The Bombay vs Mumbai debate is not yet dead

The Bombay-not-Mumbai crowd refuses to admit even temporary defeat to Maharashtra or Mumbai. When Amol Rajan, the Kolkata-born editor of the British newspaper, The Independent, decided to restart using ‘Bombay’ in his daily to refer to what most people in Mumbai have always referred to as Mumbai, the Bombay-not-Mumbai folks felt appreciated. They felt understood. They felt slightly less threatened. It was a moment of re-affirming their faith. But few others seemed to care. I have still chosen to react because the tussle between Mumbai and Bombay is not a Hindu-nationalist versus cosmopolitan-liberal-India struggle as it is falsely made out to be. Bombay-not-Mumbai folks with hurt egos still control the representation of Mumbai — inside the Indian Union and across the world. They control this representation through their trans-metropolitan networks of other sympathetic deracinated elite. The fact that I am reacting to something that is probably of marginal interest to Maharashtrians except for some who want to milk its potency as a powerful symbol of real people shows how the Bombay crowd, The Independent editor and this author are probably closer to each other than each of them are to Mumbai. Misrepresentation creates anger. Any injustice does. All misrepresentations must be contested for self-respect of the salt of the earth is not for sale.

With the breakdown of Congress dominance all over the Indian Union, there was a slight loosening of the power-grip of the Anglo-Hindi Nehruvian elite. Their self-declared cosmpolitanism was a poor excuse for their own parasitism. Rooted people who lived by their own identities and not borrowed colonial ones, asserted themselves politically. While cosmo-liberal and Hindu-nationalist pundits portray the assertion of rootedness or native identity as a speed-breaking hindrance to a cosmopolitan pan-Indian love-fest, most mobilizations based on rootedness draws life-force from exclusion and injustice. Maharashtra happened. And then Mumbai happened.

Bombay lost both the battles because slowly but surely servant, and not master, numbers started mattering. Bombay never recovered from these defeats. There’s a slow but unmistakable trans-generational shift of their children, assets and resources towards the NCR, the next metropolis anointed to be a celebration of alienation, of deracination, of the idea of India.

No one represents Bombay’s vaunted cosmopolitanism of yore as does Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy — a migrant who made Mumbai is own. When he set up the JJ School of Art, he brought GW Terry from Britain as a drawing teacher with a lucrative annual salary of Rs300 in 1857 with the condition that Terry must learn Marathi within a year of joining. That was then. The post-1990 new-India elite that has no significant stake in anything to do with the culture or the soil they benefit from, may yet defeat Mumbai. Mumbai has to defend itself against what elite rootless classes have done to Bengaluru, including preliminary initiatives to divide the city to give themselves political clout through their Whitefield enclaves. Sobered by defeats, Bombay-not-Mumbai may be smart enough to avoid conflict by letting the name remain Mumbai but continue domination in other ways. 

Bombay-not-Mumbai gangs still control Mumbai, as they always have and are more likely to have a sympathetic trans-continental associate in a British newspaper. The basis of that lies in the marginalisation of the rooted majority. Celebrating Bombay over Mumbai is celebrating distributive injustice. All great cities have multiple names. When the commonly used name isn’t the ‘internationally’ used name, it tells us more about elite-minority clout than anything else. Bombay gets a reality-check from Mumbai every time at the municipal elections. There, where people matter, Mumbai wins.

The author comments on politics & culture @gargac