Slumbay
Language: English
Part of speech: name
Etymology: Blend of slum + Bombay (the city’s former name) with influence from bay, especially in later use with Mumbai.
Senses: examples: text: But the migrants are feared as the reputed source of crime and instability. There are warnings that “Bombay will become Slumbay”.
ref: 1996 June 1, John Gittings, “Slum dwellers of Bombay stand their ground”, in The Guardian, London, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 16, column 5:
text: To compete for international trade, many Indian politicians insist, Mumbai needs to transform itself from “Slumbay” into a showpiece.
ref: 2005 May 10, Brian Hutchinson, “Leaving ‘Slumbay’: Vancouver’s Minaean hopes its steel-built homes will give hope to Mumbai’s slum dwellers”, in National Post, volume 7, number 166, Toronto, Ont., →ISSN, →OCLC, page FP7, column 1:
text: Before the 2004 May elections, some prominent citizens of the city had filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the Mumbai High Court asking the election commissioner to disenfranchise the slum dwellers arguing that if they were living illegally, they could not be considered legal citizens of the city and therefore could not be eligible to vote. This was a move to label the dwellers of Slumbay as illegal (and hence criminals) and by that question the citizenship rights of a large section of city’s population. […] In the last fifty years of city’s development, from being a dream city it has become Slumbay, a city becoming more and more hostile to the migrant population, particularly low income ones and the poor.
ref: 2008, Darshini Mahadevia, Harini Narayanan, “Slumbay to Shanghai: Envisioning Renewal or Take Over?”, in Darshini Mahadevia, editor, Inside the Transforming Urban Asia: Processes, Policies and Public Actions, New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, →ISBN, pages 95 and 126:
text: For example, Mumbai (formerly Bombay) is India’s financial and industrial capital and the fifth most populated city. Home to a global elite, property prices in the centre are extremely high. Among the obvious affluence, there is significant poverty with over half the city’s population living in slums. This situation has earned the city the name of ‘Slumbay’.
ref: [2009, Dawn Burton, “Distribution”, in Cross-cultural Marketing: Theory, Practice and Relevance, Abingdon, Oxfordshire; New York, N.Y.: Routledge, →ISBN, page 124:
text: Just as the American census bureau’s pronouncement had shocked Cleveland, in 2011 an announcement from the Indian census bureau stunned Mumbai: the population of Mumbai island, it found, was in decline. While growth in the wider suburban region continued, the migratory tides lapping up against the man-made island city had reversed. Presumably word had reached village India that the glowing vision of Mumbai they saw in Bollywood movies didn’t stack up with “Slumbay” realities.
ref: 2013, Daniel Brook, “Slumdogs and Millionaires: Bombay, 1991–Mumbai, Present”, in A History of Future Cities, New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Company, →ISBN, pages 348–349:
text: Yet even though the city’s majority population consists of slum-dwellers, they occupy merely 8 per cent of the city’s land. Mike Davis has therefore described Mumbai as ‘the global capital of slum dwellers’ (2007: 23), while some journalists nicknamed the city ‘Slumbay’ to hint at its melting-pot nature, in which extreme inequalities meet extreme scarcity of space.
ref: [2016, Igor Krstić, “Bombay Cinema”, in Slums on Screen: World Cinema and the Planet of Slums, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, →ISBN, part 2 (Local Expressions), page 225:
related: word: Slumbai
glosses: Derogatory name for Mumbai: a megacity, the capital of Maharashtra, India.