India - What's In A Name?

You say Bombay and I say Mumbai. You say Calcutta and I say Kolkata.

The old song about pronunciation "Po-tay-to, po-tah-to; to-may-to, to-mah-to" could be the refrain of most Indians, as well as other citizens of former colonial territories who are bent on dropping the Westernized versions of city names.

In 1995, the city council of Bombay renamed India's largest city Mumbai, after the Hindu goddess Mumbadevi. Nine years on, the financial and entertainment hub is still most commonly known as Bombay, although most of the world, including the U.S. government and the European Union, officially accepts Mumbai.

Bombay's re-christening triggered the renaming of several Indian cities in a show of muscle-flexing by municipal officials.

Madras in southern India - which gave its name to a cloth print popular in the 1960s - became Chennai, a shortened version of the name of an Indian who once owned the land on which the city grew up.

The eastern city of Calcutta - famous in British history for the imprisoning of colonials in the "Black Hole of Calcutta" has become Kolkata.

This renaming can create peculiar problems for some people - take tour operator Hameed Shahul, for instance. He noted that since the southern state of Kerala renamed the old city of Calicut six years ago, some tourists have insisted they want to visit both Calicut and Kozhikode - which is the city's new name.

"I have to convince tourists that both cities are the same," said Shahul.

But many top institutions have stuck with the old names. It's still Bombay High Court, Madras High Court, Calcutta High Court and Cochin High Court since altering these would require an act of India's Parliament.

The Bombay Stock Exchange, Bombay Gymkhana club and the University of Madras also have retained the old names on grounds of tradition. When the Kerala city of Cochin was renamed Kochi, administrators at the Cochin University of Science and Technology kept the old name because they feared the school could be confused with Japan's Kochi University.

"Some people argue that by changing names India is becoming more patriotic," said K.V. Kunjikrishnan, the university's registrar, referring to nationalist politicians' desire to do away with colonial names. "But I strongly feel that ... it is a political smoke screen to impress people and get votes."

Sharda Dwivedi, author of two books on Bombay, says revisions distort history.

"You can't eradicate 300 years of history," she said. "I personally think the collective memory of people is what really matters, even in terms of heritage."

"The name Bombay immortalized a city that was Kipling's birthplace," she said of author and poet Rudyard Kipling, the first Briton to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1907. The name, though, is of Portuguese origin - bom bahia, meaning ``good bay.''

Sometimes renaming proposals are provoked by misplaced beliefs that old names are linked to British or Portuguese colonial history. A couple of years ago, downtown Bombay's Laburnum Road was to be renamed due to the British ring to the name.

"Then someone said, 'But that's a tree, not an Englishman,'" recalls Dwivedi. The road gets its name from the golden-yellow flowered, Indian native laburnum trees lining it.

To be politically correct, some businessmen carry two sets of visiting cards, presenting one with the city's new name to government officials and the other with the older, better-known name at international seminars.

"They don't want to upset protocol if they're dealing with any officials," said Gul Tekchandani, chief investment officer of Sun F&C, a Bombay-based brokerage.

There is reason for caution. In Bombay in the late 1990s, Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena party workers blackened signs on businesses and schools that did not revert to Mumbai. And in June, right-wing activists vandalized signboards on cobbled streets in western India's Goa state to demand the renaming of 14 roads with Portuguese names.

India's colonial past included British, Portuguese and French rule in different regions.

In a nation with 18 official languages and hundreds of dialects, Indians are divided over renaming their cities.

In Calcutta, grocery shop owner Tapan Mondal said the renaming "made no difference because we never used Calcutta. For us it was always Kolkata in our conversations."

Calcutta was always pronounced Kolkata (pronounced COAL-ka-tah) in the Bengali language. But with the new name the English pronunciation and spelling switched to Kolkata, too.

Yet another city resident, consumer rights activist Mita Dutta, says she uses Calcutta in most conversations. "To say Kolkata is a conscious effort."

India is not alone in switching colonial names. South Africa, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are among many countries that renamed provinces and cities. Sri Lanka, the island nation off India's southern tip, changed its own name, dropping the colonial name Ceylon in 1972.

The revised name, meaning "island," was used in early times and derived from the ancient Sanskrit language. But the Bank of Ceylon, the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation and even the Ceylon Tourist Board have stuck with the colonial name.

Some countries merely corrected spellings based on Britons' faulty pronunciation of foreign languages. Bangladesh changed the spelling of its capital to Dhaka, instead of the British Dacca, in 1982.

Similarly in China, the government changed from Peking to Beijing in the 1950s to bring the spelling closer to the Chinese pronunciation and later turned Canton into Guangzhou - both changes adopted by the rest of the world.

The military regime in Myanmar has had less success getting acceptance for the ancient name for the country best known as Burma. The United States still uses Burma, and it's Burma/Myanmar for the European Union. Myanmar is derived from the Burmese name Myanma Naingngandaw.

One important sign of acceptance is the use of the new name by mapmakers, who usually act once the responsible government adopts the change. The mapmakers say they hear of changes from embassies, the U.S. Board of Geographic Names and international organizations such as the United Nations.

The National Geographic has a Map Policy Committee that meets monthly to discuss changes.

Maps of India show both names for Bombay with the old name in parenthesis. "This is like the transition we went through for China with Beijing/Peking and Guangzhou/Canton appearing together," said David Miller, senior editor of National Geographic Maps.

As in the usage of Constantinople alongside Istanbul, Bombay will keep popping up in most maps. "It's done with some of the more famous historical cities that have changed names," said Miller.

But he feels new names should be recorded. "Name changes often reflect the will of the people in democracies or the use of an indigenous language gaining favor over a former colonial language," he said in a telephone interview from Washington.

Back in western India, where it all began, Pramod Navalkar, leader of the right-wing Shiv Sena party that spearheaded the change to Mumbai, says things may be getting out of hand.

"It began with cities, then roads, then intersections. Now even street corners are being renamed," Navalkar said. "Everybody gets confused."

He added with a chuckle, "Many a time I also say 'Bombay.'"

By Ramola Talwar Badam