Name Changes
Posted on December 8th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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Steve Sailer makes an interesting point with respect to the Mumbai name change that hadn’t occurred to me:
All these people are missing the essential point: Name-changing increases ignorance. People lose the thread. The libraries are full of books referring to Bombay, not to Mumbai.
Most people in America had heard of Bombay and knew it was in India. Until this terrorist attack, most Americans had never heard of Mumbai and had no idea that it was in India or that it was the large, famous city they had once heard of as Bombay, where all the Bollywood movies are made.
I might be tempted to say that it would be difficult to increase the average person’s ignorance of India, but that’s not the point. Offhand, I would say that if you knew that Bollywood movies were made in Bombay, you were already way ahead of the crowd, which didn’t know that Bollywood movies existed. So I’m not sure that these people would be terribly confused by the new name. That being said, I have objected in the past to the new ecumenical name miaphysite being applied to non-Chalcedonian Christians. The Copts want to use this name, and I don’t think it matters one way or the other. For starters, it is not meaningfully distinct from the existing, albeit pejorative, label monophysite, and it is just one more term that people have to learn about Christological differences where terminology is already confusing enough for most people. Most relevant books refer to these Christians as monophysites or by some other antiquated label (e.g., Jacobite), so relabeling all of them miaphysites to make a point is rather silly and bound to create more, rather than less, obscurity. It is likely to increase confusion, if not ignorance, and thus make it harder for people to understand the Christological controversies. Even so, the change to Mumbai is not that hard to adjust to, so I don’t quite understand why there is so much resistance.
Not to drift too far from the point here, but perhaps we should check which name has been removed from the Oxford English Children’s Dictionary first….
Interesting–has any progress been made between the Orthodox and the monophysites/miaphysites?
It’s time someone mentioned the delightful ditty ‘Istanbul’, in case some youngsters haven’t yet made its acquaintance.
http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~yavuzcet/lyrics.htm
The resistance, which I myself feel, is because the word Bombay conjures up a lot of associations, most of them are silly, romantic Kiplingesque in nature, but they’re there.
Even so, the change to Mumbai is not that hard to adjust to, so I don’t quite understand why there is so much resistance.
Really? I think a lot of us Westerners feel the name change is stripping us of OUR heritage. We already have hundreds of years of Western and Indo-Western literature where the city of Bombay plays a prominent role. Bombay is a symbol of oriental exoticism. It has drinks, clothing lines, retail chains, etc. named after it. To no longer have Bombay in the world is a loss. Arguably many Mumbaikar feel insulted to play the role of such a symbol, I get that, but it also makes Bombay a special place in the world – up there with Rome, New York, Paris, and Rio. Why would anyone throw that away?
FWIW
There is another take on the name change Here:
I have a feeling that the resistance to these things is not based wholly on residual Romantic/Colonialist feelings about a given city, though these certainly contribute in the case of Bombay.
I think that it is part of a broader reluctance to go along with the postcolonial crowd’s de-Anglicization of our global toponyms. I feel the same sort of irritation at “Mumbai” that I did a few years back when all the TV networks were going on about the Winter Olympics being held in “Torino”, as if there weren’t a perfectly good English name for the city already. Are we next going to have to start talking about Moskva and Muenchen? (Or an even better analogy for the last, “Minga”, which is apparently the Austro-Bavarian dialect name for the city.) The whole project is just ridiculous.
I think I’m just going to start calling everyplace by its respective Latin name. Makes things much simpler.
eis ten polin… *sigh*
If one cared at all and watched for longer than 30 seconds, one couldn’t have missed that Mumbai was formerly Bombay. I come from the other side of the equation and believe that people should be called whatever they want to be within reason and native pronunciations should be preferred. Espania over Spain. Deutschland over Germany. Like you, I don’t find Mumbai to be all that different from Bombay.
‘Really? I think a lot of us Westerners feel the name change is stripping us of OUR heritage. We already have hundreds of years of Western and Indo-Western literature where the city of Bombay plays a prominent role. ‘
So? Who gives a crap about our heritage? What about their heritage? Some white people came along and changed the name of their town. Doesn’t that matter?
Where was all the crying when Yugoslavia disappeared? Can I bitch about it and make them force all those people to live under rule they hated so I can continue to say the word?
The resistance is very familiar and is based, like much of modern American movement conservative animus, in disproportionate resentment. As in: those utopian fascist liberals are trying to make us use different terminology (and wear seatbelts and recycle) so let’s pretend it’s a grievous harbinger of evil and blog about it for a week.
Okay, maybe I’m a little bitter.
That’s what makes the least sense about it. No one is *making* anyone do anything. There is not, so far as I know, an organization dedicated to compelling use of post-colonial names by anyone. No one is going to be charged a fine if he keeps calling it Bombay.
Also, I don’t know that this “don’t call it Mumbai” meme has really caught on at a lot of conservative blogs. As far as I can tell, most of the discussion has been on left blogs breaking down into somewhat pro- and anti-Hitchens camps.
Well, it’s in the nature of grievance to elide the difference between force, pressure, and custom (I acknowledge that liberals are even more frequent eliders, because they’ve historically been more likely to push up against pressure and custom).
And I came to the Bombay kerfuffle via the Hitchens/Sullivan/JGoldberg/Corner axis, so it’s struck me as primarily a righty cri de coeur with a lefty peanut gallery laughing along.
Of course I’m wildly overstating my claims, but that’s the nature of bitterness.
Leaving aside the larger issues at stake, I think Sailer’s point here is a silly one. As M.Z. Forrest pointed out, anyone who watched or read any of the news coverage was told quickly and repeatedly that Mumbai and Bombay are the same city.
Daniel writes that he “might be tempted to say that it would be difficult to increase the average person’s ignorance of India, but that’s not the point.” But in this instance it is the point (at least partially). Imagine a hypothetical news consumer who has heard of Bombay, but does not know that the city is now called Mumbai, and is too thick to figure out that it’s one city despite several days of news coverage that constantly made note of this fact and/or used the two names interchangeably.
Should we (and everyone else in the world, from Burma/Myanmar to Bombay/Mumbai to Iran/Persia to Britain/the UK, to America/the US/the States, etc.) go out of our way to use names and terms that will not unduly confuse such a news consumer? No, because that news consumer doesn’t exist, because no one that ignorant and ineducable pays attention to the news. Even if it made sense to cater to the lowest common denominator Sailer’s still setting the bar way too low.
Sailer also seems to be making a larger point about the importance of continuity (there are books about Bombay in libraries, etc.). But that point also relies on the existence of this hypothetical idiot who cares enough about history to look up Bombay in a library, but is too stupid and helpless to understand that the city now has a different name. We’re talking about a profoundly stupid and helpless person, since if you type “Bombay” into Google the first result is the Wikipedia entry titled “Mumbai,” and you can read about the name-change without even clicking over to the article.
I wish I had seen this post a couple of days ago. Rawshark is full of crap. The locals there used Mumbai when speaking in Marathi and Bombay when speaking in English. Guess what? They still do. Changing the name from Bombay to Mumbai on officially on English signs and maps was a political move and a lot of the locals there are still pissed about it even now. I’ve heard plenty of locals there who feel the change robbed them of a heritage and of some international prestige. It cracks me up when I’m there to hear locals say Bombay and hear Westerners say Mumbai.