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A notional region was fashioned by the rulers of the sixteenth-century Deccan; they used cultural, economic, social, and urban organisations to define the region. In the choices they made about minting currency, marital alliances, or the distribution and scale of mosques, they defined their region. The sixteenth-century Deccan was known for geographical and social mobility, with people from several places around the Indian Ocean littoral. But they soon became part of this ecumene and found their own position within it. The kingdoms of the Deccan thus created their own world, fashioning a socio-cultural region that was not defined solely on the basis of politics. This paradigm of a region challenges the assumption that regions are defined only as parts of, or on the periphery of, larger imperial formations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]