I am posting this query on behalf of Hal Schiffman. Please send
responses directly to him: haroldfs@GMAIL.COM
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"I've been asked by a colleague in another (non-South Asian) area of
the world
what is the history of colonial city naming in India, and whether it
is possible to
reconstruct what the "original" names for Bombay/Mumbai,
Madras/Chennai, and
Calcutta/Kolkata.
Two questions in particular I have is whether (1) Bombay was ever
called Mumbai by
speakers of other languages of India, other than Marathi, and (2)
when exactly did the
call for renaming Bombay as Mumbai began? I'd be interested to know
how recently
this phenomenon is.
I know that in the case of Madras/Chennai, I never heard of
"Chennai" when I first went
to Tamilnadu (then called Madras State) in 1965 and only later was
there a push to rename the
city.
I keep in mind an incident from when I was involved in SEASSI and
went to Hanoi to
recruit teachers of Vietnamese. We noticed that when speaking
Vietnamese, people
referred to Saigon as Saigon, but when speaking English, they called
it Ho Chi Minh City.
So I'm wondering whether this practice is all current in referring
to Indian city names.
Hal Schiffman
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Thanks,
--
E. Bashir, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer in Urdu
Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations
The University of Chicago, Foster 212
1130 E. 59th St.
Chicago, IL 60637
Phone: 773-702-8632
Fax: 773-834-3254