Mumbai (was Bombay)

[topaz]

Christopher Hitchens argued this week in Slate that Mumbai (the name for the city known as Bombay until 1995) is a "fake name," compares it to the Burmese junta renaming that country "Myanmar", and suggests that right-thinking people will continue to refer to Mumbai as Bombay.

I don't get it.  The opposition in Burma to the name "Myanmar" is partly a symbolic opposition to the military regime.  The Burmese protesters do not even recognize the legitimacy of the ruling party.  I don't see that the same issues apply in India.  As evidence, Hitch cites this 2006 Slate article by Christopher Beam:

Shiv Sena's leadership pushed for the name change for many years prior to 1995. They argued that "Bombay" was a corrupted English version of "Mumbai" and an unwanted legacy of British colonial rule.... The push to rename Bombay was part of a larger movement to strengthen Marathi identity in the Maharashtra region.... The name change didn't impact all of Mumbai's residents. Speakers of Marathi and Gujarati, the local languages, have always called the city Mumbai. "Bombay" is an anglicization of the Portuguese name "Bombaim," which is believed to derive from the phrase "Bom Bahia," or "Good Bay." (Portugal held territories in western India until 1961.)

So at least to some degree it's a top-down change.  But it's not clear to me that that automatically means that "Bombay" is a more proper name.  Why is a 16th-century Portuguese colonial name more culturally appropriate for an Indian city than a Hindu name that derives from local temples going back thousands of years?

Help me out.  I know a lot of you are smarter than I am and pay more attention to Asian politics than I do.  Am I missing something big from the backstory here?

Comments

[vespid-interest.livejournal.com]

I carpool with an Indian woman who moved to the US a few years ago and she prefers "Bombay" because that's the name she grew up with. (She's 26 or something.)

I'm actually going to admit this despite it making me look WAY dumb

[mizarchivist]

I had not put it together that Bombay and Mumbai were the same places. I feel a little less dumb given that the name change is a little more than 10 years old, so... way after geography classes were done.
I feel badly that I didn't realize this before.

Also, I work for an organization where we would refer to Hawaii half the time as Sandwich Islands, Sri Lanka as Ceylon, and Burma is totally Burma. Just sayin'.

I can't help you with back story- sorry!

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

"Bom Bahia" is a false popular etymology. Bom is a masculine form; you'd expect Bahia Boa if anything. The name predates colonialism and--not surprisingly--had several competing variants: Mumbai, Mambai, Bambai, etc. The first is now the preferred Marathi version, but less than half of all Bombayites (or, if you prefer, Mumbaikar) have it as their mother tongue, even if it is the official language. A majority speak Bambaiya Hindi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambaiya_Hindi), and the Hindi version is Bambai and has been for hundreds of years. Why should this suddenly change based on the whims of the Maharashtrian nationalists? It's like declaring that the official name of Chicago should henceforth be "Chicawguh" and that everyone worldwide should change their transcriptions accordingly.

[kcatalyst.livejournal.com]

Hopefully someone who actually knows details will help us all out, but I'm gonna take a wild stab and say that the Hindu-Muslim tensions which are so huge in India probably have something to do with this. At this point (I think his argument is going) no one is going to mistake using "Bombay" as a sign of support for European rule, but "Mumbai" is a marking of territory on the part of Hindus.

[kcatalyst.livejournal.com]

Never mind, muckefuck saved the day, and I am clearly wrong!

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Why is a 16th-century Portuguese colonial name more culturally appropriate for an Indian city than a Hindu name that derives from local temples going back thousands of years?

I keep trying to write responses, but since my family is also from the British Commonwealth they keep coming out unhelpfully snarky.

Also, while I would think "no, the name you choose to call your city is wrong and the name we called it is right" was annoying anytime, it seems particularly snide right after the attacks. Right now Mumbai, and India, have more important things to worry about than whether Christopher Hitchens validates their placenaming.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

This is an excellent point, too. Better stated than Hitchens', with more eye to the complexities of the situation, and much shorter than his article.

[docstrange.livejournal.com]

Agreed to all that!

Personally, last time I was in New Amsterdam, I couldn't convince ANYONE that they had screwed up the name of their city. The fools!

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't say you are. Bambai is not only the Hindi name, but the Urdu name as well, and Shiv Sena is virulently and vocally anti-Muslim. Moreover, "Mumbai" is transparently related to the name of the Hindu goddess Mumbadevi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbadevi), for whom the city was originally named. The renaming was absolutely an act of Hindu nationalist territory-marking.

So while I can't really blame Hitchens for having a bone to pick with a gang of xenophobic thugs like the Shiv Sena, the comparison to Myanmar is still overstated. (Not that the Shiv Sena haven't stolen elections, but there's no major political party in India which haven't.)

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

I knew you would come through for me! :-)

[mhw.livejournal.com]

Places change, and names are changed with them.

I was born in what was, at first recording, Eboracum; then Eoferwic; then Jórvík; now York. I then moved to Coventry, which may originally have been named for a tree belonging to Cofa, or a settlement near a convent. I've also dwelled briefly in Heantun / Wulfrūnehēantūn / Wolverhampton and Leman-tūn / Lamintone / Leamington Priors / Leamington Spa / Royal Leamington Spa - which after all that church-and-state flummery is still generally known simply as Leamington.

I don't think it makes any practical difference at all.

[maebeth.livejournal.com]

Exactly that.

I get why some who are opposed to a name that is part of hindu nationalist territory marking.

But as a descendent of those who did christian nationalist territory marking (ie colonialism) I'm not feeling ready to have an opinion about someone else's choices, however badly made. (Nor even to suppose I could determine if the choices were badly made or not.)

I guess I could use the french argument "we tried nationalist territory marking, and it wasn't a good idea" to say that in general I'm opposed ot nationalist territory marking... but I wouldn't try to decide which nationist territory marking name wins in that argument.

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

Back around 1995, I was a Project Manager at Parametric Technology, and one of my guys was a Muslim from Mumbai. He called it "Mumbai", and everyone in his family called it "Mumbai". They were not the least bit Hindu.

Did ol' Hitch have a similar problem with the transition from "Peking" to "Beijing"? How about "Persia" to "Iran" (which the BBC didn't bother to change until 1979).

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

There's a difference, however trivial, between a natural process of linguistic change and a conscious act of politically-motivated renaming. In the case of York, the old Celtic name Eboracum wasn't entirely replaced by Germanicised variants; it gave rise to Welsh Efrog, Irish Eabhrac, and Scottish Gaelic Eabhraig--names still used by speakers of the language when they have cause to refer to the city. I don't recall any proposal by the City of York Council to impose the name "York" on those speakers, and certainly no Celtic nationalists are demanding that a more direct descendant of the ancient name Eboracum be restored.

However, just such a thing has taken place in Bombay: a nationalist party has officially changed the name of the city to the version found in only certain languages and demanded that this form be used in preference to all other variants, even those of long standing. Is there a practical difference? Well a bit, as evidenced by the fact that at least one poster here didn't realise that "Mumbai" and "Bombay" were in fact the same entity. But mostly it's symbolic. To name a thing is to control it, and the Shiv Sena and their allies are symbolically asserting control over a space that was at one time more cosmopolitan and welcoming to non-Hindus.

[opadit.livejournal.com]

If I remember correctly, the native name for the area that Philadelphia now encompasses -- though both the area and the aboriginal population were a tiny fraction of what they are today -- was Shackamaxon.

I could walk around saying "Shackamaxon" all day long. It's a very satisfying set of phonemes.

Shackamaxon. Shackamaxon. Shackamaxon.

But, most importantly of course, WWCHD?

[mhw.livejournal.com]

A political party may demand what it pleases, and, to the extent to which it has jurisdiction, may attempt to enforce the demand; but where it has no jurisdiction, such a demand amounts to mere posturing and whistling in the wind.

To name a thing is to control it

If you believe in the power of verbal magic, yes, but...

[they] are symbolically asserting control over a space

'Symbolically' is the operative word. I honestly don't see why they should expect us to participate in their conjuring tricks with words, any more than I should take seriously any attempt, say, by the French Academy to insist that everyone should be bullyragged into adopting the French pronunciation of Paris.

[phornax.livejournal.com]

I was going to point out the false Portuguese etymology, but looks like muckefuck beat me to it. :^)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

And that's all that Hitchens is asserting in that bit, really. Most people have gone along with the change simply because that's what most authorities (media outlets, map publishers, etc.) have done, others because they've bought the argument that the thrust of the change is primarily anti-colonialist. He's just stating (if a bit forcefully) that one can say "Bombay" without feeling like a dinosaur for doing it.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Just as a random data point, while the city is Beijing, I was just visiting Peking University a few weeks ago and they make a point of that being their name in English rather than "Beijing University". (I'm not sure why, as I was reluctant to ask questions that might be politically sensitive.) And of course, the airport is still PEK, but that's because airport codes pretty much never change. (E.g., ORD remains long after Orchard Field became O'Hare.)

Similarly, while the country is Iran, I know at least one emigrant from there who describes herself as Persian. (She's also impatient with calling the language "Farsi" in English. "Do you also talk about people speaking Deutsch and Francais?)

I've also heard that the residents of Ho Chi Minh City still mostly call it Saigon, though I have no direct experience in that case.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Certainly the Vietnamese in my old neighbourhood do, but they're not exactly representative. (You'll see more South Vietnamese flags on display in Uptown than official ones.) And pretty much all Persian-speakers I've met object to the label "Farsi"--and often using the same argument. (Just today, I saw one upbraid a person of mixed Persian-Turkish heritage for saying "Farsi" when they wouldn't call their mother's tongue "Türkçe".) But, again, they're not the most representative sample.

[beowabbit]

I don’t have much opinion on Bombay/Mumbai, but just as a random side point, the phonological difference between Burma and Myanmar in Burmese is fairly small, much smaller than the difference between New Orleans and N’awlins (but similar in that it’s a social-register difference). A big chunk of the difference is transcription.

[hissilliness.livejournal.com]

Christopher Hitchens is putting being contrarian ahead of making sense!? O stop the presses, O do!

[harimad.livejournal.com]

The "change" from Peking to Beijing came from a change in Romanization systems rather than a change in the name of the city. And this change didn't affect speakers of any Chinese dialect.

Saigon-> Ho Chi Minh City is different because the city was never called anything like Ho Chi Minh City before. My experience, now 10 years old, is that the residents say Saigon.

Iran -> Persia -> Iran is probably the closest analogy but I know little of the history.