The decision of the government of India to rename the town of Port Blair, capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, as Sri Vijaya Puram passed without debate or much national comment. It was, arguably, a justifiable decision—replacing the name of an 18th century British colonial surveyor (Archibald Blair) with one redolent of the derring-do of the great maritime Chola empire, which had ranged over much of Southeast Asia, including the Andamans, from the 9th to 11th centuries.
Srivijaya was actually not an Indian place, but an ancient Sumatran empire repeatedly raided and conquered by the Cholas, whose emperor Rajendra I used the Andamans as his base of attack in the 11th century. The renaming served as a reminder that India had a rich history before the British ruled it, and was in keeping with the ruling BJP government’s loudly-proclaimed desire to rid the country of all reminders of its ‘colonial slavery’.
Some residents protested that this betrayed their long sense of connectedness to the place and their shared identity; that the name change was a poor substitute for serving the development needs of the city, which suffers from decaying infrastructure, corruption, poor roads, power, water, health care and public services; and that instead of consulting taxpaying residents, the decision has been taken on the whims of an administration that is ‘unresponsive, dictatorial, and disconnected’. Their protests have been ignored in the government’s chauvinist zeal.
The self-appointed guardians of Indianness, convinced that the names of cities and landmarks reflect the colonisation of the national sensibility, had long set about nationalising nomenclature in the name of Bharatiya sanskriti whenever they had the chance.
When it was the British who were being corrected, no one objected terribly: it was right, after all, that the anglicised ‘Cawnpore’ should revert to ‘Kanpur’, that ‘Poona’ and ‘Simla’ should adopt spellings that conformed more closely to their local pronunciations, and that ‘Kannur’ and ‘Kollam’ had no reason to be spelt ‘Cannanore’ and ‘Quilon’ respectively because some colonial administrator thought those versions more pleasing to the Anglo-Saxon ear.
These were acts of reclamation, but next came a round of less necessary changes of imperial-era names. So in the mid-1990s, the Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu capitals were renamed Mumbai and Chennai. Since ‘Bombay’ was at that point arguably the best-known Indian place name internationally, attached to everything from Bombay gin to Bombay duck and the names of restaurants of varying elegance around the world, this was the equivalent of a company jettisoning a well-known brand name in favour of an inelegant patronymic—as if McDonald's had renamed itself Kroc's in honour of its founder.
Similarly, Madras kerchiefs, Madras jackets, the fabric known as bleeding Madras went by the board as ‘Chennai’ was adopted without serious debate. We could easily have chosen to have ‘Bombay’ and ‘Madras’ in English and ‘Mumbai’ and ‘Chennai’ in Indian languages, just as the Germans accept the name ‘Germany’ in English and ‘Allemagne’ in French for the country they themselves call ‘Deutschland’. But no, that wasn’t good enough for our local chauvinists.
So far, not so good. But we all learned to adjust. What's in a name, Shakespeare asked, and of course, the weather will be just as sultry in Chennai as it used to be in Madras.
But now the current ruling dispensation, with an enormous Hindu-chauvinist chip on its shoulder, has started going after place names that had nothing to do with the British, replacing Muslim names with Hindu ones. The renaming in 2018 of the historic town of Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh to an older, but overtly Hindu name, Prayagraj, was meant to target the former Muslim rulers of the subcontinent, who left a number of towns, localities and villages with Islamic names of Arabic or Persian derivation during their centuries in power.
Unlike the British, the Muslims assimilated fully into India, contributing their religion, architecture and culture to the great Indian mosaic, but for the BJP, Muslim names are also reminders of ‘slavery’ and need to be dispensed with. So Mughalsarai is now Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Junction, Gorakhpur’s Urdu Bazar is Hindi Bazar, Ali Nagar is Arya Nagar, and so on.
But this column is not the occasion for a fresh bout of disputation about the politics of name-changing. Instead, it intends to raise the question: when will this stop? After nearly eight decades of independence, isn't it time to start drawing the line somewhere?
Are we Indians so insecure in our independence that we still need to prove to ourselves that we are free? The Brits and Mughals have long gone; it takes a terrible inferiority complex, in any case, to think that one can overturn the experiences of history by altering a few names. And what signal does this send to our Muslim citizens, who are being ‘othered’ by these changes? That they don’t really belong to India with the same entitlements as those who bear, and now impose, Hindu names?
And is there no comfort, after all, in being able to take places for granted, without the continuing sense that they are still susceptible to being renamed? Mughalsarai had century-old associations for those who travelled that way; Allahabad has a hoary history, especially in the anti-colonial movement. No one living in those places today associates them with memories of foreign oppression.
There is something altogether pettier here: a demarcation of territory, the weak asserting their strength. In parts of India, it is customary for a bride, upon marriage, to take on a new name—not just a surname, but a first name—chosen by her husband's family. It is as if our new rulers, unaccustomed to wielding real moral authority, wanted to show they were now the lords of these places, and to demonstrate the change by conferring a new name.
What these aggressive nativists are doing is demonstrating that they are now in charge, that the old days are over. They are asserting their power to decide what a thing will be, the power to name—for if one does not have the ability to create, one can at least claim the right to define.
Changing the name of Port Blair won’t fix its many problems, and the same applies to every other town in India. Perhaps the time has come for the government to take one last look at the names they cannot abide by and go on one vast, final renaming spree before declaring a permanent moratorium on any more name-changes. Then we can finally announce we are grown up and fully vaccinated against our inferiority complexes, inflicted upon our petty souls because our ancestors were vanquished by people who left their names behind on our soil.
(Views are personal)
Shashi Tharoor
Fourth-term Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvananthapuram and the Sahitya Akademi winning author of 24 books, most recently Ambedkar: A Life
(office@tharoor.in)