NAMING POWER. I'm generally a pretty big fan of iconoclasm, but Matt's post on the renaming of Bombay to Mumbai brought me up short. As noted by many who commented on Matt's Anglocentric approach, to the people of India, English is not simply another language; it is the language of the colonial power to which they were subject for hundreds of years. But more than that, it is the language of the people who botched the partition of the subcontinent -- a partition that resulted in the largest mass migration in history (more than 10.5 million) and an estimated 2 million deaths over a period of several weeks. Further, "Mumbai" is not a translation or corruption of Bombay (itself a corruption, as Matt notes, of the Portuguese "Bom Baim"); it is the name given the city by the people who were there when the Portuguese appropriated the land to make a city. They are not Hindi speakers, so I don't care that Hindi speakers used to call the city by its Portuguese name. And I don't think that because the Portuguese made a city on land that wasn't theirs that the name they gave the stolen land gets to live in perpetuity.
