By Garga Chatterjee
There is a section of the Bombay-not-Mumbai crowd that refuses to admit even temporary defeat to Maharashtra or Mumbai. When Amol Rajan, the Kolkata-born editor of a British newspaper, recently decided to start using the term 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 that at least someone understood them. They felt slightly less beleagured, if only very slightly so. It was a moment of re-affirming their faith. It felt nice. But few others seemed to care. But I have still chosen to react because, the tussle between Mumbai and Bombay is not a Hindu-nationalist versus cosmopolitan-liberal-India divide as the editor falsely made it out to be. Elites with hurt-egos and those who share their worldview will conjure up any reason to make their point. Bombay still controls 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 elites. The fact that I am reacting to something that is probably of very 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 than to each other than each of them are to the Mumbai imagining of the city. But this mis-representation creates anger. Any injustice does. Hence, such all representations or mis-representations must be contested, for self-respect of the salt of the earth is not for sale.
With the break-down of Congress dominance all over the Indian Union, there was also a slight loosening of the power-grip of the Anglo-Hindi Nehruvian elites. Their self-declared cosmpolitanism was a poor excuse for their own parasitism. Rooted people of the soil, who lived by their own identities and not borrowed colonial ones, asserted themselves in the political front. While some pundits portray assertion of rootedness or native identity as a speed-breaking hindrance to a cosmopolitan 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 the numbers of the servants have started mattering compared to the numbers of the masters. These are defeats from which Bombay never recovered. There is a slow but unmistakable trans-generational shift of their children, assets and resources towards the NCR, the next metropolis anointed to be the sprawling glitzy celebration of alienation, of rootlessness, of deracination of the idea of India.
The tiny minority of Mumbai who call it Bombay, as opposed to the rooted majority who have always called it Mumbai, is overjoyed that a British newspaper has decided to “change back” to Bombay. This doesn’t mean that Britain controls Mumbai. This shows once again that the minority that uses Bombay (and are likely to have a compatriot in a British newspaper) still controls Mumbai, as they always have. The basis of that lies in the marginalization of the rooted majority. Celebrating Bombay over Mumbai is celebrating distributive injustice.
None represents Bombay`s vaunted cosmopolitanism of yore as does Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy. Though he was a migrant to Mumbai, his rootedness is unquestionable. When he was setting up the J.J.School of Art, he brought G.W.Terry from Britain as a drawing teacher with a lucrative annual salary of 300 Rupees in 1857. Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy`s condition to G.W.Terry was that he 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 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 let the name remain Mumbai and not risk a renaming conflict while continuing to dominate in many other ways. They may be on the rise again but the rooted Maharashtrian has not still disappeared. Mumbai, in its dethroner of Bombay avatar, can still offer resistance and has not been defeated, yet.
All great cities have multiple names. When the most 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 the municipal elections are held. There, where people matter, Mumbai wins.