Deny Mumbai

It won't be online for about a week, but in this week's Spectator, Charles Moore writes:

One of my dinner companions was a young businesswoman and philanthropist who told me that she was from Bombay. I remarked that she didn't call it Mumbai. "Oh no," she said, "no Indian does. It is a word used solely in conversation with foreigners." She confirmed that the switch of official name from Bombay to Mumbai was the result of anti-Muslim Hindu agitation in the 1980s led by the charismatic Balasaheb Thackeray. Thackeray's sectarian Mumbai-Jumbo led to a rash of these name-changes - Madras becoming Chennai, Calcutta being re-spelt to sound less English - ignored by most Indians, but uncritically accepted by the outside world.