When he released his first music video, Mumbai-based musician Mihir Joshi understood that it would be reviewed by India’s Central Board of Film Certification for obscene or offensive lyrics. When the board objected to a single word, he quickly agreed to part with it.
However, he was flabbergasted to hear that the word was “Bombay.”
“I started laughing, and I said: ‘What are you talking about?’” Joshi, 33, said in an interview.
The music video was broadcast on the MTV Indies cable channel over the weekend with the offending place name replaced with a bleep and blurred in the accompanying subtitle.
“I have nothing against the word ‘Mumbai,’” he added, a little plaintively. “I’m not calling it ‘Constantinople’ or ‘Atlantis’ or whatever.”
He chose “Bombay” in the second line of the song, he said, because he needed a rhyme with “today.” However, by doing so, Joshi stumbled into one of India’s many unresolved tugs of war over history and identity.
Mumbai, a word drawn from the Marathi language, has been the official legal name of Joshi’s home city since 1995, when the nativist political party in power chose it to replace the Anglicized name Bombay, used since colonial times.
Not everyone adopted the new name, though. Some kept using Bombay out of long habit or institutional inertia — the city’s stock exchange and its high court still bear the name, for example. Others stuck with Bombay as a political statement, rejecting what they considered xenophobic politics behind the change.
Although this divide leads to regular dust-ups on televised talk shows, Joshi’s case was the first in recent memory in which an artist has been called out for using Bombay.
“If the name of this city has been changed, it’s only fair that we adhere to the new name,” daily The Mumbai Mirror editor Meenal Baghel said. “But should it have been bleeped as if it is a four-letter word? I think that’s ridiculous.”
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