Indian renaming controversy
The
Indian renaming controversy is a result of a movement to rename cities and other locations to regional or pan-Indian names from their anglicised British names.
The debate is not unique to
India as other former colonial territories also seek to reclaim part of their heritage by
opting for traditional names. However, the opponents of this move argue that, given that India is multi-cultural, and was a British colony until relatively recently, the renaming is not appropriate.
Major cities that have been renamed in recent years are,#
Mumbai formerly Bombay, #
Chennai formerly Madras, #
Khambhat formerly Cambay, #
Kochi formerly Cochin,#
Kolkata formerly Calcutta,#
Kozhikode formerly Calicut,#
Thiruvananthapuram formerly Trivandrum, and #
Kollam formerly Quillon.
On
December 11 2005,
chief minister Dharam Singh announced that the
Karnataka state government accepted
Jnanpith awardee
U R Ananthamurthy's suggestion to rename
Bangalore to its
Kannada name,
Bengaluru.
The new name will be effective from
November 1,
2006. In most of these cases the 'new' names are simply the names by which these cities have always been known in the native language (
Bengali,
Tamil or
Malayalam, as the case may be - thus local Kannada language newspapers announced that "Bengaluru is to be renamed as Bengaluru").
The renamings refer to
English language usage, and it is not clear that Indian municipalities have the authority to enforce this, or that there was anything 'colonial' about the former mispronunciations and mis-spellings of local names which existed in English (as with the English '
Florence' and '
Venice', rather than the
Italian Firenze and
Venezia).
In the case of Bombay and Madras the derivation of the name was from Portuguese, not English. The name changes in Bombay were carried out in response to the demands of the Hindu Nationalist
Shiv Sena party. 'Mumbai' is probably derived from the temple of
Mumba-Devi in Bombay, and although there is no evidence that it was the name of a settlement before the arrival of the Portuguese, who called it
Boa Baía (good bay), it has long been the name of the city in Marathi and Gujarati, whilst Hindi-speakers called it
Bambai.
[ Samuel Sheppard Bombay Place-Names and Street-Names (Bombay: The Times Press) 1917 pp104-5] However, some argue that as the renaming was part of the Shiv Sena's
Bhumiputra (son of the soil) policy, it is an attempt to erase evidence of the city's cosmopolitanism and multi-lingual character.
[Sujata Patel "Bombay and Mumbai: Identities, Politics and Populism" in Sujata Patel & Jim Masselos (Eds.) Bombay and Mumbai. The City in Transition (Delhi: Oxford University Press) 2003 p4; Suketu Mehta Maximum City. Bombay Lost and Found (New York: Alfred Knopf) 2004 p130]Arguably the 'original' name for Bombay would be 'Colaba' or 'Kolaba', the southernmost island of the group now making up the Bombay peninsula, derived from the name of the Kola fishermen who originally lived here.
In many cases the older names continue to be used informally, or survive in the names of universities and other institutions. The
Bombay High Court and
Madras High Court were named after the erstwhile
Bombay and
Madras presidencies, and have not been renamed.
In certain cases, the effort has extended to buildings and institutions named by the former colonizers. For example, Mumbai's Victoria Terminus railway station has been renamed
Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus after a 17th century Maratha warrior. Many colonial-era street names, particularly in
Delhi,
Calcutta and
Bombay have been changed, but many, particularly in southern cities, continue to have British-era names. These renamings tend to be ignored by the local inhabitants.
*
List of renamed Indian public places*
The Politics of Name Changes in India*
Bangalore to become Bengalooru: The politics of renaming cities
