

Islands of Bombay and Colaba in 18th Century. Source: 'Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency. [Edited by Sir James M. Campbell. General index, by R. E. Enthoven.]

The transfer of the islands to the English in 1661, as part of Catherine of Braganza's dowry to Charles II, gave the East India Company access to a deep-water natural harbour usable in all seasons. The Company's President at Surat and Governor of Bombay, Gerald Aungier, submitted detailed proposals for the islands' development in 1671. With the Directors' approval, work began to fortify the island, build docks, and establish civic and judicial institutions. Company officials repeatedly pressed for the headquarters to move from Surat to Bombay.

The Opium and Cotton Economy

The economic foundation of early colonial Bombay was trade with China. Britain's growing appetite for Chinese tea created a trade deficit that the Company addressed by exporting Indian opium from Daman and Bombay, and raw cotton from Gujarat and the Deccan. The city's merchant class took the lead in developing these networks, rapidly extending Bombay's commercial hinterland into western and central India (Farooqui, 2006).

The accumulation of capital through the China trade in the first half of the nineteenth century provided the basis for the development of industrial capitalism in the second half. The decline of Maratha power in the region, the expansion of railways, and the growth of the port removed the remaining advantages that Surat had held over its rival.

Industrial Bombay: The Cotton Mill Era

The first textile mill in Bombay was established in 1854. The conditions for its growth were well established: surplus capital in the hands of an indigenous entrepreneurial class, cheap labour from the Ratnagiri coast and the Deccan, and a supply of raw cotton from Gujarat and Khandesh carried by railway (Chandavarkar, 2002). By 1925, the textile industry employed 148,000 workers — about one-tenth of the city's resident population (Indorewala et. al., 2017).

The period between 1918 and 1938 saw more than a thousand strikes in individual mills and departments. The mill district, Girangaon (literally 'village of mills'), became a distinct working-class geography within the city, with its own social culture, labour organisations, and political character.

Deindustrialisation and the Informal Turn

Sustained industrial growth in India began to slow in the mid-1960s. In Bombay, this brought a gradual restructuring of the textile sector. Subcontracting became the dominant mode of production. The textile strike of 1982–1983, one of the largest labour actions in independent India, involving some 250,000 workers, accelerated capital flight and diversification, resulting in the retrenchment of over 150,000 workers and leaving Girangaon's mills as a vast reserve of urban land that would later become the object of intense real-estate conflict.

The shift towards informalisation was irreversible. Estimates suggest that informal employment grew from 49 per cent of Mumbai's workforce in 1951 to about 65–66 per cent by the 1990s (Bhowmik, 2010). Mumbai has an estimated 200,000 street vendors, of whom roughly 20 per cent were previously employed in organised manufacturing. The informalisation of the city's labour force has, over time, reduced the organised bargaining power of workers and, for many, lowered living standards.

The Census Comparison: Two Cities, Two Trajectories

Migration and Growth

The divergence in the two cities' fortunes is most clearly seen in their migration and population dynamics over the twentieth century.

Mumbai consistently recorded a substantially higher migration rate than Surat through most of the twentieth century. The gap widened sharply from 1951, coinciding with the post-Partition influx of refugees. Surat, by contrast, experienced a slower and steadier growth of migrants until the 1980s, when the expansion of its diamond-cutting and synthetic textile industries created a large new demand for migrant labour.

By 2011, according to the Census, 27.66 per cent of Mumbai's residents had been born outside Maharashtra, a rise from 26.4 per cent in 2001 and 21.1 per cent in 1991. The primary source states were Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, and Karnataka (Census of India, 2011).

Surat's 2011 Census data tells a different story. Of the city's total population of 6.08 million, 3.76 million (61.9 per cent) were migrants, an exceptionally high proportion for any Indian city. Of these, 88.4 per cent had come from other states, primarily Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan. Work and employment accounted for 64.4 per cent of all male migration; marriage was the dominant reason for female migration.

The Sex Ratio as a Mirror of Migration

Sex ratio data reveals the character of migration to each city. In 1901, Surat had a sex ratio of 956 females per 1,000 males — close to the natural population norm. Mumbai's was 631, reflecting the heavily male character of industrial migration. Over the following decades both cities saw declining sex ratios as male labour migration intensified; Mumbai's ratio fell as low as 544 in 1911.

The longer-term trajectory shows an interesting reversal. Mumbai's sex ratio has steadily improved since the 1960s, reaching 863 by 2011 — reflecting better opportunities for women and a more settled migrant population. Surat's sex ratio, by contrast, has fallen in recent decades, reaching 753 in 2011, as fresh waves of predominantly male migrants from north India joined the diamond and textile industries.

Reasons for Migration: Surat vs. Mumbai

The census data on migration motivations reveals important differences between the two cities. Work and business dominate inter-state migration to both cities, accounting for about 65 per cent of male migrants in each. Within-state patterns differ, however: work and business explain 40–45 per cent of male migration to Surat within Gujarat but only 25–30 per cent for comparable flows into Mumbai within Maharashtra. Marriage accounts for a higher proportion of female migration to Surat than to Mumbai, possibly reflecting the greater prevalence of chain migration and community networks linking Surat to its origin districts.

The Cyclical Nature of Urban Fortune

The histories of Surat and Bombay remind us that no city's position is fixed. Surat was among the most important trading cities in Asia at the height of Mughal power; within a century and a half it had shrunk to a modest provincial town. Bombay was a cluster of malarial islands in the seventeenth century; by the twentieth it was India's commercial capital and one of the largest cities in the world. Each city's trajectory was shaped by forces partly beyond its control: the fall of empires, shifts in global trade, colonial policy, and the construction of infrastructure; and partly by the accumulated decisions of its merchants, workers, and administrators.

Surat's recent resurgence, driven by diamonds, synthetic textiles, and increasingly, petrochemicals and services, took place against the backdrop of Mumbai's relative deceleration: de-industrialisation, the closure of the mills, and the growing difficulty and expense of life in an overcrowded metropolis. Whether Surat's growth will translate into the kind of deep institutional capacity, in education, health, public transport, and civic governance, that would make it a genuinely equitable city, remains an open question.

What the comparison makes clear is that urban growth and urban decline are not aberrations. They are the normal condition of cities over long spans of time. The question is not whether a city will face its worst of times, but whether, when those times come, it has the resilience and the institutions to survive them, and the capacity to use the subsequent recovery well.

Bibliography and Further Reading

Census of India (2011). Migration tables D-series. Office of the Registrar General of India, New Delhi. https://censusindia.gov.in

Chandavarkar, R. (2002). The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940. Cambridge University Press.

Commissariat, M.S. (1957). A History of Gujarat, Vol. III. Bombay: Orient Longman.

Das Gupta, A. (1979). Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, c.1700–1750. Wiesbaden: Steiner.

Farooqui, A. (2006). Opium City: The Making of Early Victorian Bombay. Three Essays Collective.

Haynes, D.E. (1991). Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852–1928. University of California Press. https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft8h4nb56f

Imperial Gazetteer of India, Vol. XXIII (1908). Surat entry. Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing. https://dsal.uchicago.edu/reference/gazetteer/

Indorewala, H., Wagh, S., Ramakrishnan, U., & Nandlaskar, O. (2017). Mumbai City Résumé. ResearchGate. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.12877.31205

Kosambi, M. (1986). Bombay in Transition: The Growth and Social Ecology of a Colonial City, 1880–1980. Almqvist & Wiksell International.

Oxford Economics (2019). Global Cities: The Future of the World's Leading Urban Economies, 2019–35. https://www.oxfordeconomics.com

Patel, D. (2020). Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism. Harvard University Press.

Postans, M. (1839). Western India in 1838. London: Saunders and Otley.

Robson, B. (2016). Historical Urban Population data: Vijayanagara/Hampi, 1350–1600. 

Scientific Data, 3, 160034. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.34

Bose, A. (1978). Urbanization and Urban Systems in India. Oxford University Press. Data from Census of India decennial reports 1901–2011

Chandler, T. (1987). Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census. Edwin Mellen Press.

Haynes, D.E. (1991). Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852–1928. University of California Press. 

Surat District Gazetteer (1962). Government of Gujarat, pp. 315–318.

Bhowmik, S. (2010). Street Vendors in the Global Urban Economy. Routledge. Cited in Indorewala et al. (2017).