HVK Archives: Our obsession with names
Our obsession with names - The Express Magazine
Shashi Tharoor
()
19 January 1997
Title : Our obsession with names
Author : Shashi Tharoor
Publication : The Express Magazine
Date : January 19, 1997
I am still finding it extremely difficult to get used to 'Mumbai'
and 'Chennai'. Or even to take these new designations for two
dearly-beloved old cities very seriously. Unless one positive
thing comes out of this - if southerners in the rest of India no
longer have to put up with being generically described as
'Madrasis'. (Somehow, I don't think 'Chennaiyyas' will catch ' on,
even as an insult.)
Every once in a while the artificial conflict between 'India' and
'Bharat' gets out of hand and something like this erupts. (My India
embraces Bharat too - Brijbhasha as well as Britbhasha - but that's
a subject for another column.) Anyway, one area in which Bharat is
winning over India appears to be in the naming game, and I'd like
to dissent.
I'm all in favour of undoing the colonisation of our national
sensibility - up to a point. But has anyone reflected that the
adoption of 'Mumbai' in English is the equivalent of a company
jettisoning a well-known brand name in favour of an inelegant
patronymic - as if McDonald's had renamed it, self Kroc's in honour
of its founder, Ray Kroc?
'Bombay' has entered global discourse; it conjures up associations
of cosmopolitan bustle; It is attached to products like Bombay gin,
Bombay duck, and the overpriced colonial furniture sold by 'The
Bombay Company'; in short, it enjoys name recognition that many
cities around the world would spend millions in publicity to
acquire. Can we afford to be so insular as to scorn that in our.
globalised world? 'Mumbai' was already the city's name in Marathi,
but what has been gained by insisting on its adoption in English,
and by whom, other than sign-painters and letterhead-printers?
The Maharashtra Government went one step further and renamed the
city's main railway station, Victoria Terminus, an
Indo-Gothic-Saracenic excrescence universally known as 'VT' and
completely devoid, in every Indian's imagination, of any
association with the late Queen-Empress. 'VT' is now officially
known as 'Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus': try telling that
to a Bombay taxi-driver.
When our first Government renamed the 'United Provinces', they kept
the familiar acronym 'UP' by calling it 'Uttar Pradesh'. If
Mumbaiites had to scrap the overweight monarch, couldn't someone
have found a Marathi nationalist hero with the initials 'V.T.'? The
human rights activist V M. Tarkunde, for instance, would have been
a worthy choice in my eyes, but, no doubt, the Sainiks could have
found a 17th-century equivalent if they had tried hard enough.
Not to be outdone, the DMK Government, which had in an earlier
spell in office renamed the state of Madras as Tamil Nadu, decided
that the city of Madras, too, should be re-baptised 'Chennai'.
They believed that 'Madras' was a Portuguese coinage, derived
either from a trader named Madeiros or a prince called Madrie Oust
as Bombay came from the Portuguese 'Born Bahia', or 'good bay').
Once again, international 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, however, it seems the renamers may have
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 madhu-ras, honey).
Worse, they had also overlooked the embarrassing evidence that
Chennai was itself not 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 is worse lexicology, but in India-that-is-Bharat it
is good politics. After 50 years of independence, isn't it time to
start drawing the line somewhere? Was it really necessary for
Keralites, who had got used to calling their capital Trivandrum in
English and Thiruvandooram in Malayalam to jettison both
abbreviated forms for the glory of 'Thiruvananthapuram'? Or to
insist that 'Trichur', which is in fact a close approximation of
the popular local pronunciation, be renamed 'Trissur', a spelling
which must have been dreamt up by Kerala's sole surviving
illiterate?
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 VT But are we so insecure in our independence that we still
need to prove to ourselves we are free? Is there no comfort, after
all, in being able to take places for granted, without the
continuing sense that their identities are still susceptible to
change?
In 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 is as if the rulers of Bombay and Madras
wanted to show that they were now the lords and masters of these
cities, and to demonstrate the. change by conferring a new name
upon them.
For what these assertive nativists are really doing is showing that
they are now in charge. They are affirming their power, the power
to decide what a thing will be, the power to name. For, if one
cannot create, one can at least define.
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