This week, British newspaper The Independent is set to implement an editorial rule — Mumbai’s going back to Bombay in all references to the city — a cradle to our movie industry and one of the world’s megacities. Population 1.85 crore and climbing. But The Independent’s India-born editor Amol Rajan has chosen to ignore the current name that brings together all things fantastic about the city. In his argument, Rajan (orginally from Kolkata, or Calcutta) claims the move is the paper’s stand against the closed-minded view of Hindu nationalists.
Even Tamil Nadu has had name change of several cities to oppose colonialism, with Chennai replacing Madras being the most prominent one. In 1996, the then ruling party Dravida Munnetra Kalagam (DMK) officially renamed the capital city by referring to the ancient name of Chennapatnam. “The British actually renamed several cities only for easier pronunciation. But to bring back the local dialect, we have changed the names of several cities including Thoothukudi (Tuticorin), Kanyakumari (Cape Comorin), Thanjavur (Tanjore) and others,” says K.R.A. Narasiah, a popular Tamil historian.
Bombay was officially changed to Mumbai in 1995 with yes, the Shiv Sena forming the name-change campaign’s spearhead. The Marathis though, have been using ‘Mumbai’ from much before the paperwork. But Rajan is of the opinion he’s doing us a favour by pointing the light at issues he believes are ‘ascending’. “The whole point of Bombay is of an open, cosmopolitan port city, the gateway of India that’s open to the world,” said Rajan, in an interview with BBC radio (of course).
“If you call it what Hindu nationalists want you to call it, you essentially do their work for them. As journalists, as someone who edits The Independent, it’s incredibly important to be specific about our terminology. I’d rather side with the tradition of India that’s been open to the world, rather than the one that’s been closed, which is in ascendance right now.” “The Independent has a colonial hangover,” says Anil Dharker, columnist and director of the Mumbai International Literary Festival. Brits didn’t just murder names of cities in India. Names of hundreds of ports and capitals worldwide were changed just because the Empire couldn’t pronounce them.
Retired professor of history, Prof. Aravind Ganachari, from Mumbai University explains: “There is no strain of Hindu nationalism when you call it Mumbai. Beijing was previously called Peking, and Istanbul was previously called Constantinople. Does that mean these cities should go back to their former names because a white man decided on it? This announcement by the Independent only reeks of colonialism. Imperialism did no good to India — all these years they tried to civilise India under the guise of colonialism. The guys in the UK probably need lessons in civility.”
And in Kerala, where the Brits chose absolute convenience over recognition of culture, names of dozens of port towns were “altered” to avoid confusing the man responsible for trade receipts. Malayinkeezhu Gopalakrishnan, a Kerala-based historian says, “Misinterpreted translations were a reason for the spread of anglicised place names in Kerala. Here, native speakers were an important source of information for the British and the Dutch. The way they articulated the names did not suit the anglicised tongue. So, they recorded and documented it in the way they could decipher in terms of spelling and pronunciation. “Funnily enough, the capital’s name was either Aananthapuram or Thiruvaananthapuram but after the British opted for Trivandrum, it became Thiruvananthapuram for local people. It was in 1810 that a British Colonel James Wells first called it Trivandrum,” adds Gopalakrishnan.
