It's 'Bombay' not 'Mumbai'

Do you say 'Moskva' for 'Moscow'? 'Wien' for 'Vienna'? Do you expect the French to drop 'Londres'? Of course not.

From the late 1990s, Indian governments began to change the official names of some prominent cities—from ‘Bombay’ to ‘Mumbai’, ‘Madras’ to ‘Chennai’, and ‘Calcutta’ to ‘Kolkata’. Shortly afterwards, British journalists followed suit. Noticing the change, I made sense of it on the grounds of courtesy: after all, if that’s what Indians want to call their cities, why should we object? Still, I was uneasy, half-intuiting that something less innocent was going on.

Now, I see that my intuition was on the button. Recently reading John Keay’s 1991 history of the East India Company, The Honourable Company, I learned that the three great port cities all owe their existence to it. Before the British arrived, Bombay comprised a set of seven separate islands, Madras was a fishing village, and Calcutta a cluster of three villages. According to Tirthankar Roy, the Bengali-born professor of economic history at the London School of Economics, by providing security, political stability, and impartial justice, the EIC attracted Indian artisans, merchants, and financiers from the interior, and so enabled the islands and villages to transform themselves into major ports and hubs of international trade.