Andrew Sullivan excerpts from Christopher Hitchens’ article, which in turn quotes Salman Rushdie on how the name change came about. No simple throwing off the shackles of colonialism?
When Salman Rushdie wrote, in The Moor’s Last Sigh in 1995, that “those who hated India, those who sought to ruin it, would need to ruin Bombay,” he was alluding to the Hindu chauvinists who had tried to exert their own monopoly in the city and who had forcibly renamed it—after a Hindu goddess—Mumbai. We all now collude with this, in the same way that most newspapers and TV stations do the Burmese junta’s work for it by using the fake name Myanmar. (Bombay’s hospital and stock exchange, both targets of terrorists, are still called by their right name by most people, just as Bollywood retains its “B.”)
Apparently that’s exactly what it is. No sooner posted than here comes exasperated dissent from one of Sullivan’s readers (read the whole illuminating comment here):
I’m a fourth-generation Mumbaikar who loves reading your blog, but your post about the name Mumbai (linked to Hitchens) left me seething.
Hitchens is completely wrong. As someone whose roots go back many generations in Mumbai, let me assure you that we’ve always called the city Mumbai in our local language Marathi. The name Bombay was given to the city by the British. What do you think the city was called before the Europeans arrived? It was called Mumbai.
. . . For Hitchens, and now you, to state that the Bombay-Mumbai name change is akin to the Burma-Myanmar change is very insulting to this Mumbaikar proud of her Marathi roots. I sincerely hope that you will stop relying on Hitchens for information on Mumbai.
