What is the difference between bombay and mumbai

Many important banks, financial institutions and companies are also headquartered in Mumbai. Mumbai is an important entertainment center with the large Hindi film industry and the niche Marathi film industry.

Image by Nikkul. File from Wikemedia Commons. Are Mumbai and Bombay the Same? Bombay, India, was renamed Mumbai in Tags: Bombay , Mumbai. Adding to the confusion, historical records indicate that the city was referred to as Mombayn , Bombay , Bombain , Bombaym , Monbaym , Mombaim , Mombaym , Bambaye , Bombaiim , Bombeye , Boon Bay , and Bon Bahia, among other names at different points in its colonial history!

And so some Marathi, Konkani, Gujarati, and Kannada speakers had been referring to the city as Mumbai even though it was Bambai to Hindi speakers and the rest of the country, and Bombay in official records.

It is part of a larger, ongoing wave where places across India have undergone name changes often to rid themselves of names given by the British. We and our partners use cookies to better understand your needs, improve performance and provide you with personalised content and advertisements.

To allow us to provide a better and more tailored experience please click "OK". Sign Up. Travel Guides. The fig tree creek of Umarkhadi, and the umbrella trees of Bhendi Bazaar. In an essay on the relationship between place names and decolonisation, recalling flora and fauna may feel benign, not because the naming system follows a pleasant logic, but because it is difficult to read these place names within the wider socio-political context.

The megalopolis of Mumbai is built on what was once an archipelago of seven islands, which was known to the Greek geographer Ptolemy, in CE, as Heptanesia. Pleistocene sediments suggest that the islands were inhabited since the South Asian Stone Age, but nothing certain can be known about these ancient peoples. The earliest known accounts are from the 4th century BCE when Koli fisherfolk and Agri salt collectors called these islands their home. Between the 2nd century BCE and 9th century CE, the islands were ruled by successive dynasties, until the reign of the Shilaharas from to The Delhi Sultanate annexed the islands in and controlled them until when they were then governed by the independent Gujarat Sultanate.

During the 16th century, the Mughal Empire became the dominant power in the South Asian subcontinent. But with the defeat of the last Maratha Peshwa in by the British, almost the entire Deccan Plateau came under British suzerainty and was incorporated into the Bombay Presidency of the British Raj.

From to , the city was reshaped by large-scale civil engineering projects aimed at merging all the seven islands of Bombay into a single amalgamated peninsula; and the opening of the Suez Canal in transformed Bombay into one of the largest ports on the Arabian Sea. When the British Raj ended in , the decolonial process began not only by discharging the white sahib from his administrative post, but contending with the different claimants of each state, city and neighbourhood.

In , following protests in which civilians died in clashes with the police, Bombay State was reorganised along linguistic lines. Gujarati-speaking areas of Bombay State were partitioned into the State of Gujarat, and the State of Maharashtra was formed with Bombay as its capital. The post-Independence decolonial efforts also included symbolic amendments like respelling or overwriting colonial place names. Bombay was officially renamed by legislation in , and under the Shiv Sena Government in Maharashtra, the city became Mumbai.

A temple was built for her in , in what is now the Bhuleshwar district of the city. But there are older names that refer to the archipelago, Kakamuchee and Galajunkja, which are still sometimes used. The renaming of Mumbai under the influence of the Shiv Sena political party did not stop at the level of the city; it extended to landmarks, roads and intersections. Between April and August , the civic administration approved such proposals.

The roads committee of the municipal corporation spends 90 per cent of its time renaming. The shift from Bombay to Mumbai was concomitant with the shift in the representational space of the city. The economic decline and the loss in soft power that the city suffered in the late 20th century coincided with the rise and radicalised populism of the right-wing Hindu fundamentalist party Shiv Sena:. Sometime in the s [ The change was not sudden, and it was not equally visible in all spheres.

But it was unmistakable. The civilian conflicts of Bombay in late and early saw thousands of Muslims massacred and a quarter-million of them flee the city. The difficulty in Mumbai is that decolonisation is confused as a de-Islamisation. Not only Muslims are considered outsiders, but also Buddhists, Jains, Christians, Sikhs and Parsis, and even Hindu speakers of Gujarati; which is ironic since the first known peoples of Mumbai, the Koli fisherfolk, came from ancient Gujarat, and their patron goddess, Mumbadevi, gives the city its name.

The decolonised or indigenised Hindu regime too readily discounts the pluralistic reality of the city, and the effect on the lived experience of minorities is violent. The voice of the ruling party now forcibly asserts that it is to a pan-Hindu — no, pan-Marathi — place that I have arrived. That is where I supposedly stand, and my belonging in this city is moderated in relation to this assertion.

The history of this city is layered. There are inconsistencies, and recollecting is a fallible process augmented by prejudices and preferences. In a city that is being increasingly defined by exclusionary identity politics, the process of decolonisation must be cautious, remembering that not everyone shares the same meaning, impulse, and interpretation of what a decolonial action is.

We ought to refrain from superficial forms of ticket-clipping on the grounds of colour, and instead become attentive to the processes of recovery. In Aotearoa, decolonisation is seen, for the most part, as a fundamental process for the restitution of justice — not only for Indigenous people to reclaim resources, but also to recover minds and bodies from European ways of perceiving, relating and existing.

But in Mumbai, my sense of the decolonial project is made topsy-turvy. Here, I cannot take renaming at face value, as an inherent and unquestionable form of decolonisation. The challenge in Mumbai, as it is everywhere in the decolonising worlds, is how to ensure equitable representation across multiple communities bordered and bound by caste, class and creed.