The return of the nativists

Govts should not aim to either censor history or rewrite it

The Tamil Nadu government’s reversal, within a week, of its decision to change the spellings of 1,018 places with traditional names to align more closely to their Tamil pronunciations highlights the essential pointlessness of nativism. The new names, picked by an expert committee based on recommendations of district collectors, have evoked mixed responses, mostly on account of the complexity involved in changing the Anglicised spelling of Coimbatore to Koyampuththur, or Vellore to Veeloor, or Egomore to Ezhumbur. 

Now, the state government is working on aligning transliteration standards and a new list is expected in two or three days. Apart from the question of whether the state needs to dissipate its energies on this exercise when it remains among the worst hit by Covid-19, this resurgence of nativism raises other concerns within the broad rubric of the idea of India. To be sure, this kind of nativism has been bubbling under the surface for at least 25 years. Thus, Bombay became Mumbai, Calcutta Kolkata, and Madras Chennai. Such changes ignored the histories of all three cities, which were originally set up by the British, so their English names were not really corruptions of the original, as was the case with pre-existing places such as Cochin/Kochi and even Delhi/Dilli or Dehli.

The logical course would have been to follow a best global practice with names that are spelt and pronounced differently, as with Rome/Roma, Florence/Firenze, China/Cheen, or Egypt/Misr. In other words, names can have equal validity in different languages, and there is no need to insist on complicated spellings and pronunciations to align with local language.

Much re-naming has had to do with de-colonisation, as is the case of Kingsway (now Rajpath), Queensway (now Janpath), or Curzon Road (now Kasturba Gandhi Marg) in New Delhi. This may have had some validity; no one wants to be reminded of colonial rulers, who pillaged the country any more than people want to be reminded of slave traders whose statues have been recently removed in places like Bristol. Former colonial cities, too, have replaced statues of British rulers with Indian personages, one incongruous example being the substitution of Empress Victoria’s statue in front of the Victoria Memorial with one of Aurobindo Ghosh, its austerity sharply contrasting with the lush carvings of angels and flora at the base.

The Bharatiya Janata Party on its part has tried to replace Muslim names such as Aurangzeb Road, Mughalsarai Station, and Allahabad, with less historical justification. But it also sought to reduce the unjustified preponderance of programmes and roads/squares bearing the names of the Nehru-Gandhi family and second-rung Congress leaders. But some of the new names make even less sense than the old ones.

The issue comes down to a matter of time and place. Today, B R Ambedkar’s statues, in trademark suit and tie, probably outnumber Gandhi’s, as social justice gains currency and the freedom movement becomes part of remembered history. The racist Churchill’s statue in London’s Parliament Square, attacked the other day, has a greater chance of surviving there than it would in Calcutta. The point, perhaps, is to move with the spirit of the times without trying to either censor history or to rewrite it. All historical figures had their pluses and minuses, as with Thomas Jefferson, a founding father of the US, who owned slaves and fathered children with one of them. Or Tipu Sultan, who was both a hero to those wanting to fight the British at the time and a villain, especially in places like the Malabar, while presenting also a complicated approach with regard to Hindus and Muslims. Certainly, Indian states need to cultivate a maturity in viewing such personages without the need to paint them entirely black or white.