The Story Of Bombay Duck: Bombay’s Most Loved Fish

Some ingredients confuse you with their names, and Bombay Duck, which sounds like something that ought to have feathers, wings and a pond to call home, is one of them. Not a duck; it is a slender, soft-bodied marine fish known as bombil in Maharashtra, loitta in Bengal, and bumla in Gujarat.

In Mumbai, however, bombil is more than a fish. For the Koli fishing communities who have lived along the city’s shores for generations, bombil has been food, livelihood, and a way of preserving the sea for days when it becomes unreachable. Its strange English name has history, too.

The story behind the name Bombay Duck is almost as intriguing as the fish itself. The most popular explanation dates to the British era and links the dried fish to the Bombay Dak—the postal service that carried mail from Bombay to other parts of India. As the pungent-smelling dried fish was carried alongside the mail, the story goes, Bombay Dak gradually became Bombay Duck in British usage. Other theories suggest that the name was a British mishearing or corruption of local terms for the fish. What remains certain is that the curious name stuck, turning a humble coastal fish into one of Bombay’s most recognisable culinary exports.

Bombil is found in the waters around India’s western and eastern coasts, but its association with Mumbai runs particularly deep. The city’s Koli fishing communities have traditionally built their lives around the sea, with fresh catch forming the centre of everyday meals for much of the year.

Fresh bombil is an unusually delicate fish. Its body is soft and almost translucent, and it contains a great deal of water, which makes it particularly fragile and quick to spoil. That softness is precisely what makes a properly prepared Bombil Fry so distinctive: the flesh almost collapses against the crisp coating. But the same characteristics that make fresh bombil delicious also make it difficult to store.

This is where drying enters the story. For generations, Koli communities have sun-dried fish during the warmer months, building a pantry for the monsoon. When heavy rains arrive, and the sea becomes difficult or dangerous to navigate, fresh catches become less dependable. The answer was not to abandon fish, but to preserve them when the weather allowed. Dried fish became an essential part of the seasonal pantry known as aagoticha samaan. Bombil, with its abundance and relative ease of availability, became one of its defining ingredients.

The process is simple but relies entirely on the environment: fish are cleaned, salted and laid out or hung in the sun, where sea breeze and heat gradually remove moisture. What emerges is almost another ingredient altogether. The soft, mild fresh fish becomes firm, intensely savoury and famously pungent. That smell, which can be overwhelming to an unfamiliar nose, is inseparable from the food cultures that cherish it, and it helps explain the appeal of the dried form.

Dried fish could also travel farther than fresh fish. Without refrigeration, drying transformed a highly perishable catch into something that could be stored and transported. That mattered not just to fishing communities but to inland consumers who wanted access to affordable marine protein.

The British developed a taste for it, too. Nineteenth-century travel accounts mention dried bumbelo being eaten with breakfast dishes such as kedgeree, the Anglo-Indian preparation of rice and fish that emerged from the meeting of Indian and British food cultures.

As Bombay Duck did not remain confined to Bombay, it reached India’s eastern coast, where it became known as loitta and entered Bengali cooking, particularly in dried form as shutki. In Gujarat, it became bumla.

For Mumbai, Bombay Duck is more than an ingredient; it is deeply intertwined with the history of the city’s fishing communities. As monsoon arrives and the rough sea makes fishing difficult, dried bombil preserved during the summer becomes an important part of the coastal pantry. The fish is also enjoyed fresh, most famously as Bombil Fry, where its delicate flesh is coated with rice flour or semolina and fried until crisp. Across Koli and Parsi kitchens, it finds its way into curries and other preparations, while dried bombil is toasted, crumbled into rice and dal, or cooked with onions, coconut and spices. In this way, the fish moves easily between seasons and kitchens.

Yet Bombay Duck’s story is larger than the plate. It belongs to a Mumbai that existed long before the modern metropolis, when fishing villages dotted its coastline and communities lived according to the rhythms of the sea. The practice of drying fish for the monsoon was not simply a culinary tradition but a way of preserving the sea’s bounty through the months when it could not be easily accessed. The fish, therefore, captures something essential about Bombay itself: its ability to absorb, transform and make its own the things that pass through it. A local fish became Bombay Duck, a seasonal necessity became a delicacy, and a preservation technique became part of the city’s culinary identity. For generations of Mumbaikars, its unmistakable pungency has been not just the smell of dried fish, but the smell of home.