Kurla is a suburb of Mumbai, India. It is the headquarters of the Kurla taluka of Mumbai Suburban District. The suburb is named after the eponymous East Indian village that the suburb grew out of. It falls under Zone 5, Ward 'L' of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai. Its railway station, spelt as Coorla until 1890,[2] is one the busiest on the Mumbai suburban railway on the central and harbour railway lines of Mumbai as is the Lokmanya Tilak Terminus (LTT) for out-station passenger/express trains The Suburb gets its name from the East Indian village of Kurla, whose name in turn originated from "Kurli", the local name for crab, as these were found in plenty in marshes in the vicinity of the village. The village of Kurla came under Portuguese rule when the Treaty of Bassein (1534) was signed by Sultan Bahadur of Gujarat and the Kingdom of Portugal on 23 December 1534. In 1548, the village of Kurla and six other villages were given by the Governor of Portuguese India to Antonio Pessoa as a reward for his military services.[3] Kurla remained under Portuguese rule until the British occupied Salsette Island in 1774. The island was formally ceded to the East India Company in the 1782 Treaty of Salbai. In 1805, Kurla was connected to Sion on Bombay Island by the Sion Causeway. Coorla, as it was spelt during the British Raj until 1890, was a major station on the Great Indian Peninsula Railway between Bombay and Thane, the first railway line in British India when it opened in 1853. In 1808, Kurla, along with the villages of Mohili, Kolekalyan, Marol, Sahar, Asalphe, and Parjapur, were given by the British to a Parsi merchant of Bombay, Mr. Hormasji Bamanji Wadia in exchange for a piece of land near the Apollo pier gate in Bombay. His Son, Mr. Ardeshir Hormasji Wadia, after whom the A. H. Wadia Road was named, paid for them a yearly Quit-rent of 358 (Rs. 3587).
