Yeh Hai Bombay Meri Jaan: Requiem for a Cosmopolitan City

Abstract

Critical toponymies, instead of viewing place names as transparent signifiers that designate places as ‘objects’ or ‘artifacts’, have foregrounded the necessity for understanding place naming as ‘a contested spatial practice’ and attempted ‘a critical interrogation of the politics of place naming’. In view of the frequency of colonial erasures and appropriations of the spaces of the colonised, post-colonial reclamations of place resort to technologies of toponymic cleansing, founding and restoration as acts of resistance. Toponymic resistance can occur on both the creation and deployment of alternative names and the use of alternative pronunciations for established names. Viewing ‘pronunciation to be an important element of the cultural politics of place naming within post-colonial societies’, Kearns and Berg argue ‘that even when widespread agreement on the name of a place prevails, the way the name is pronounced reflects, and contributes to, the constitution of imagined communities’. Arguing that plural pronunciations of the city’s names – Bombay, Bambai and Mumbai – evoke multiversal cosmopolitan urban imaginaries that are sometimes disjunctive, this article shows that Hindi cinema employs ‘multiplicity of means’, amalgamating the linguistic tools of toponymy with paralinguistic and extralinguistic codes, to produce the myth of the cosmopolitan city or ‘the Bombay Dream’.