At some point over the summer, I read an online discussion which asked how and why it was that certain countries’ or cities’ names changed, e.g. Burma becoming Myanmar.

One of the contributors posted a link to a 2008 article on N+1, ‘How Bombay Became Mumbai’, which is a deep dive into India’s recent history. Excerpts follow, emphases mine.

In it, writer Nikil Saval purports that Mumbai is a name that is not one rooted in history:

When I was younger, I used to travel through Bombay in order to get to my ancestral city, Bangalore …

“Bombay has hundreds of very different ethnic communities, most of whom heartily dislike one another,” Suketu Mehta wrote in Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004). “They have been tolerating one another for centuries, until now.” I grew up knowing about Bombay’s pogroms in 1993, instigated by Hindu nationalist boss, Bal Thackeray (the model for Raman Fielding in Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh), which followed the demolition of a five-century old mosque at Ayodhya by Hindu mobs. The head of India’s right-wing Shiv Sena group, which was founded in 1966 and based in Bombay, Thackeray would be essentially parodic if he weren’t so murderous. He was until recently focused on starting an India-based rival to McDonald’s, “Shiv Vada-pav,” with a fried potato burger as its main attraction. And it was through his initiative that the city was renamed “Mumbai,” after the city’s patron goddess Mumbadevi—which, the nationalists argued, returned the city to its Hindu past. In reality, the Sena had overwritten history with a fantasy: Bombay was originally a Portuguese (Bom-baim), and then English (Bombay), trading port. The notion that it has a particularly Hindu past to return to is false …

A friend pointed out to me that I can’t call the place Bombay anymore—I’ve always insisted on it, against the weird, historically suspicious nationalism of the ’90s. But now these acts of terrorism have cemented the name in the world imagination. If I continue to refer to Bombay, people will wonder, “Hasn’t he been watching the news?”

A few years ago, I watched a television documentary, part of which had a quick vox pop with Indians, all of whom said they never use the name Mumbai, only Bombay. They laughed at the suggestion that they should say Mumbai instead.

Bombay/Mumbai showed up again in a September 2023 article in The Telegraph, ‘Samyukta Nair: The doyenne of Mayfair restaurants on where the smart set like to eat’:

She says that Mayfair reminds her of the art deco architecture on the Colaba peninsula in Mumbai – or Bombay, as she still calls it. ‘If you know the city, it’s very hard to say “Mumbai”. I grew up in Bombay. That’s home for me. It’s a feeling.’ Currently single, she lives in London for three quarters of her time; the remainder she is with her parents in Mumbai or travelling.

Tens of millions of Indians cannot be wrong. Perhaps one day, we will once again call Mumbai Bombay.