The Politics of Name Changes in India

Ever since independence in 1947, many locations in India have changed their names. Much of this resulted from the reorganization of the states on linguistic lines (as opposed to British colonial divisions). However, in the last six years, many major towns and cities have been renamed in ways that affect foreigners more. Among this flood of changes, three stand out. These are the former cities of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta, which, together with Delhi, are considered the "mega cities" of India.1 They are the four most populous cities in India, and all but Madras are among the 15 most populous cities in the world.2 As a result, they are important commercial and transit hubs, and are well known outside India. Yet nearly six years later, most non-Indians still have no idea that they are now named Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata. Given the difficulties involved in these changes, one expects compelling justifications for the changes. In each case, these changes have officially been justified on anti-colonialist grounds. However, I will argue that these changes are instead tools for channeling regionalist sentiment in the conflict between the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the centrist Indian National Congress (INC), and various regional parties. Opponents of the INC proposed all these names, but those proposed by the BJP and its nationalist allies have been more divisive.

The case of Mumbai was the first major change to happen, and is thus the best known. In 1995, the ruling party in the government of the state of Maharashtra (of which Bombay was capital) announced that Bombay's name would be changed to its Marathi name, Mumbai.3 The casual observer would assume that the name "Bombay" was a British corruption of the original "Mumbai". However, this is not actually the case. In actuality, the Portuguese colony on the islands was called "Bom Bahia", meaning "Good Bay" or "Good Harbor". This colony, not any ancient settlement, was given to King Charles II of England as his dowry for marrying the Portuguese princess Catherine de Braganza in 1661, at which point the name was anglicized to "Bombay".4

The justification accepted by most people without question seems to be that Mumbai was the original name of some settlement in the area, so the name change was just a restoration of the original Indian name. For instance, http://www.mumbainet.com/renaming.htm claims that the native Kolis had "named the island Mumbai, after their divine protectress". But all sources seem to be in agreement that there were seven islands until some point in the twentieth century, when the water between them was filled in. The seven islands inhabited by the Kolis were named Colaba, Mazagaon, Old Woman's Island, Wadala, Mahim, Parel and Matunga-Sion.5 "Mumbai" was a derivation of the name "Mumbadevi", a goddess worshipped by the Kolis. According to http://www.soulkurry.com/v2/ssi/print.php3?articleid=736, the Koli settlements were named after their patron deities, and (at least by the early 20th century) one of the settlements in Bombay was named Mumbadevi. This article also suggests that the goddess was sometimes known by the alternate name of Mumabai, but this name does not seem to have been attached to the city as a whole by anyone other than the Marathas.

Thus, the name Mumbai seems to be an attempt to respect the original inhabitants of the islands. But in the intervening centuries, Bombay had also become home to large numbers of Gujaratis, Gujarati Muslims, Goans, British, and Parsis, many of whom referred to it as Bombay. The particular form "Mumbai" seems to suggest that "Bombay" was a corruption of the "original" name. The change was first proposed as far back as 1982 by the municipal government.6 However, it was not until 1995 that the change was actually made. This was when the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena party came to power in coalition with the BJP. The Shiv Sena had many policies that discriminated against non-Marathas and Muslims, and this name change seemed to be one more divisive measure. But the national government, though still controlled by the INC, approved the change readily, because of their weak standing for the upcoming elections. (They ended up losing to the BJP-led coalition anyway.)

Soon afterwards, in late August 1996, the ruling party of Tamil Nadu announced that Madras would be renamed Chennai.7 In this case, there is no suggestion that the colonial name was a corruption of the new name. Apparently, in 1639, the Raja of Chandragiri gave the British East India Company the right to build a fort in or near the town of Madraspatnam. As they developed the town, the locals formed another town nearby. One ruler wanted it named after himself, but another managed to get it named Chennapatnam after his father Chennappa. As the two towns grew together, the English kept the name Madras, while the Tamilians kept the name Chennai.8 Thus, the two names both date back to the early 1640's, when this was the only British settlement in India. However, the European presence in Chennai is older, as the Basilica of San Thome, housing the tomb of the Apostle Thomas, dates back to 1504.9 Some believe that the Portuguese had set up a settlement here, named "Madre di Dios", after the Church of St. Mary, and the British eventually shortened the name to "Madras".10 However, the Church of St. Mary is an Anglican church, and this source claims that there was no town named Chennai, so this claim is suspicious at best. However, given the older Portuguese presence in the area, the source of the name seems plausible. In any case, the name Madras is older than Chennai, but Chennai has another source of authenticity, being the name in the language of the inhabitants.

The ruling party of Tamil Nadu at this time was the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). This party has protested northern interference in southern culture, and has promoted all things Tamil. One of its offshoots, the All-India Anna DMK, was part of the BJP-led coalition that took national power in May 1996, but withdrew from the alliance after a month, bringing the INC back into power for another year. The AIADMK (in coalition now with the INC) dealt the DMK (in coalition with the BJP) a resounding defeat in local elections this May. (11. The New York Times, May 14, 2001, "Fiery Actress Helps Opposition Strengthen Role in India") It appears that these two parties share regionalist sentiment while disagreeing on national policies. These shifting alliances suggest that neither party truly prefers the BJP or the INC, but instead use these national parties as tools in their local power struggle.

Thus, the older names of these two major cities both derive from Portuguese and British colonial rule, while the new names represent regional pride. In both cases, the new name is actually the name in the language of the majority of inhabitants. However, due to its status as the commercial hub of India, Mumbai is not as dominated by Marathi as Chennai is by Tamil. But "Mumbai" has the advantage of sounding like "Bombay". The approval of these two major name changes by the national government started a wave of others that continues to the present. However, in February 1997, the national government issued a proclamation saying that both old and new names would be acceptable for use for Mumbai and Chennai.12 This decision appears to have been prompted by trouble with foreign trade and the reluctance of foreigners to use the new names. At this point, the INC was back in power in national government, and the new city names were no longer popular causes, particularly with voters living far from these cities. Many suggest that this was a ploy by the INC to call into question all the motivations of Shiv Sena and BJP politicians, particularly as many locals were more hurt by the loss of foreign recognition than helped by local pride. 13

But by April 1997, the government of Tamil Nadu retaliated by declaring that all cities in Tamil Nadu would be renamed with their Tamil names, instead of English ones. This proposal was made on the pattern of the renaming of Madras as Chennai, and the renaming of many places in neighboring Kerala (under the Communist Party of India, Marxist (CPM)) with their Malayalam names. The Minister for Tamil Official Language and Tamil Culture declared that this change was only part of an effort to create a "change in the attitude of the officials", complaining that many send notes in English rather than Tamil. Interestingly, on the same day, he announced that the English word "mayor" was also acceptable in Tamil, and the leader of another party said that he would continue to agitate against non-Tamil signs in shops. 14

By 1998, with the BJP was back in power in New Delhi, the de-colonialization of names continued. Throughout late 1999 and 2000, the ruling party in West Bengal discussed renaming Calcutta. (The CPM has been in power in West Bengal since 1977. This party has ruled on and off in Kerala since 1957. It has had little or no support in the rest of India.) The change was finally approved on December 23, 2000 15 and ended up being more drastic than anticipated. (The full text of the announcement reads: "The Government of India have, after careful consideration, accepted the proposal of the State Government of West Bengal to change the name of the city of 'Calcutta' to 'Kolkatta'(sic)." This terseness suggests some discomfort with the idea of renaming the city. Just two weeks before this announcement, the central government had said "a change should not be made merely on grounds of local patriotism or for linguistic reasons" and asked for a list of reasons why the change would be made, and an accounting of costs involved.) In addition to renaming the city Kolkata (to match the pronunciation in Bengali, the native language of the vast majority of the people in the region), the entire state was renamed Bangla, meaning "Bengali".16 These changes were inspired by the name changes of Mumbai and Chennai, but also by neighboring Bangladesh. The communists struggled for a long time against the INC, which they saw as giving privilege to the northwestern states in agricultural and industrial development. Their strength has traditionally depended on opposition to Hindi and English education, in favor of Bengali, a language with a long literary tradition, including Rabindranath Tagore, the first Indian Nobel laureate. However, as demands for English education rise, they need new regionalist support. When East Pakistan became independent in 1971 and was renamed Bangladesh, Bengali became the official language. Many Bengalis saw this as a positive development and wanted to replicate the success of Bengali within India.17 Echoing the sentiment in Tamil Nadu, this renaming of the city in the local language is accompanied by demands of some Bengali intellectuals that at least a third of the signs in the city be written in Bengali. 18

However, in response to the name changes in West Bengal, the BJP has proposed some name changes of its own. The obvious choice, paralleling the restoring of Bengali pronunciation to the name Kolkata, would be to rename Delhi as Dilli, to match Hindi pronunciation. However, the proposal has been to rename Delhi as Indraprastha, which was the name of the capital city of the Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata, one of the two great Hindu epics. There was in fact an ancient town named Indraprastha on the site of modern New Delhi, but the name Delhi, or a variant of it, has been used in all languages since the medieval period.19 It is unclear where the name came from, but Indraprastha has never been more than just one region of the city. In fact, the Sikh population of the city has circulated a petition to rename Indraprastha University as "Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University", to commemorate Sikh history and make up for anti-Sikh riots in 1984.20

Even more controversial is the attempt to rename Ahmedabad, the largest city in Gujarat. Ahmedabad was named after Ahmed Shah the Muslim prince who founded the city in 1411. However, in 1991, the BJP-led municipal corporation attempted to rename the city as Karnavati, but was prevented by the INC-led national government. Their justification was that the Hindu ruler Karna Deva actually founded the city in the 11th century on territory taken from the tribal chief Ahsa Bhil, and that Ahmed Shah founded his city on the same territory.21 The city and state both have large Muslim populations, much of which is located in the nearby town of Gandhinagar, the state capital. The recent renaming of Kolkata has brought the issue back to the fore in BJP politics in Gujarat. However, the Home Minister L.K. Advani, whose decision is important in this issue, is the parliamentary representative of Ghandinagar, and has thus far avoided the issue in order to prevent conflict within his own constituency.22 Since the Bhili tribal group has asked to have the city named after Ahsa Bhil, and the BJP has ignored their claims, the BJP will most likely not have the strength to force this issue in the near future.23

Thus, the BJP seeks to take the pattern of renaming a city with an ancient name to replace a British colonial corruption, and use it to rename cities built by Muslims in Medieval times. There are even suggestions by some that the country should be renamed Bharat after characters in several ancient epics, rather than India, which (like Hindi, Hindu, Sindh, and Hindustan) is etymologically linked to the Indus river, which is now in Pakistan.24 This ploy of various regional governments to assert their own power against the INC may thus be turned around by the BJP to impose Hindu fundamentalism and Hindi language on multicultural India. While the BJP and Shiv Sena claim that their philosophy of Hindutva is meant to represent Indian nationalism, and not religious ideology, their actions have clearly not reflected this. By renaming Bombay as Mumbai, they effectively declared that the city belonged to the native Kolis and Marathas. However, the city's current economic prominence depended also upon Gujarati Muslim rule, Portuguese and British ports, Konkani refugees from Portuguese Goa, and Parsi merchants attracted by this multicultural setting.25

In the wake of the INC's 1997 decision to allow both old and new versions of place names, it seems that both names may coexist for each of these cities. In the case of Ahmedabad, members of the BJP and other Hindu nationalist groups have already begun referring to the city as Karnavati in their correspondence.26 In India, it appears to be common practice to equivocate between different names for the same place. For instance, the travel site www.aapkashahar.com switches back and forth with the names of many of these cities. Though http://www.aapkashahar.com/trivandrum/trivandrum.html has "Trivandrum" in its URL, it lists the distance of towns in Kerala from "Thiruvananthapuram", using the old names of Quilon and Calicut, and the new names of Thrissoor and Kochi. The map of Kerala uses only the old names. The page on Chennai has a map of Tamil Nadu that locates "Madras" and discusses the "Madras Music Academy". This example is typical in that the names of institutions seem to be more fixed in people's minds than the names of the cities. And similarly, the more official text uses the new names, while the informal maps (drawn in ASCII characters rather than as graphic images) use the older names.

Public opinion seems to be very mixed in general. Most people use the new names in formal discussions without question, until someone brings up the subject. For instance, a discussion in December 2000 on the site http://www.sysindia.com/forums/Ladies_Corner/posts/4643.html discussed a TV show about the name changes. After a woman in the audience at this show raised a question about the expense of the new names, "ALL WERE USING ONLY CHENNAI TILL THEN. THE MOMENT ISSUE CROPPED UP DUE TO A SELFISH NORTH INDIAN BUSINESS WOMEN -the mood changed and the chaneg (sic) was opposed". Once the issue came up, all discussion participants and 95% of the audience voted for the name Madras, though the participants had apparently only been saying Chennai before. Some participants compared the changes to other international ones, like "Peking" to "Beijing", "Burma" to "Myanmar", and "Rangoon" to "Yangon". But others see them as just attempts by politicians to grab regional power. Given the party distribution of these changes, with BJP names being generally more divisive, while local parties have renamed cities with their names in the regional languages, it seems politics plays a large part in the motivation for these changes. The INC has notably not made any name changes in areas where it had control, which fits with its theme of national unity that it has pursued since independence. With the INC losing power in these past few years, it seems likely that more name changes may take place. But in the elections last month, they made gains in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Assam. To prevent real damage though, they will need to make gains in Gujarat.

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