MUMB AI JUMBO
Dhiren Bhagat on the
SS's ominous plan to change Bombay's name
SOME years ago, looking through the library at Dove Cottage, I came across a book called Voyage from Bushear to Bom- bay. On the page where the author had explained the origin of the name Bombay — a sheltered harbour, hence born (good) bahia (bay) — I spotted a waggish couplet tightly packed into the margin, written in what I presumed was the poet's hand. If! am right about the hand it must be the only joke Wordsworth ever wrote, not a very good joke, I admit, but one which time and the accretion of meanings have made slightly funnier:
Shelter'd from Toil here did the Adventurers Gay
Squat down at ease, and nam'd it hence Bum- bay!
I wonder what the poet would have made of the Bombay Municipal Corpora- tion's unanimous 'demand' last week that the name of the city be changed to Mum- bai. (Not being a comp. man I cannot imagine the entries this would provoke should Jaspistos seize the idea.) But histor- ically the BMC may have a point. It was the British settlers who thought the name derived from the Portugese (Buan bahia or Born bahia) and this idea passed into most 19th-century books. But that theory, as Gillian Tindall tells us in her 'biography' of Bombay, City of Gold (1982), is now discredited: `. . . it cannot be right since the earliest Portugese settlers already cal- led the place Bombaim.' Etymologically, Mumbia — the Marathi word for Bombay — seems to have the edge. Mumba (or Mombai) was the goddess of the Koli fisher-folk who originally occupied the islands and who continue to cast their nets off Danda, the fishing village beneath our balcony in Bombay. But it is unlikely that Mumbia has been clamouring for the change: she is the goddess without a mouth.
This business of changing names is a familiar racket in India as anyone who has read R. K. Narayan's Lawley Road will recall. Roads keep getting their names changed but few people use the new names, not from a lack of patriotism but because the new names are inconveniently long. So in Bombay it's still Marine Drive, Peddar Road, Warden Road and Napean Sea Road. Funnily enough, one of the few recent changes to have stuck is from one English name to another English name: Elphinstone Circle is now known as Horni- man Circle. Our own road, Pali Hill, had its name changed some time last year to Shrimati Nargis Dutt Road to commemo- rate a deceased neighbour, a distinguished Muslim film star and member of the Upper House. Names of roads in Bombay are usually painted white on a blue back- ground: in this case someone decided to make the background green, presumably in deference to our neighbour's religion. It was an ill-advised move: the Hindus felt provoked, and a riot broke out. But the changes aren't always that violent. In a continuing attempt to rub out the British legacy cities keep changing their names: Cawnpore became Kanpur a long time ago, Benares, Varanasi; Poona is now quite firmly Pune, though when I was last in Gauhati I found few takers for Guwaha- ti, the new official name.
But in Bombay's case the change is more 'I came to New York to get away from all the Americans in London.' ominous. Towards the end of April, as Reagan went into a tizz, about the SS graves in Bitburg and the Western world gulped, another — not dissimilar — SS was resur- recting itself in Bombay. On 25 April the Shiv Sena (literally Shiva's army, a militant Maharashtrian organisation) obtained con- trol of the Bombay Municipal Corpora- tion, winning 70 of the corporation's 170 seats.
The Sena was founded back in the mid-Sixties by Bal Thackeray, a soft- spoken Maharashtrian who began his career as a cartoonist on the Free Press Journal. Initially, its animus was directed against the South Indian migrants to the city but of late the 'army' has been growl- ing against Muslims and 'outsiders' who squat on the city's pavements. It's a diffi- cult question, what one does with these squatters, in fact the Supreme Court has been mulling it over for the last four years. The SS wants simply to throw them out and it's a stance many middle-class taxpayers find appealing.
In the second half of May I spent most of my evenings with Thackeray in a living- room stuffed with flattened tiger heads and toy cannons, trying to draw him out. 'I am a terrorist,' he said almost as soon as I met him, obviously hoping to impress me. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I still don't. 'My real hero is Adolf Hitler,' he went on; 'one may perhaps disagree with his final solution but that is merely arguing over details. Personally I would be of the opinion that we put all the Muslims on a boat and ship them out. But the fact remains that Hitler was a great patriot and that he served his people well.'
His Maharashtrian chauvinism has its limits, though. It soon becomes clear Thackeray doesn't go in for a wholesale repudiation of things foreign. He smokes a pipe and reads collections of Jak cartoons. His other great hero is Walt Disney. 'Unfortunately I never got to meet him but it is the ambition of my life to build a Disneyland in Bombay.' (N. T. Rama Rao, the other loony regionalist, is similarly keen on a Disneyland: 'there is no need to build one in the state,' Rajiv quipped in parliament two months ago, 'the whole of Andhra Pradesh is a Disneyland.') It's a depressing thought that maybe history is on the side of the SS. The principle behind Bombay has always been gab as grab can. In 1509, only 11 years after Vasco da Gama's boats reached India, the Portuguese first landed in Bom- bay and set the trend: 'Our men captured many cows and some blacks who were hiding among the bushes and of whom the good were kept and the rest were killed.' It sounds alarmist but the truth is the fascist clowns have succeeded in taking over the BMC and not everything they do is funny. Demanding a change of name is only the beginning. If the SS has its way it will soon begin disposing of undesirable 'foreigners' (their phrase), throwing the bums back into the bay while Mumbai, the goddess without a mouth, mutely looks on.
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