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From: "Mani M. Manivannan"
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Subject: [agathiyar] Kolkata, Bangla and the Identity issue
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BARRY BEARAK of the New York Times writes about the
Bengali Intellectuals' pursuit of changing the names of
their beloved city and state to Kolkata and Bangla.

http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/090999calcutta-journal.html

Excerpts are given at the bottom.

I know it is fashionable in the English language press to mock at this.
The Hindu and Times of India have accused the Bengali intellectuals
of chauvinism! But they said the same thing when Tamils changed
the name of their state from Madras to Tamil Nadu and more recently
the name of the city from Madras to Chennai. Of course, the Bombay
province became Maharashtra, Mysore State became Karnataka, Andhra
state was created out of the princely state of Hyderabad and parts of
Madras Presidency.

While Bengalis brag that what they think today, the rest of India
will think tomorrow, in this case, they are following the lead set
by others.

Actually, it is a matter of identity. An individual, a group, a people,
have the right to identify themselves. It * is * liberating. There is
no need for people to accept the identity that others have thrust
on them. Whether it is pancama, untouchable, harijan or whatever,
if a Dalit finds it offensive, she has the right to change it. Or,
like the American blacks, they may consider a term endearing
when it is used by one of them while taking offense if others use it.
And there is something fundamentally evil in the terminology used
to identify a vast group of humanity as what they are not - as in
"non-brahmins."

Mani M. Manivannan
Newark, CA, USA.

--- Excerpts Begin -----

CALCUTTA, India -- This great and grotesque city has been called many
things, some of them not so nice, there is one name they will no longer
tolerate. Calcutta is never again to be called Calcutta.

A determined clique of the intelligentsia recently proposed that the city
henceforth be known in English as Kolkata, which is how the name is
pronounced in the Bengali language. In July, the West Bengal state assembly
unanimously agreed.

Many here resent the ever-creeping influence of English, the mother tongue
of British imperialists and satellite television, and Hindi, the language of
the big shots in New Delhi and most of the Indian cinema.

Bengalis argue that the name Calcutta was certainly none of their ancestors'
doing. While its origin is a matter of some dispute, it was most likely
coined by marble-mouthed English overlords who could not get their tongues
around Kolikata, the name of a village near where the British laid anchor
300 years ago in a malarial swamp.

To Bengali intellectuals, of course, the city is so much more than that.
Indeed, to them, Calcutta has the wondrous and unrivaled virtue of being
home to the Bengali intellectual himself -- by culture and self-assessment a
person of superior brainpower and spirit, adept at debating all the isms and
wasms of political thought. He is the Indian who effortlessly quotes Marx
and Marcuse and McLuhan, all the while sipping coffee and scribbling poems
on a paper napkin.

To the Bengali intellectual's ear, however, too little of the city's
incessant talk is now being done in the mellifluous, cultured Bengali
language. So many outsiders have poured into Calcutta in recent decades that
only half of its 11 million citizens are Bengali. Most advertisements and
store names are written in those two interloping tongues, English and Hindi.

Gangopadhyay, who writes in Bengali, heads a movement that wants to hold
down this linguistic trespassing. The city's name change is just an opening
gesture. They also demand that Bengali be made a mandatory subject in
elementary schools, that television stations broadcast more shows in the
language, that every worker who serves the public -- from bureaucrats to
shopkeepers -- speak some as-yet-unspecified minimum of phrases.

"If there are 10 Bengalis, there will be 11 opinions," said B.G. Gupta, a
retired bureaucrat originally from Uttar Pradesh. "The Bengali may have no
food on the table, but he's off arguing somewhere about the Vietnam War or
the last book he has read or whether it is a good idea to change every
signboard in the city from Calcutta to Kolkata."

The official change of the name still awaits approval from the Indian
government's Home Ministry. A second planned alteration, changing the
state's name from West Bengal to Bangla, will require a vote by Parliament.

"Soon, I assure you, we will be Kolkata, and this will be how the world will
know us," Bhattacharya said. "It is what we want and it is inevitable. These
days, does anyone have the guts to say Peking instead of Beijing?"

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company

---- Excerpts End ------