Mumbai Trivia
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45 free Mumbai trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Mumbai was seven islands, a Portuguese outpost, a queen's dowry and a £10-a-year lease before it became India's financial capital. This quiz covers the story: the Koli goddess behind the name, the Treaty of Bassein, Catherine of Braganza, the Hornby Vellard reclamation, India's first railway in 1853, the Civil War cotton boom, the 1960 birth of Maharashtra, the 1982 mill strike, the 1995 renaming and the 2008 attacks. The city's icons follow: the Gateway of India and the last British troops, Victoria Terminus, the Art Deco ensemble, Elephanta's Shiva, the Queen's Necklace, the Sea Link, the 7.5-million-a-day locals, dabbawalas, vada pav, Dharavi, Ganesh Chaturthi and the Parsis. Then Bollywood's name and first films, the BSE, the billionaires, Wankhede's 2011 final and Mumbai's 41 Ranji titles. Easy questions ask which state Mumbai leads and what Bollywood blends; hard ones want the vada pav pioneer and the East India Company's rent. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the city and its landmarks, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Try our India and Bollywood quizzes next.
30 of 45 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Mumbai is the capital of which Indian state?
Maharashtra
Maharashtra: the state was born in 1960, when years of protest split the old two-language Bombay State in two and the city stayed on as capital of the Marathi-speaking half.
Q 02Which party, newly in power, pushed through the 1995 renaming of Bombay as Mumbai?
Shiv Sena
Shiv Sena: the party argued that 'Bombay' was a relic of colonial rule and chose a name honouring Mumbadevi, a goddess long worshipped on the islands.
Q 03The Kolis, the earliest known inhabitants of Mumbai's islands, traditionally made their living how?
Fishing
Fishing: the Kolis' patron goddess, Mumbadevi, is the likeliest origin of the city's name, a better bet than the old tale that it comes from the Portuguese for 'good bay'.
Q 04Mumbai was built on an archipelago of how many islands?
Seven
Seven: the Greek geographer Ptolemy knew the cluster as Heptanesia in the 2nd century, some sixteen hundred years before the islets were merged into one.
Q 05Bombay's islands passed to England in 1661 as part of whose dowry on her marriage to Charles II?
Catherine of Braganza
Catherine of Braganza: her brother was king of Portugal, which had held the islands since the 1530s, and by 1668 the Crown had already passed them on to the East India Company.
Q 06England leased Bombay's islands to the East India Company in 1668 for what annual rent?
£10
£10: the future financial capital was at first no great prize, just a toehold on the west coast that the Company ran from its older base at Surat.
Q 07From the 1780s onwards, how were the separate islands of Bombay joined into one?
Causeways and reclaimed land
Causeways and reclaimed land: the first big step was the Hornby Vellard, an embankment that stopped high tides flooding the low central plain, and later schemes filled in the rest.
Q 08India's first passenger railway, opened on 16 April 1853, ran from Bombay to which neighbouring town?
Thane
Thane: the 34 km line was the first step in opening the hinterland by rail, which, with the Suez Canal and the cotton mills, fuelled Bombay's boom in the later 19th century.
Q 09Which conflict of the 1860s set off a cotton boom in Bombay?
The American Civil War
The American Civil War: with the cotton of the Southern states cut off, Britain's mills turned to Bombay and fortunes were made, until peace in 1865 sent prices crashing and the bubble burst.
Q 10When Bombay State was split along language lines in 1960, which state was created alongside the one that kept Bombay?
Gujarat
Gujarat: four years of protest by Marathi speakers against sharing a two-language state ended with its partition into a Gujarati-speaking north and a Marathi-speaking south.
Q 11The Gateway of India was erected to commemorate the 1911 landing of which British monarch?
George V
George V: he and Queen Mary are said to have been shown only a cardboard model when they landed in 1911, because the real arch was not completed until 1924.
Q 12Who left India through the Gateway of India in February 1948?
The last British troops
The last British troops: a battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry marched out through an arch that had been built to mark a British monarch's arrival, saluted by soldiers of the new Indian Army.
Q 13Mumbai's great Gothic Revival railway station, now known as CSMT, carried what official name until 1996?
Victoria Terminus
Q 21Bollywood is the industry making films in which language?
Hindi
Hindi: the nickname welds Bombay to Hollywood and was coined only in the 1970s, by which time the city's studios had already been making films for sixty years.
Q 22Who made 1913's Raja Harishchandra, thought to be India's first feature film, in Bombay?
Dadasaheb Phalke
Dadasaheb Phalke: with no actresses willing to appear on screen he cast men in the women's roles, and the country's highest award for a lifetime in cinema now carries his name.
Q 23Which 1931 Bombay production was India's first sound film?
Alam Ara
Alam Ara: once films could talk, Indian cinema began to split into separate industries, one for each of the country's major languages.
Victoria Terminus: it took a decade to build and was named for the queen's Golden Jubilee, and since 1996 it has been renamed twice in honour of a 17th-century Maratha king.
Q 14The Elephanta Caves in Mumbai Harbour are dedicated mainly to which Hindu god?
Shiva
Shiva: the island's own name is a later accident, given by Portuguese sailors who found a large stone elephant there, a statue that now stands in a public garden in the city.
Q 15Marine Drive's nickname, the Queen's Necklace, comes from what?
Its streetlights seen at night
Its streetlights seen at night: from the high ground at the northern end, the lamps strung along the long C-shaped curve of the bay look like a string of pearls.
Q 16Which cable-stayed bridge has carried traffic across Mumbai's Mahim Bay since 2009?
The Bandra–Worli Sea Link
The Bandra–Worli Sea Link: until it opened, one congested road was the only link between the western suburbs and the old island city, so the bridge gave rush-hour drivers a second way across.
Q 17Which form of public transport carries the most commuters around Mumbai?
Suburban trains
Suburban trains: known simply as 'locals', they are the backbone of the city's transport, and at peak hours they run far more crowded than they were ever built for.
Q 18Mumbai's dabbawalas do what for a living?
Deliver home-cooked lunches to workers
Deliver home-cooked lunches to workers: each tin carries a code of colours and numbers showing where it must go, so carriers who never meet the customer can pass it from hand to hand across the city.
Q 19Vada pav, a favourite Mumbai street snack, consists of a deep-fried potato dumpling served in what?
A bread bun
A bread bun: the snack is usually credited to Ashok Vaidya, who began selling it from a stall outside Dadar station as a quick, cheap bite for commuters on the move.
Q 20Which Mumbai district, often called Asia's largest slum, houses around a million people and thousands of small workshops?
Dharavi
Dharavi: its lanes support a thriving trade in leather goods, garments, pottery and recycled plastic, all on prime land in the very middle of the financial capital.
Q 24Which 1975 blockbuster starring Dharmendra and Amitabh Bachchan is often called Bollywood's 'curry western'?
Sholay
Sholay: its bandits, hired guns and revenge plot borrow openly from Hollywood and Italian westerns, yet it is widely rated the most iconic film the Mumbai industry has made.
Q 25The Bombay Stock Exchange, established in 1875, holds what distinction?
Oldest stock exchange in Asia
Oldest stock exchange in Asia: it grew out of a handful of brokers who met to trade under a banyan tree, years before they had a building of their own.
Q 26Antilia, the 27-storey tower completed on Mumbai's Altamount Road in 2010, serves as what?
One family's private home
One family's private home: industrialist Mukesh Ambani's house has its own temple, cinema and 168-car garage, plus a 'snow room' where the family can escape the humid Mumbai heat.
Q 27In 2024, Mumbai overtook Beijing as the Asian city with the most what?
Billionaires
Billionaires: the 2024 Hurun rich list found the city had added 26 in a single year, lifting it to third in the world behind New York and London while Beijing slipped to fourth.
Q 28Mumbai's Wankhede Stadium hosted the 2011 final of which tournament, won by India against Sri Lanka?
The Cricket World Cup
The Cricket World Cup: captain MS Dhoni promoted himself up the batting order and finished the chase with a six, giving India its first title since 1983.
Q 29Which festival fills Mumbai with pandals for up to ten days and ends with idols being carried into the sea?
Ganesh Chaturthi
Ganesh Chaturthi: it grew into a mass street festival under British rule, when the nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak revived public celebrations as a way round a ban on political gatherings.
Q 30Mumbai is home to the world's largest population of which religious community?
Parsi Zoroastrians
Parsi Zoroastrians: descended from Persians who fled religious persecution, they settled in Bombay once the East India Company promised toleration, and their merchants did much to build the city.