Bangalore gets Bengaloorued

Bangalore gets Bengaloorued
SHASHI THAROOR

So can we now buy railway tickets to Bengalooru? I remember how my team-mate and i, heading off to represent St Stephen’s College at a debating competition in what was still Calcutta, got our student concession forms made out to ‘Haora’, as the newspapers had informed us that Howrah had been renamed. It was only after queuing for two hours that we discovered that, whatever the Bengali babus of Writers’ Building may have decreed, the Indian Railways had not yet digested the new reality. We were sent back to College with the proverbial flea in our ear — for having attempted to buy tickets to a station that didn’t (yet) exist.
It took years for ‘Haora’ to catch on. ‘Bengalooru’ may happen faster. It’s striking to recall that the cities of the Raj kept their names for decades: practically the only city that changed the spelling of its name was Kanpur, which the British had absurdly spelled Cawnpore. Then the self-appointed guardians of Indianness — politicians looking for new postures to affect — came into their own in the 1990s. So the Shiv Sena-led government of Maharashtra renamed the state capital Mumbai, abandoning a name with nearly four centuries of global resonance. This struck me at the time as the equivalent of a company jettisoning a well-known brand in favour of an inelegant patronymic — as if McDonald’s had renamed itself Kroc’s in honour of its inventor. ‘Bombay’ had entered global discourse; it conjured up associations of cosmopolitan bustle; it is still attached to products like Bombay gin, Bombay duck, and the overpriced colonial furniture sold by ‘the Bombay company’; in short, it enjoyed name-recognition that many cities around the world would spend millions in publicity to acquire. ‘Mumbai’ was already the city’s name in Marathi; but what has been gained by insisting on its adoption in English, aside from a nativist reassertion that benefited only sign-painters and letterhead-printers?
Not to be outdone, the DMK — which had, in an earlier spell in office, renamed the state of Madras as Tamil Nadu — decided that the city of Madras too would be rebaptised. Once again, name recognition — Madras kerchiefs, Madras jackets, Bleeding Madras, the Madras monitoring system — went by the board as Chennai was adopted without serious debate. (Ironically, ‘Chennai’ comes from the name of Chennappa Naicker, the Raja of Chandragiri, who granted the British the right to trade on the Coromandel coast — and who was a Telugu speaker from what is today Andhra Pradesh.)
So bad history was worse lexicology, but in India-that-is-Bharat it is good politics. The Communist government in Bengal soon followed: ‘Calcutta’ is now ‘Kolkata’, the way Bengalis pronounce it in their native tongue. (The International Air Transport Association, however, resolutely insists that airlines still tag your bags to ‘CCU’, not ‘KKT’, which belongs to Kentland Airport in the US. In Tamil Nadu, the state government has allegedly instructed postmen not to deliver mail addressed to ‘Madras’ — compelling evidence of the pettiness that underlies the directive — but baggage tagged to ‘CHN’ rather than ‘MAA’ will end up in Jeonju, South Korea). The habit proved catching: Kolkata’s Kommunist kousins in Kerala decided that Cochin — a name that had stood for centuries and even been exported (to South-East Asia’s ‘Cochin-China’) — would henceforth be Kochi. And as the 21st century dawned with computer professionals in the West discovering Bangalore — and even beginning to fear their jobs would be ‘Bangalored’, outsourced to India — the politicians of Karnataka decided that their capital’s new-found fame more properly belonged to ‘Bengalooru’, the ‘city of boiled beans’ rather than of India’s burgeoning Silicon Plateau.
Who on earth benefits from all this? Was it really necessary for Keralites, who called their capital Trivandrum in English and Thiruvandooram in Malayalam, to jettison both abbreviated forms for the glory of ‘Thiruvananthapuram’, a word i have hardly heard anyone actually use? Or to insist that ‘Trichur’, which is in fact a close approximation of the popular local pronunciation, be re-spelt ‘Trissur’, which must have been dreamt up by Kerala’s last surviving illiterate?
So far, the rulers of Delhi have remained immune to the contagion, even though the name itself is a British misspelling: it should have been either ‘Dehli’ or, more colloquially, ‘Dilli’. But given the quality of many of the politicians aspiring to national office, it would not entirely surprise me if someone started a clamour to rename India’s capital as well. After all, there is something marvellously anti-elitist about being able to oblige English-speakers to accept such changes: it is a reminder that, in Independent India, power over the English labels of places has passed to those who were never comfortable in that language.
What’s in a name, Shakespeare asked, and of course the traffic will be just as congested in Bengalooru as it was in Bangalore. But are we so insecure in our independence that we still need to prove to ourselves that we are free? In some 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’s a signal that her old life is over, and that she now belongs completely to another. This is the kind of thinking that underlies India’s renaming mania. It is as if today’s rulers want to show that they are now the lords and masters of these cities. For what these aggressive nativists are doing is to demonstrate that they are now in charge, that the old days are over. They are asserting their power, the 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.