From seven islands to a city of 20 million, Bombay (now Mumbai) has been shaped over centuries by political, economic and social forces.

From Koli fisherfolk to colonial planners, and from Bollywood stars to textile barons, many have shaped the western Indian city's landscape and identity.

The city is ever-evolving, the past giving way to the future, birthing new guises and blurring the old. From fishing nets to ports and mills to malls, Bombay has constantly reinvented itself and remained a city in flux.

A new exhibition 'Bombay Framed' charts the city's shape-shifting passage through the centuries using a stunning array of paintings, photographs and multimedia prints.

More than 100 images spanning three centuries have an extraordinary range that document the city in its full diversity from the elite worlds of Zoroastrian merchants and cinema stars to working-class lives of ordinary citizens.

Together they invite us to see the city itself as a kind of artwork: layered, complex and made up of many different experiences, Gyan Prakash, curator of the exhibition, told the BBC.

According to Prakash there are a few key moments when Bombay really changed - in the 1830s and 40s, when reclamations and bunds joined the seven separate islets into a single island city.

Two decades later, in the 1860s, the fort walls came down, paving the way for imperial buildings to come up which gave the city its distinct colonial identity.

Since the 2000s the city's planners have focused on building more utilitarian infrastructure, with new sea bridges and coastal roads radically transforming how the city looks today.

This is a city of ancient caves but also of modern mills and atomic research facilities, making it impossible for two people to view it in the same way.

While Bombay brought cinema to India, cinema lived on its streets and not just on celluloid. The exhibition features a vivid line-up of vintage film posters from the 1950s and 60s that were once pasted across the city's walls.

The city's name was officially changed from Bombay to Mumbai in the mid-1990s, with authorities saying that was to shed its colonial legacy.

Prakash says their exhibition is titled Bombay Framed rather than Mumbai Framed simply because most of the images come from a time when the city was officially known as Bombay.