With the Union Cabinet accepting a two-year-old resolution in the Kerala Assembly, the state is well on the way to being renamed as Keralam. In a similar vein, the statue of Sir Edwin Lutyens, the principal architect of colonial New Delhi, is to make way for one of C Rajagopalachari. Both these acts stem from the post-colonial trend of rediscovery by formerly ruled people, sharpened by recent culture politics. These acts are more than a rearrangement of syllables and statuary. Some are meant to reclaim identity, some to assert pride, and some to erase a memory and sideline the Other.
Few would quibble with the switch to Keralam. It is meant to reflect how Malayalis pronounce the name of their state. Keralam is the correction of an anglicised error but also a reclamation of ownership. Bombay was bestowed to its denizens by renaming it as Mumbai. Madras thusly became Chennai, and Calcutta Kolkata. Contrary to the objections of anglicised elites, these were not attempts to airbrush history (although Bombay did have a Portuguese origin). They were a nod to local phonetics and local pride.
The change to Keralam has a utilitarian appeal too, apart from local pride. South Indians will no longer have to endure the irritation of hearing North Indians call it Keral. Keralam is a good workaround for those who could not be persuaded to overcome the Sanskritic tendency of dropping the terminal a.
Name changes and statue removals become controversial when the motive stems from a need to erase the cultural contribution of some sections of society. The renaming of Allahabad as Prayagraj, Faizabad as Ayodhya, and Mughalsarai as Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Nagar were presented as cultural rediscovery, but also owed some to triumphalism. Exercises in erasure leave cities cleaved between winners and losers of naming rights, not as equal stakeholders. Keralam is happily an exception in this trend. It’s a name that leaves no one out and expresses a linguistic identity shared by Hindu, Muslim and Christian Malayalis alike.
In some places, erasure projects in the guise of renaming have given rise to campaigns based on total fiction. Take the move to rename Hyderabad as Bhagyanagar. It’s a city built from scratch by Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah of the Qutb Shahi dynasty in 1591, and today rightly honours him in its name. But a campaign is afoot to call it Bhagyanagar on the basis of a spurious legend that it was once named for a Hindu consort of his. This is not a reclamation of past glory. It’s a lie meant to reject one strand of the city’s history to privilege another.
Hopefully, the move to dislodge Edwin Lutyens from his pedestal in New Delhi will not go so far as to erase his contribution. He was indeed the principal architect of imperial New Delhi, the zone still colloquially called Lutyens’ Delhi. He designed the Viceroy’s House (now Rashtrapati Bhavan) and much of the city’s central vista. He also left behind letters dripping with racist condescension towards Indians. Lutyens’ architectural contribution to Delhi is undeniable; so is his prejudice. A mature republic would record both. If his statue is moved, let a plaque remain. Post-colonial India must celebrate its heroes but not deny its past.