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Renaming of cities in India

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The Indian renaming controversy is a result of a movement to rename cities and other locations to regional or Indian names from their anglicised British names.

The debate is not unique to India as other former colonial territories also seek to reclaim part of their heritage by opting for traditional names. However, the opponents of this move argue that, given that India is multi-cultural, and was a British colony until relatively recently, the renaming is not appropriate.

Major cities that have been renamed after independence are,

  1. Mumbai (formerly Bombay)
  2. Chennai (formerly Madras)
  3. Khambhat (formerly Cambay)
  4. Kolkata (formerly Calcutta)
  5. Tirunelveli (formerly Tinnevelly)
  6. Thoothukudi (formerly Tuticorin)
  7. Pune (formerly Poona)
  8. Varapuzha (formerly Verapoly)
  9. Puducherry (formerly Pondicherry)
  10. Thanjavur (formerly Tanjore)
  11. Khadki (formerly Kirkee)
  12. Tiruchirapalli (formerly Trichinopoly)

On December 11 2005, chief minister Dharam Singh announced that the Karnataka state government accepted Jnanpith awardee U R Ananthamurthy's suggestion to rename Bangalore to its Kannada name, Bengaluru.

The new name will be effective from November 1, 2006. In most of these cases the 'new' names are simply the names by which these cities have always been known in the native language (Bengali, Tamil or Malayalam, as the case may be - thus local Kannada language newspapers announced that "Bengaluru is to be renamed as Bengaluru").


The renamings refer to English language usage, and it is not clear that Indian municipalities have the authority to enforce this, or that there was anything 'colonial' about the former mispronunciations and mis-spellings of local names which existed in English (as with the English 'Florence' and 'Venice', rather than the Italian Firenze and Venezia).

In the case of Bombay and Madras the derivation of the name was from Portuguese, not English. The name changes in Bombay were carried out in response to the demands of the Hindu Nationalist Shiv Sena party. 'Mumbai' is probably derived from the temple of Mumba-Devi in Bombay, and although there is no evidence that it was the name of a settlement before the arrival of the Portuguese, who called it Boa Baía (good bay), it has long been the name of the city in Marathi and Gujarati, whilst Hindi-speakers called it Bambai. However, some argue that as the renaming was part of the Shiv Sena's Bhumiputra (son of the soil) policy, it is an attempt to erase evidence of the city's cosmopolitanism and multi-lingual character.


In many cases the older names continue to be used informally, or survive in the names of universities and other institutions. The Bombay High Court and Madras High Court were named after the erstwhile Bombay and Madras presidencies, and have not been renamed. This lis includes the IIT's at Chennai and Mumbai, which continue to be IIT-Madras and IIT-Bombay

In certain cases, the effort has extended to buildings and institutions named by the former colonizers. For example, Mumbai's Victoria Terminus railway station has been renamed Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus after the 17th century Maratha Emperor. Many colonial-era street names, particularly in Delhi, Calcutta and Bombay have been changed, but many, particularly in southern cities, continue to have British-era names. These renamings tend to be ignored by the local inhabitants.

See also

References

  1. Samuel Sheppard Bombay Place-Names and Street-Names (Bombay: The Times Press) 1917 pp104-5
  2. Sujata Patel "Bombay and Mumbai: Identities, Politics and Populism" in Sujata Patel & Jim Masselos (Eds.) Bombay and Mumbai. The City in Transition (Delhi: Oxford University Press) 2003 p4; Suketu Mehta Maximum City. Bombay Lost and Found (New York: Alfred Knopf) 2004 p130

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