Mumbai is not Bombay: bloggers' views

More than natural catastrophes, manmade reconfigurations such as the naming and renaming of places can, and often do, strike at one’s very identity, producing the emotional traumas that lead us to study strategies and narratives that preserve, or are built around, those identities. The city of Bombay is a case in point: when it was officially renamed Mumbai in November 1995, the renaming, which aimed at undoing the Portuguese and later British “perversions” attached to the name Bombay (Hansen 2001), was not uncontroversial and is still debated. Are Mumbai and Bombay the same city? What is the meaning conveyed by the name for different social actors? Considering that reiterative practices of naming contribute to the creation and fixation of identities and thereby names can be used to claim certain identities, this chapter focuses on the underinvestigated discourse emerging from the public opinion perception of the renaming of the city. If the politics of identity is driven by the assumption that neither identity nor sense of community can ever be stable, then the ways in which entities are named carry with them multiple meanings and narratives. Against this backdrop, also shaped by the profound political power located in the capacity to name (vom Bruck and Bodenhorn 2006), the case study presented here aims to map attitudinal orientations (Martin and White 2005) towards the renaming of Bombay through the linguistic analysis of texts collected from a sample selection of British and Indian blogs.