Boldly Fighting Hindutva

By Daniel Larison • December 3, 2008, 8:22 AM

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

This is, if anything, even sillier than complaining about using the name Myanmar. Contra Hitchens, Myanmar is not a “fake” name. It is another name for Burma in Burmese, used when referring to the country in writing, and the fact that it was adopted as the official name by a military junta should not necessarily make it the “wrong” name. The name Bombay was itself the invention of the Portugese that caught on and became institutionalized in the colonial period, and the city has been called Mumbai by speakers of some dialects for quite a while. As Hitchens’ own colleague Chris Beam at Slate wrote a couple years ago:

Speakers of Marathi and Gujarati, the local languages, have always called the city Mumbai.

So really all one is doing by refusing to use the new name is to privilege other dialects over Marathi and Gujarati. Now that‘s a powerful statement.

What is sillier still is to act as if refusing to use Myanmar matters. You are not freeing one dissident or aiding one protester against the junta by doing this; it is a show of solidarity that doesn’t even express solidarity, but simply makes you feel as if you have taken a stand when all you are doing is continuing a habit. The same goes double for Mumbai. You are not making the BJP weaker by your refusal; Shiv Sena is not going to disband out of fear of your mighty refusal. No one is obliged to use the new names, of course, and many don’t, but could we at least not pretend that by refusing the new name we are doing anything meaningful?

Presumably Istanbul should remain Istanbul by Hitchens’ standards, since it was officially renamed by a secularist, despite the rupture with the city’s past the newer official name represents. The change was a symbolic break with the Ottomans, but simply formalized a colloquial name of the city, which is similar to what happened in India. Should we all go back to calling a certain famous city on the Volga Tsaritsyn rather than the neutral Volgograd to show that we are calling it by its “right” name? I doubt Hitchens’ great scruples over using “the right name” would apply here, nor would they have applied to any of dozens of Eurasian cities previously renamed for various thugs and partisans of Hitchens’ political persuasion.

Update: A Mumbai local sets Andrew straight.

18 Responses to Boldly Fighting Hindutva

rushin says:

December 3, 2008 at 10:12 am

I completely agree with the silliness of not using the name Mumbai, or equating it to some grand notion of Hindu chauvinism, when it just happens to be the local pronunciation. And it doesn’t make the BJP any weaker. My question is, why would one want to weaken the BJP. It seems to me that despite their rhetoric, whenever they’ve been in power, they’ve governed largely secularly (at least more so than the Congress and its ridiculuous pandering to minorities). And, looking at the Vajpayee govt. from 98-04, might I add, they’ve also shown themselves to be much more capable on the economy, foreign policy, and the crucial task of fighting Islamic terrorism. Yes, I know, there were terror attacks during their tenure too, but as someone who’s lived in India through both governments, there’s just no comparison. There have been as many terror attacks in the last 12 months alone as there were during the BJP govt’s entire tenure. Isn’t it in the best interests of India and the West for the BJP to be decisively voted into power in the next Lok Sabha elections?
kitstolz says:

December 3, 2008 at 10:14 am

Or course for a few opinion leaders in the West to use the name Burma instead of Myanmar will not bring down the secretive regime that rules that country with an iron fist…but the regime is so cruel and ruthless that to refuse to go along with its wishes even on small matters is a perfectly reasonable stand, even if it was proposed by Hitchens. (What the regime has done to its people in Burma is at least as bad as what Saddam Hussein did to his people in Iraq.)

Plus, the renaming in this case is part of the regime’s larger media strategy, which is to create endless confusion and complexity, so that the truth is perpetually obscured, within the country and outside it.

It’s quite likely that on that blessed day when the regime falls and the people celebrate in Rangoon, that they will return immediately to using the name of Burma. Those who went along with the regime in the name-changing will look a little foolish, as did those in the days of the French Revolution who went along with radical changes to the calendar proposed by the ill-fated revolutionaries, which most of the French set out to forget as soon as possible.
Daniel Larison says:

December 3, 2008 at 10:32 am

The names of the months invented by the revolutionaries were created out of whole cloth, and they meant nothing to anyone. They were the epitome of artificial, imposed nonsense. The point about these names discussed above is that they are actually names that people who live in the countries/cities in question have *always* used. It did not keep the USSR propped up one day more when people acquiesced in calling the place Leningrad, and refusing to call it by that name would have meant nothing. There have scarcely been any more cruel and ruthless regimes than the Soviet one, but I don’t recall from my youth any great drive to call Soviet cities by their pre-1917 names. I use the names indifferently, because one is not more “right” than the other. All of this is political posing at its most useless, and a lot of it isn’t even very well informed.

Should we start calling it Rhodesia because of the misrule and crimes of Mugabe? Are we colluding with the government by calling it Zimbabwe? Would we have been colluding with Ian Smith’s government had we called it Rhodesia in the 1970s and ’80s when Mugabe was viewed as nothing more than the anti-colonialist rebel? These questions are ridiculous.
rawshark says:

December 3, 2008 at 10:54 am

Mumbai is the name of the city. When the brits showed up they butchered the name. Now that they’re gone the real name is back. Not so hard.
Almost all of our off shore contractors are from India. There have been many diversity events where they schooled us on the history of India.
Hitchens once wrote an article stating that the name Pakistan was an acronym for Punjab, Afghani, Kashimir and Indus. I asked my boss, a Pakistani muslim. He said basically that Hitchens was making that up. Hitchens has a gift where he can say anything and make it seem like he knows what he’s talking about even when he’s just making stuff up.
Daniel Larison says:

December 3, 2008 at 11:16 am

“My question is, why would one want to weaken the BJP.”

This is a fair point, and certainly at the national level the BJP-led coalition government was reasonably successful and not particularly “communalist.” Modi in Gujarat was a different matter, but nationally BJP-led governments have been competent. I don’t assume that one should want to weaken the BJP, but I also think that is really a question for Indians to decide for themselves. Singh’s government has pretty clearly dropped the ball when it comes to security, so I think we will see the BJP prevail in the elections, and that is not something that should be feared.
bayesian says:

December 3, 2008 at 11:23 am

Rawshark, Hitchens was basically correct about the name “Pakistan”, and your Pakistani boss was either ignorant or disingenuous (or both).

I’m not sure if your retelling of Hitchens butchered the acronym’s history or Hitchens butchered it in his original (the latter is quite quite believeable).

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_Declaration
Dan Koffler says:

December 3, 2008 at 11:45 am

I think the governing principle is that you call people by whatever demonym they want to go by, though obviously what ‘they want’ gets tricky in case like Burma/Myanmar. The limiting case is language names; it’s pretty cloying to hear someone speaking in English refer to ‘espaÃ±ol’ or ‘Deutsch’ (which is the same reason that the language of Iran should be called ‘Persian’ in English, not ‘Farsi’).

Apropos of Daniel’s post, green-lanternism about the good it does to refuse to say ‘Myanmar’ would seem to dictate that the Russia hawks should have been flooding the broadsheets and the airwaves with outraged demands to call Kaliningrad ‘KÃ¶nigsberg’. We owe the Georgians nothing less.

Bayesian is correct about the name of Pakistan (so far we’ve left out the ‘s’ which stands for Sindh I believe), but in addition to being an acronym of territorial claims, it’s also Urdu for ‘Land of the Pure,’ (which could well be the only meaning Rawshark’s boss is familiar with, in which case it’s an honest mistake). Mohammed Ali Jinha was really one of the all-time great propagandists.
Dan Koffler says:

December 3, 2008 at 12:05 pm

Oh, and of course, the elephant in the room here is why Hitchens doesn’t refer to Iran as ‘Persia,’ assuming that he’s not a fan of either of the states that have used that name internationally. Now it just so happens that there has been an Iranian state almost continuously for 2600 years, minus a relatively brief Hellenistic occupation, and in that time the country was always known by its people as some variation on ‘Iran’ — ‘Airyanem Vaejah’ in Avestan, ‘Airya áºŠsaÃ§am’ in Old Persian, ‘Eranshahr’ in Middle Persian, ‘Iran’ in modern Persian (even the non-Persian Parthians ethnonym was ‘Parthava’ which is northeast Iranian dialect for ‘Pahlava’ whence ‘Pahlavi’ — and never as any variation on ‘Persia’ (‘Parsa,’ ‘Pars,’ ‘Fars’), which is only one region in the southwest, albeit a historically important one since it was the home province of the Achaemenians as well as the Iranian dialect by and large won out over the others.

Despite all that, isn’t Hitchens pretty much committed to insisting on calling the country ‘Persia’ in solidarity with the beautiful boulevards of Tehran and Esfahan when the revolutionary constitutionalist Shah Qajar was in power?
Daniel Larison says:

December 3, 2008 at 12:34 pm

Yes, I’ve noticed the same stupid hang-up that he and Andrew have both had in refusing to use Iran’s proper name. I said something about this last year.
Joshua says:

December 3, 2008 at 1:15 pm

Peter Hitchens also likes using the old names for countries and cities… at least the brothers can agree on that!
Gilligan says:

December 3, 2008 at 8:33 pm

The reason to call it Bombay is simple: That’s the English name for the city. Are you proposing to start calling Athens “Athenai,” Naples “Napoli,” and Munich “MÃ¼nchen”? I don’t know any other society that has compunctions about calling foreign places by the names in their (the speaker’s) language. The Spanish call London “Londres” and New York “Nueva York.”
Daniel Larison says:

December 3, 2008 at 8:38 pm

If people want to make the argument that they are using the English name for Burma, Bombay or wherever, they can do that. That is decidedly not the argument they are making. They are making a B.S. argument that they are using the old English forms out of some political protest against the people who changed the name. It’s bogus and meaningless, and I don’t care for it.
antrastan says:

December 3, 2008 at 8:45 pm

It always itches me to use English names for places that have real names. Florence over Firenze, for example. Two things prevent me changing this: (1) I would sound pretentious; (2) I would have to learn a host of new words and their respective pronunciations, half of which I would no doubt bungle embarrassingly.
Daniel Larison says:

December 3, 2008 at 8:51 pm

Those are fair points. I would prefer that people understand that Hungarians call their country Magyarorzsag, and so forth. However, I don’t insist that people use the names of places in the native languages, but I do say that they should not pretend that they are taking some important moral stance by refusing to use indigenous names. They are using the names they know and are familiar with, which is fine, but it is not some high-minded protest.
David Tomlin says:

December 3, 2008 at 9:37 pm

For me the most exasperating nomenclature controversy is, or was, the ‘Jordan is Palestine’ nonsense. It’s been mostly dropped since Jordan renounced its claim to the West Bank, but in my youth the editorial pages were full of it.

Would we have been colluding with Ian Smithâ€™s government had we called it Rhodesia in the 1970s and â€™80s when Mugabe was viewed as nothing more than the anti-colonialist rebel?

In those days opponents of Smith’s government, especially British ones, insisted that the ‘correct’ name was ‘Southern Rhodesia’. (Zambia had previously been ‘Northern Rhodesia’.) The theory was that Rhodesia was still part of the British Empire, because Britain wouldn’t recognize its independence until there was ‘majority rule’. It was an odd confluence of imperialism with anti-racism.

Now it just so happens that there has been an Iranian state almost continuously for 2600 years, minus a relatively brief Hellenistic occupation . . .

Sorry, the person who wrote this doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Iran has been part of several larger entities (the Omayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, the empire of Timurlane, etc., etc.) It has also at times been divided into smaller entities.
Glaivester1 says:

December 3, 2008 at 10:53 pm

If people want to make the argument that they are using the English name for Burma, Bombay or wherever, they can do that.

That’s the argument I use. Why use names that will obscure the identity of the place in history, when the place has historically been called Bombay/Burma/etc. in English? Why try to assert that English pronunciations are offensive and must be replaced with native pronunciations?

For me the most exasperating nomenclature controversy is, or was, the â€˜Jordan is Palestineâ€™ nonsense.

At some point, the opposite was true; what we think of now as “Palestine” (i.e. the West Bank of the Jordan River) used to be called Cisjordan (as opposed to Transjordan, what we now call Jordan).
vanya says:

December 4, 2008 at 7:56 am

What Glaivester1 said. There is no reason to be ashamed of English place names for foreign places.
conradg says:

December 4, 2008 at 7:51 pm

I really think it would be best, and certainly pro-paleocon, to call every geographical region on earth by some obscure name from its past, preferably at least several hundred years old.

I’m reminded of a computerized version of the board game Risk, which includes maps of Europe, Asia, and North America which each have literally close to a couple of hundred regions, each given incredibly obscure old names. I wasted a lot of time conquering small medievel fiefdoms over and over again, and I still can’t remember their names. A world composed of obscure regions like that might be our best defense against war, in that you can’t declare war against a country whose name you can remember or pronounce.