As elections loom, the renaming spree heats up

Somewhere in the dusty depths of the Bengal bureaucracy, I was once told, there existed an office whose sole purpose was to rename things. Streets. Squares. Parks. Kolkata being a city filled with sahib names, the department always had its hands full toppling dead white men and replacing them with freedom fighters.

Renaming these days is an urgent national project, not just the preserve of Bengali babudom. The government should just set up an official MRT — Ministry to Rename Things. Once we thought Acche Din was about a tomorrow we could look ahead to. Now we realise it is really about yesterday once more.

In his book, The Paradoxical Prime Minister, Shashi Tharoor writes that the government has turned out to be more a name-changer than a game-changer. Chalo, at least it’s change of some kind. And perhaps it’s cheaper and less of an eyesore than gigantic statues that stand as testimonials more to our vainglory than the hero being memorialised.

In India, there are many reasons to rename. Local pride — Bombay to Mumbai. Local pronunciation — Cawnpore to Kanpur. Local heroes — Dalhousie Square to Benoy Badal Dinesh Bagh. ‘Bad’ Muslim to ‘Good’ Muslim — Aurangzeb Road to A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Road.

Crucial differences

Not that these changes are always thought through. When local authorities in Kolkata decided the simply named Lake Road would henceforth be named after Kavi Subramanya Bharathi, they did not think about what it would mean for the poor Lake Road to Howrah Station minibus. Not surprisingly, decades later, the new name has not quite taken off. It does not roll off the tongue of the minibus conductor. When Mamata Banerjee decided Metro stations would be named after Bengal’s cultural icons, she didn’t realise that when you are underground in the bowels of the city, Kavi Nazrul station gives you no clue whether you have arrived at Garia Bazar or New Garia.

But the current Central government, humming Cher’s If I Could Turn Back Time, has clearly one simple yardstick for its re-naamkaran mission. It’s sanskarification. Its agenda is to treat the Mughal empire and Delhi sultanates as foreign invasions on par with the British. Of course, there are crucial differences. Muslim armies might have come to India to plunder and loot but in the end they also made their homes in India and became part of India’s DNA. They did not regard India as just a cash cow that would fund their retirement back in Dundee. There was no Mughal East India Company that treated India as raw material for the mills of Manchester or Fergana.

As elections loom, the renaming spree heats up. Allahabad to Prayagraj. Faizabad to Ayodhya. Mughalsarai to Deen Dayal Upadhyay Junction. Gurgaon to Gurugram. Perhaps Ahmedabad to Karnavati. Aurangabad to Sambhajinagar. It’s the benign face of officialdom not just rewriting history but also reminding its citizens, especially its Muslim citizens, that there’s a new sheriff in town.

Sadly, whether Gurgaon is Gurugram or not means nothing to the dengue-carrying mosquitoes there. When Allahabad becomes Prayagraj, does it remove 435 years of its history? The fact that a city named Allahabad is home to the Kumbh Mela, one of the greatest Hindu festivals ever, is the sangam that truly makes India unique, something we should take pride in instead of disowning.

Imagined glory

This is not about Muslim-scrubbing, the government says. We are just going back to the old “real” name. In the name of restoring a “real” India, we are rewinding back to our imagined Golden Age of flying chariots and head transplant surgeries. But where does this quest for “real” logically end?

Is a potato, tomato or chilli really Indian? Cricket? Biryani? Samosa? Mustard seeds came from the Mediterranean, garlic from Central Asia, and rajma from Central America. And if we want to wipe Persian-speaking Turkish invaders off the map of modern India, what do we do with the zalabiyas they brought with them that have stayed on as jalebis? Oh what a jalebi whorl we will find ourselves trapped in, as we go around this spiral of authenticity, trying to peel away centuries of inter-mixing only to realise too late it’s the inter-mixing that made us what we are. We are Indian, a word that’s not Indian at all.

Instead of frantically looking for what was originally ours, why not celebrate how we changed, flavoured, enriched whatever came to us, whether on the backs of invaders or on trading ships? And reserve the name-change game for occasions when it can really pack a wallop? As when the Bengal government slyly renamed the street where the American consulate lives in Kolkata from the innocuous white bread Harrington Street to Ho Chi Minh Sarani, which is what it remains to this day, a constant reminder of hubris humbled.

Deen Dayal Upadhyay Junction, meanwhile, in abbreviation will sound just like DDLJ.

The writer is the author of Don’t Let Him Know, and like many Bengalis likes to let everyone know about his opinions whether asked or not.