Editorial: The politics of place names

Chennai

It pushes other moves to rechristen cities and places into the humble shadows; for instance, Madras to Chennai, Allahabad to Prayagraj, Aurangzeb Road to Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Road and so on. If these demanded minor alterations in maps, signboards, and other such markers, the latest renaming initiative demands a pretty thorough makeover.

But is this indeed a renaming in line with many altered place names in the past? At a fundamental level, not quite. All that this mass ‘renaming’ has done is change spellings of places, and that too in one language – English. Respelling is perhaps a more appropriate way of describing this exercise.

But there is another dimension to the practice of changing place names – politics. Madras became Chennai ostensibly to strip it from colonial association and return it to its Tamil roots. (Never mind that there is some evidence to believe that Madras could have derived its name from the village of Madrasapattinam, which is referred to in multiple historical sources). Prayagraj was rechristened Allahabad during the Mughal period, but the decision to revert to the old name by Yogi Adityanath was all about making a political point and playing to his majoritarian constituency. Similarly, the change in the name of Delhi’s Aurangzeb Road was guided more by signalling that the controversial emperor was the symbol of ‘oppressive Muslim rule’ than by considerations of recognising the much-loved former President Abdul Kalam.

So, is there an undertone of politics behind the recent respelling exercise? One may well argue that changing the English spelling of place names to reflect the way they are pronounced in Tamil is suffused with a welcome linguistic nationalism, an act of signalling the pre-eminence of Tamil over colonial English. If this is the reason the Tamil Nadu government has been working on this respelling exercise since 2018, then someone had better say as much. Because this subtle piece of political signalling is so faint that it is likely to be lost at the best of times. In the middle of a pandemic, it is unlikely to be heard at all. In fact, the question that manifests itself in the minds of most people – who have been told that Coimbatore will, from now on, be the even more wordy Koyampuththoor – is how did the powers that be find the time for such a pastime in the middle of this turbulence. What we need for the government to do is to change the trajectory of the coronavirus, however one chooses to spell it.