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The Daily Dish - 2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan

It's Bombay

By The Daily Dish
Dec 3 2008, 8:29 AM ET

Hitch informs me that the change in name to Mumbai is a function of Hindu chauvinism:

When Salman Rushdie wrote, in The Moor's Last Sigh in 1995, that "those who hated India, those who sought to ruin it, would need to ruin Bombay," he was alluding to the Hindu chauvinists who had tried to exert their own monopoly in the city and who had forcibly renamed itafter a Hindu goddessMumbai. We all now collude with this, in the same way that most newspapers and TV stations do the Burmese junta's work for it by using the fake name Myanmar. (Bombay's hospital and stock exchange, both targets of terrorists, are still called by their right name by most people, just as Bollywood retains its "B.")

I wasn't aware of this but now that I am, the Dish will refer to Mumbai by its previous name.



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