Why bombay renamed mumbai

Subscribe Now. Your Subscription Plan Cancel Subscription. Home India News Entertainment. HT Insight. My Account. Sign in. It is part of a larger, ongoing wave where places across India have undergone name changes often to rid themselves of names given by the British.

We and our partners use cookies to better understand your needs, improve performance and provide you with personalised content and advertisements. To allow us to provide a better and more tailored experience please click "OK". Sign Up. Travel Guides. The civilian conflicts of Bombay in late and early saw thousands of Muslims massacred and a quarter-million of them flee the city. The difficulty in Mumbai is that decolonisation is confused as a de-Islamisation. Not only Muslims are considered outsiders, but also Buddhists, Jains, Christians, Sikhs and Parsis, and even Hindu speakers of Gujarati; which is ironic since the first known peoples of Mumbai, the Koli fisherfolk, came from ancient Gujarat, and their patron goddess, Mumbadevi, gives the city its name.

The decolonised or indigenised Hindu regime too readily discounts the pluralistic reality of the city, and the effect on the lived experience of minorities is violent. The voice of the ruling party now forcibly asserts that it is to a pan-Hindu — no, pan-Marathi — place that I have arrived. That is where I supposedly stand, and my belonging in this city is moderated in relation to this assertion.

The history of this city is layered. There are inconsistencies, and recollecting is a fallible process augmented by prejudices and preferences. In a city that is being increasingly defined by exclusionary identity politics, the process of decolonisation must be cautious, remembering that not everyone shares the same meaning, impulse, and interpretation of what a decolonial action is.

We ought to refrain from superficial forms of ticket-clipping on the grounds of colour, and instead become attentive to the processes of recovery. In Aotearoa, decolonisation is seen, for the most part, as a fundamental process for the restitution of justice — not only for Indigenous people to reclaim resources, but also to recover minds and bodies from European ways of perceiving, relating and existing.

But in Mumbai, my sense of the decolonial project is made topsy-turvy. Here, I cannot take renaming at face value, as an inherent and unquestionable form of decolonisation.

The challenge in Mumbai, as it is everywhere in the decolonising worlds, is how to ensure equitable representation across multiple communities bordered and bound by caste, class and creed. Socio-economic, political and cultural citizenship depend on intersecting economies of representation. My friends say Bombay did a better job of accommodating everyone than Mumbai. Their counter-argument for retaining the name Bombay, at least on their tongues and in their email signatures, is to enact a form of resistance against the narrowing effects of the ruling party.

But calling the city Mumbai marks the transmutation in ideology and outlook, and underscores the altogether different set of power relations of the present day. Bombay is lost, and constructing alternative narratives to the Hindu Right cannot be in nostalgic tones.

It is in the crevices of these concerns — in the decolonising of our public spaces, our cities and their museums — that naming and renaming has its proper place.

Austin, How to Do Things with Words , ed. Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Header image: Emma Gleason Passage Journal , Art By Balamohan Shingade Read Time: 59 mins. What's in a name? The history of a place, its present, and its future.

Aa Aa. Many local residents still call it Bombay out of habit as elsewhere in the world. The nationalists had been pushing for a name change for many years. Mainly they wanted to strengthen Marathi identity in the region.

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