Not to be outdone, another regional party heading the government in Madras, the DMK — which had, in an earlier spell in office, renamed the state of Madras as Tamil Nadu (“homeland of the Tamils”) — decided that the city of Madras also would be rebaptized. The chief minister had been informed that “Madras,” like Bombay, was actually a Portuguese coinage, derived either from a trader named Madeiros or a prince called Madrie. “Madras is not a Tamil name,” announced the chief chauvinist to justify his decision to rename the city Chennai, the word used (though not always) by Tamil speakers. 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. More unfortunately, the chief minister had overlooked the weight of evidence that Madras was indeed a Tamil name (derived, alternative theories go, from the name of a local fisherman, Madarasan; or from the local Muslim religious schools, madarasas; or from madhuras, from the Sanksrit and Tamil words for honey). Worse, he had also overlooked the embarrassing fact that Chennai was not, as he had asserted, of Tamil origin. It came 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” would henceforth become Kolkata, which was the way Bengalis pronounced 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 Kent-land Airport in the USA. 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 Southeast Asia's Cochin-China) — would henceforth be Kochi. And as the twenty-first 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 newfound fame more properly belonged to “Bengalooru,” the “city of boiled beans” rather than of India's burgeoning Silicon Plateau.
So can we now buy railway tickets to Bengalooru? I remember how my teammate 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, Calcutta's grand colonial-era station, 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. But who on earth benefits from all this? Was it really necessary for Keralites, who had gotten used to calling their capital Trivandrum in English and Thiruvandooram in Malayalam, to jettison both abbreviated forms for the glory of “Thiruvananthapuram,” a word I have never heard anyone actually use? Or to insist that “Trichur,” which is in fact a close approximation of the popular local pronunciation, be respelled “Trissur,” which must have been dreamt up by Kerala's last surviving illiterate? And after sixty years of independence, isn't it time to start drawing the line somewhere? Isn't it time to say we are what we are, the product of a history we cannot deny, and the names of our towns and cities will reflect the centuries of influence from various quarters that have gone into making the India of today?
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 none of the local languages puts an h sound after the l in the capital's name. Clearly, the people in power in Delhi (both Old and New) have more important things to do than to obsess about the spelling of the city's name. But given the quality of many of the politicians aspiring to national office, it would not entirely surprise me if someone started a clamor to rename India's capital as well. After all, there is something marvelously 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 trains will be just as crowded at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus as they were at V.T. But are we so insecure in our independence that we still need to prove to ourselves, in this childish manner, that we are free? 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? And where do we stop? British spellings may have been quaint or even inaccurate, but they had the familiarity of long usage. If they are to be expunged, will our politicians next move from orthography to religious orthodoxy? After all, the city of Allahabad, on the confluence of the holy Ganga and Jamuna rivers, was known as Prayag for millennia before Muslim rulers renamed it in honor of their God. Will it be renamed, too, on the basis of a far stronger case than Mumbai or Chennai — and if so, what signal would that send to India's Muslims? When will we decide, for pity's sake, that we have disrupted enough of our historical legacy, and that the time has come to leave well enough alone?