-
India Retold: POLITICALLY MILKING 'MUMBAI'
- Gujaratis are among the oldest residents of Mumbai. If they have always got the ‘bai’ part of the name of the city right, there is no reason to believe that they were not able to pronounce the ‘Bom’ part correctly and therefore twisted it to ‘Mum’. Thus, if Gujaratis have always called Bombay ‘Mumbai’ as Sanghvi says, it almost proves the fact that the British corrupted the original name of a village called Mumbai to Bombay rather than the other way round! Outsiders who came into the city when the corrupted Bombay was its established British name, seem to have further corrupted the already corrupted ‘Bom’ to ‘Bam’ and taken the ‘bai’ part from the locals.
Bombay is not an isolated case of the corruption of the names of Indian cities by the British. Most people have forgotten that Kanpur was called ‘Cawnpore’ by the British. There was no city at that spot too before the British built a huge military station after getting the place in 1801. Prior to that, the small town/village that existed there was variously called Karnapur(after Karna of Mahabharat) or Kanhapur/Kanhiyapur(after Lord Krishna). There was also a Kohna village in the area. Whatever the prevalent name when the British took control of it, they promptly proceeded to corrupt it to an almost unrecognisable Cawnpore.
- Examples of arrogant mutilation of names of Indian people, places and things are endless.
-
Monday, October 12, 2009
India Retold: POLITICALLY MILKING 'MUMBAI'
