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Subject: [agathiyar] The politics of renaming cities
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>From an opinion piece by Seema Alavi in the Hindu, dated Sep 19, 99.

http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/stories/1319046a.htm


The constitutional authority given to State legislative assemblies to rename cities gives them the power to uphold certain aspects of the past and blank out other spheres, according to their current political agendas, says SEEMA ALAVI.

THE professional historian and the conservationist have viewed with concern the recent spate of rechristening cities by State governments: Madras to Chennai, Bombay to Mumbai, Poona to Pune, Trivandrum to Thiruvananthapuram and more recently Calcutta to Kolikatta. The logic for the change of names has been very nativistic. The official version is that the existing anglicised names were chosen by the British who founded most of these cities. Thus it is the responsibility of governments of Independent India to erase the last traces of our colonial past and look for alternative names in the more narrowly defined provincial past. Thus Bombay, the name given by the British who created the city out of a cluster of rocky islands, was struck off. Instead Mumbai, the island's Marathi name, derived from the patron goddess of its original inhabitants, was picked up as an appropriate alternative to reinstate the city's lost pride. Similar thinking led to the choice of Pune, Thiruvananthapuram, Chennai and Kolikatta as "swadesh" alternatives to what the British had "corrupted" to Poona, Trivandrum, Madras and Calcutta.

At one level the "swadeshi" names are not entirely innovative. In fact, they coexisted in the local spoken vernaculars with their anglicised versions. Thus in British India an Indian official would refer to Thiruvananthapuram as Trivandrum in his English correspondence but revert to the usage of Thiruvananthapuram when speaking or writing in Malayalam. Bilinguality hardly created tensions in society though it did add some interesting ambivalences to our past. This trend continued in post Independence India where the English language was very rarely perceived as carrying the burden of our colonial past.

Significantly, many names were picked up by the British from the existing vernacular lexicon. They were used without any "corruption". For instance, Calcutta (Kalikata) was the name of one of the villages between Suttanutee and Gobindpore which was chosen by Job Charnock, the English agent and founder of Calcutta, to set up an English factory. Once the English settled in the area covering Suttanuttee and Gobindpore, the village of Calcutta gave its name to the whole city.

The happy coexistence of dual names continued along with bilinguality until the nativistic lobby began to rake up a "return to the roots" nationalism based on a very eschewed definition of our past. The intentionality of the name changing spree has made it the focus of attention not only of the professional historian but of all concerned citizens. For surely when names are changed with the intention of wiping out a certain phase of our past and new names allocated with a view to glorifying some other aspects of our history, then the choice of the selector and his world view are bound to come under public scrutiny. Both the professional historian and the concerned citizen wonder where the ball will stop if our past is arbitrarily dabbled with to cushion an exclusivist notion of nation and nationalism.

The more alarming aspect of the controversy is that the random tampering with our past has constitutional validity. An elected majority in state legislative assemblies has the authority to sanctify change of names. This was evident in the case of Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and West Bengal where by the vote of the elected majority in the assembly the capital cities were rechristened. This means that legislative assemblies have the power to uphold certain aspects of our past and blank out other spheres. This is hardly good news for the professional historian who fears the disastrous fallout of having politicians dip at will into the plethora of our pasts to serve their political agendas.

The intensification of the dangerous political power play with our past is reflected also in the spate of renaming streets, muhallas, provinces and districts in many states of the country. Statistics reveal that 2,500 roads and chowks have been given new names in the past three years in Mumbai alone. One reason for this frenzied name changing is because the procedure involved is relatively simple. Whereas the rechristening of cities is sanctified by the legislative assemblies, that of roads is handled at the level of the local corporation. All that one needs is to contact the local corporation and mobilise support at the municipal corporation general body. The cavalier treatment to history was reflected when a few years ago some citizens decided to rename the famous Laburnum road near Gamdevi, Mumbai, in the belief that it was named after some Englishman. Mercifully, the Bombay municipal corporation realised in the nick of time that the road was named after the Laburnum trees that used to grow in that area, thus narrowly averting a bloomer.

The christening drama has also been used by the hitherto marginalised minority and backward castes to assert their freshly acquired political power. If statues of Ambedkar have dotted the landscape of Delhi for sometime, the lesser known backward leaders have begun to show up on the streets and chowks of state capitals. Thus Lucknow, one of the centres of the backward caste access to political power has Avantibai, a Parsi woman active in the 1857 mutiny, overseeing traffic at the busy Secunderabad crossing. New districts have also been carved out in Uttar Pradesh and named after leaders of the backward castes to record in popular memory their contributions. Thus Jyotiba Phule Nagar, created in Moradabad district, glorifies the Maharashtrian backward caste leader Jyotiba Phule; Sant Ravinagar, in Benares district, honours the memory of the famous backward caste saint Ravidas; and Chatrapati Sahu Maharaj nagar, in Banda district was created for similar reasons along with a host of others. Similarly, the Buddhist strand in our past was highlighted through the creation of Gautam Budhnagar and Kushinagar in the Deoria district; and Mahamayanagar, the mother of Buddha, was the name given to a district carved out in Aligarh district.

The naming of roads and districts after hitherto marginalised groups is welcome. After all names of places are a living archive - a record of our past. It is only fair that the imbalances of earlier recordings are corrected. But erasing names to obliterate a certain section of our past amounts of a self-styled custodianship of our heritage. Throughout history, civilisations have interacted closely, a direct consequence of which has been the production of a variegated cultural matrix. The Indo-Islamic or Indo-Persian phase of our history is as integral to our political culture as the Indo-Aryan or later Indo-British. Together, these and other cultural influences make Indian tradition.

It is this multilayered past that is reflected in the names of towns and cities, roads and chowks. Changing names with a view to blocking out selectively some phases of our history is reflective of an intolerance which can culminate in knocking off archaeological monuments, archives and other symbols of our multilayered historical legacy. The past with all its ups and downs is ours. An inheritance to be protected and improvised upon. Not a playing field to be tampered with at will by unscrupulous politicians furthering their narrow political ends.