Daniel writes that he “might be tempted to say that it would be difficult to increase the average person’s ignorance of India, but that’s not the point.” But in this instance it is the point (at least partially). Imagine a hypothetical news consumer who has heard of Bombay, but does not know that the city is now called Mumbai, and is too thick to figure out that it’s one city despite several days of news coverage that constantly made note of this fact and/or used the two names interchangeably.

Should we (and everyone else in the world, from Burma/Myanmar to Bombay/Mumbai to Iran/Persia to Britain/the UK, to America/the US/the States, etc.) go out of our way to use names and terms that will not unduly confuse such a news consumer? No, because that news consumer doesn’t exist, because no one that ignorant and ineducable pays attention to the news. Even if it made sense to cater to the lowest common denominator Sailer’s still setting the bar way too low.

Sailer also seems to be making a larger point about the importance of continuity (there are books about Bombay in libraries, etc.). But that point also relies on the existence of this hypothetical idiot who cares enough about history to look up Bombay in a library, but is too stupid and helpless to understand that the city now has a different name. We’re talking about a profoundly stupid and helpless person, since if you type “Bombay” into Google the first result is the Wikipedia entry titled “Mumbai,” and you can read about the name-change without even clicking over to the article.

And I came to the Bombay kerfuffle via the Hitchens/Sullivan/JGoldberg/Corner axis, so it’s struck me as primarily a righty cri de coeur with a lefty peanut gallery laughing along.

Of course I’m wildly overstating my claims, but that’s the nature of bitterness.

Also, I don’t know that this “don’t call it Mumbai” meme has really caught on at a lot of conservative blogs. As far as I can tell, most of the discussion has been on left blogs breaking down into somewhat pro- and anti-Hitchens camps.

I don’t quite understand why there is so much resistance.

The resistance is very familiar and is based, like much of modern American movement conservative animus, in disproportionate resentment. As in: those utopian fascist liberals are trying to make us use different terminology (and wear seatbelts and recycle) so let’s pretend it’s a grievous harbinger of evil and blog about it for a week.

Okay, maybe I’m a little bitter.

So? Who gives a crap about our heritage? What about their heritage? Some white people came along and changed the name of their town. Doesn’t that matter?
Where was all the crying when Yugoslavia disappeared? Can I bitch about it and make them force all those people to live under rule they hated so I can continue to say the word?

I think that it is part of a broader reluctance to go along with the postcolonial crowd’s de-Anglicization of our global toponyms. I feel the same sort of irritation at “Mumbai” that I did a few years back when all the TV networks were going on about the Winter Olympics being held in “Torino”, as if there weren’t a perfectly good English name for the city already. Are we next going to have to start talking about Moskva and Muenchen? (Or an even better analogy for the last, “Minga”, which is apparently the Austro-Bavarian dialect name for the city.) The whole project is just ridiculous.

I think I’m just going to start calling everyplace by its respective Latin name. Makes things much simpler.

eis ten polin… *sigh*

There is another take on the name change Here:

Really? I think a lot of us Westerners feel the name change is stripping us of OUR heritage. We already have hundreds of years of Western and Indo-Western literature where the city of Bombay plays a prominent role. Bombay is a symbol of oriental exoticism. It has drinks, clothing lines, retail chains, etc. named after it. To no longer have Bombay in the world is a loss. Arguably many Mumbaikar feel insulted to play the role of such a symbol, I get that, but it also makes Bombay a special place in the world – up there with Rome, New York, Paris, and Rio. Why would anyone throw that away?

http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~yavuzcet/lyrics.htm