Trading places

Unlike Mumbai, Kolkata and Bengaluru were renamed uncontroversially and as such are welcome.

There is a weird streak of individualism that runs through every act of renaming in India, even as localities, towns, cities and languages — and sometimes, whole people — are renamed every day.

In South Africa, where I live and work for part of the year, I’m all for it. White Afrikaans and English speakers in South Africa ran things until 1994, and for the most part, they had no idea what to make of the Bantu language names and words, with their consecutive consonants and distinctive clicks. The settlers labelled people and places with the phonetic equivalent of how they thought local names should be pronounced, and when democracy finally came around in 1994, black South Africans took their names right back. New countries need new imaginations, and new imaginations need new nomenclature. Geography turned from a racial exercise into a linguistic and administrative effort. Umtata, a provincial capital, became Mthatha — keeping with the correct pronunciation of the place, replacing the full u-sound with a soft ‘u’-sound, undoubtedly making it harder for non-Bantu speakers to pronounce but restoring the version some 80 per cent of the country’s population preferred. Pietersburg, another provincial capital, named for one of the original Dutch-descended ‘pioneers’ who settled the interior of South Africa in the early 19^th century, became Polokwane — a Northern Sotho word meaning ‘place of safety’. I had heard white folks referring to neighbouring Zimbabwe as Rhodesia, and I knew exactly what they meant: oh for the good old days. As a student of the Zulu language, and generally being used to the flat vowels of Dravidian languages, my head and my heart thoroughly agreed with the revisionism I saw around me.

One day, in conversation with a friend, the name Pietersburg came up. You mean Polokwane, I said. My friend, who is black and speaks Northern Sotho and grew up in Pietersburg, laughed gently. Yes, he said, I believe that’s what they’re calling it these days.

I felt a twinge of embarrassment then, and I feel something like it in reverse every time I hear fastidious foreign friends say Mumbai or Kolkata or Bengaluru. Honestly though, how is anyone to know what is what? Mumbai was, of course, officially renamed at the behest of the vile conglomerate of thugs known as the Shiv Sena, effectively sinking any chance of its legitimacy among somewhat more human people. Hence, Bombay — and it’s not the same thing as saying Rhodesia. Kolkata and Bengaluru have always been exactly so in Bengali and Kannada, perfectly interchangeable with Calcutta and Bangalore when speaking in English. Even today, the native and anglicised names peacefully coexist; it is almost impossible for me to use Bangalore in a Kannada sentence (Bengaluru simply rolls off the tongue better in Kannada) and Bengali speakers say the same for Kolkata. This is also true of Mumbai — the name has long been in use in Marathi — but Kolkata and Bengaluru were renamed uncontroversially and as such, not being connected to large-scale ethnic-cleansing pogroms, are welcome.

In the demotic, and in any conversation I’ve had lately in English, Calcutta is Cal — and Bangalore is more usually reduced to its first and third syllable. Then you have Chennai, formerly known as Madras, a name that was never in use in the vernacular, and yet, enthusiastically adopted by people across language and class. Got that?

Some 20 years ago, Grant Road in Bangalore was renamed to commemorate a local liquor entrepreneur. My father’s friend, a man whose family had been residents of Grant Road for generations, woke up early each Sunday to splash black paint across every street sign that bore the legend ‘Vittal Mallya Road’. It was his way of telling the city not to mess with his history. Grant Road had been named for Colonel JP Grant, a British Army officer turned South Indian bureaucrat and a pillar of society circa 1900. Out with old? Sure. But I knew another Colonel Grant who loomed large on Bangalore life, my sister’s favourite teacher, and the principal of the Army School. My Colonel Grant was Anglo-Indian; Anglo-Indians were the milieu I grew up in; and his name means much more to me than that of the rich man who bought himself a road.

I suspect revisionism is nicer when it’s happening elsewhere.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 15^th, 2013.