[lbo-talk] Mumbai bombings

[Sujeet Bhatt]

On 7/15/06, ravi <gadfly at exitleft.org> wrote:
> At around 15/7/06 10:52 am, Doug Henwood wrote:
> >
> > On Jul 14, 2006, at 10:30 PM, Aditya Mopur wrote:
> >
> >> bombay
> >
> > Ok, so what are the politics of the renaming?
> >
>
> Didn't we go over this a while ago? Aditya or Sujeet or Ulhas probably
> have better info, but here's my 2c: the rename is part of the right-wing
> driven effort to "re"claim Bombay as a Marathi city (Bombay is part of
> the state of Maharashtra, though there is a large Gujarati population).
> I think this is also part of the ongoing process of renaming Indian
> cities to their "original" names, which has led to such silliness (IMHO
> of course) as Madras turning into Chennai (In the case of Madras, as
> opposed to "Trivandrum" which is a British corruption, the name Madras,
> short for Madraspatnam, is as valid a name for the city, and the usage
> by locals has always been to refer to it as Madras in English and
> Chennai in Tamil).
>

Renaming in most cases is actually only a de-anglicization of names -
it has nothing to do with right-wing politics. As Ulhas points out,
Bombay has always been referred to as Mumbai by most of its population
- whether Marathi or Gujarati. It was the British who renamed it to
Bombay because tehy couldn't pronounce the word. "Mumbai" is therefore
a de-renaming - a restoration of the original name. Ditto for
Kolkata/Calcutta.

Sujeet