Mumbai changed its name in 1995, but its high court still says Bombay
The city officially became Mumbai in 1995, yet the court at its heart never followed. A bill to rename it the Mumbai High Court, alongside new names for the Calcutta and Madras courts, won Union Cabinet approval in July 2016 and has been waiting on Parliament ever since.
The name is not the only thing that has lasted. The court opened on 14 August 1862 under letters patent from Queen Victoria, one of three high courts created in the old presidency towns alongside Calcutta and Madras. Its building, designed by the British engineer Colonel James A. Fuller in a Gothic Revival style, took from 1871 to 1878 to finish and stretches 562 feet long, crowned by statues of Justice and Mercy. It heard its first case there in January 1879, and in 2018 it became part of Mumbai's Victorian and Art Deco ensemble on the World Heritage list.
Its influence on Indian law has been outsized. Independent India's first Chief Justice, first Attorney General and first Solicitor General all came from this court, and since independence 27 of its judges have moved up to the Supreme Court, 10 of them becoming Chief Justice of India. M. C. Chagla, who served from 1948 to 1958, was its first permanent Indian chief justice after independence. Today it has a sanctioned strength of 94 judges and covers Maharashtra, Goa and two small union territories.
Much of its work happens far from Mumbai. The Nagpur bench sits in a building opened in 1940 for a separate high court, a sandstone design by H. A. N. Medd that the Viceroy called a poem in stone, built for just over seven lakh rupees. When states were redrawn in 1956, the Marathi-speaking districts around it joined Bombay State and the building became a bench of the Bombay court. Aurangabad gained a bench in 1982 after years of lobbying by the Marathwada region, whose legislators argued that travelling to Mumbai for cases cost people heavily; earlier chief justices had resisted, fearing a split would weaken the institution and its bar.
Goa has its own bench, and in August 2025 a fourth opened in Kolhapur.
Source: Bombay High Court
