Friday, May 31, 2024

Quotable quote


"Name-changing is in vogue in all of India nowadays; Madras has been renamed Chennai, Calcutta, that British-made city, changed its name to Kolkata. A BJP MP has demanded that India's name be changed to Bharat. This is a process not just of decolonization but de-Islamization. The idea is to go back not just to a past but to an idealized past, in all cases a Hindu past. But to change a name, for a person or a road or a city, there had better be a very good reason. And there was no good reason to change the name of Bombay. It is nonsense to say Mumbai was the original name. Bombay was created by the Portuguese and the British from a cluster of malarial islands, and to them should go the baptismal rights. The Gujaratis and Maharashtrians always called it Mumbai, when speaking Gujarati or Marathi, and Bombay when speaking English. There was no need to choose. In 1995, the Sena demanded that we choose, in all our languages, Mumbai. This is how the ghatis took revenge on us. They renamed everything after their politicians, and finally they renamed even the city. If they couldn't afford to live on our roads, they could at least occupy the road signs."

-- Suketu Mehta, "Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found"

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