NAME-CHANGING MANIA

The bard rightly asked, “What’s in a Name?” But for India’s political class apparently a lot. Yet as far as I am concerned, the more they go ahead and change names of places, the more obstinately do I cling on to the old names with a vengeance.

Let me begin with my beloved Bombay, the city of my birth and childhood, the city which I believe made me whatever I am today, for better or worse. I refuse to call Bombay Mumbai for the life of me. In Bombay’s case, the name-change is not just cosmetic, but an attempt to erase the city’s cosmopolitan character and replace it with a sort of provincialism. Pinki Virani nicely brings this out in her book Once Was Bombay. I remember Vir Sanghvi’s one-time interview with Bal Thackeray in which he referred to something Thackeray had said in the magazine Bombay. No sooner did Sanghvi utter the word Bombay than Thackeray snubbed him and said, please call it Mumbai. To which Sanghvi retorted that he couldn’t change the name of the magazine, which was called Bombay. Thackeray had no answer. Today, when I fill out railway reservation forms, I still state my destination as Bombay VT (Victoria Terminus) rather than as Mumbai CSMT. It’s a pity that Bombay University changed its name to Mumbai University, unlike Calcutta University and Madras University, which have resisted calling themselves Kolkata University and Chennai University respectively. Or unlike the Bombay High Court that isn’t the Mumbai High Court. Airlines, too, still use the code BOM for Bombay, not substituting it with MUM.

Actually, in day-to-day conversation few people refer to cities by the names Islamophobic and Anglophobic politicians give to them. How many people refer to Baroda as Vadodara, Aurangabad as Sambhaji Nagar, Allahabad as Prayagraj, or Usmanabad as Dharashiv? It’s only our mantris and our godi news channels that are fond of using these new names.

This business of giving cities indigenous-sounding names is what in cultural theory is called Nativism. Nativist cultural theorists are of the view that starting with the English language itself, anything that even remotely smacks of colonialism must be jettisoned. With cities, the colonialism in question isn’t restricted to British imperialism but also to Muslim rule. That is how it becomes an admixture of Anglophobia and Islamophobia.

It’s different if the powers that be settled for multiple spellings and pronunciations of names, depending on the language that was being used. The word Mumbai might sound right in Marathi, while Bombay sounds right in English. So why not make both spellings official? The Hindi heartland still refers to the city as Bambai, reminding one of the iconic Johnny Walker song Yeh hai Bambai Meri Jaan. In fact, the Hindi that is used in Bombay, Bombay-Hindi, as we call it, is known as Bambaiya. It would be preposterous to start calling it Mumbaiya.

Sometimes, it’s a single letter, like the letter h, which makes a name sound incorrect in English. I find it extremely affected to say Nashik instead of Nasik, or Shimla instead of Simla.

It’s ironic that on the one hand we value heritage and aspire that our monuments be conferred with UNESCO World Heritage status. But on the other hand, we fail to recognize that places must be allowed to retain their original names for the sake of preserving their heritage.

When I joined the English Department of the University of Poona in 1988, the university was still called University of Poona, though the city had already become Pune. I remember Nissim Ezekiel finding it very funny when he received invitations from the university, whose letter-heads called it the University of Poona, Pune. Some years later, following the example of the University of Mumbai, the university began calling itself the University of Pune. But a few years later, it underwent another name change, and it has now become Savitribai Phule Pune University, SPPU for short. What a world of difference between the appellation University of Poona and SPPU. It no longer seems to be the same institution! When I go abroad for literary or academic events, and I’m asked for my bio-note, I insist on referring to myself as Former Professor & Head, Department of English, University of Pune. If I said Savitribai Phule Pune University instead of the University of Pune, it’s likely that my organizers would think I belonged to some glorified patshala. The abbreviation SPPU can never ever acquire the intellectual aura and glamour of an abbreviation like JNU, no matter how hard we try. Nowadays, even when I write for Caravan, Scroll, The Wire, Frontline, and so on, I say at the end of the article that I taught at the University of Pune, and not at Savitribai Phule Pune University. Savitribai Phule may have done a lot for women’s empowerment and education in Maharashtra, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be imposed on the whole world. The university’s Women’s Studies Centre already bears the illustrious lady’s name, and that makes sense. But why extend it to the whole university? I know it for a fact that our foreign students were greatly affected by the name change, because now their countries refused to recognize their degrees as valid. Many countries terminated their MOUs with us after the university changed its name, though that was also on account of declining academic standards.

In their obsession with changing names, one major Indian city seems to have escaped the attention of our mantris. The city of Hyderabad. All the more so, because a city with this exact same name also exists in Pakistan. May be they haven’t figured out what to call it and are still racking their brains. Of course, when that happens, I won’t be able to use it as an alibi to hide my hybrid identity. Let me explain. Nowadays, when I’m asked where I’m from, I simply say, well, my parents were from Hyderabad. What I don’t say is that while my father was from Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh (now Telengana), my mother was from Hyderabad in Sind. And Sind, as we all know, is in modern-day Pakistan.