Articles By ShashiTharoor

In India's name game, cities are the big losers
By Shashi Tharoor
Friday, September 6, 2002

CHENNAI, India: A recent article in this space, datelined "Madras, India," elicited a wry note of appreciation from a former American ambassador in New Delhi. He liked the piece - but wasn't the dateline out of date?

He was right, of course. Since 1996, the city of Madras, to the dismay of travel agents and geography students around the world, has been known as "Chennai." The self-appointed guardians of Indianness, convinced that the names of cities and landmarks reflect the colonization of the national sensibility, have set about nationalizing nomenclature whenever they have the chance.

So a chauvinist state government renamed its capital Mumbai, proscribing the use of the word Bombay for any official purposes. This struck me as the equivalent of a company jettisoning a well-known brand name in favor of an inelegant patronymic - as if McDonald's had renamed itself Kroc's in honor of its founder.

Not to be outdone, the chauvinist government in Madras renamed the state of Madras as Tamil Nadu - "homeland of the Tamils" - and decided that the city of Madras too would be rebaptized.

The chief minister had been informed that "Madras" was actually a Portuguese coinage, derived either from a trader named Madeiros or a prince called Madrie - just as Bombay came from the Portuguese "Bom Bahia," or "good bay."

"Madras is not a Tamil name," announced the chief minister to justify his decision to rename the city Chennai. As with Bombay, name recognition - Madras kerchiefs, Madras jackets - went by the board as "Chennai" was adopted without serious debate.

Worse, however, the chief minister had overlooked the weight of evidence that Madras was indeed a Tamil name. It was derived, alternative theories go, from the name of a local fisherman, Madarasan; or from the local Muslim religious schools, madrasas; or from madhu-ras, from the Tamil word for honey.

Still worse, he had also overlooked the embarrassing fact that "Chennai" was not, as he had asserted, of Tamil origin.

It came from the name of Chennappa Naicker, the Rajah of Chandragiri, who granted the British the right to trade on the coast - and who was a Telugu speaker from what is today a different Indian state, Andhra Pradesh.

So bad history is worse lexicology, but in India it is good politics. This is not a new development. Names had been changed since soon after the British left.

But after more than five decades of independence, isn't it time to start drawing the line somewhere?

What's in a name, Shakespeare asked, and, of course. the weather will be just as sultry in Chennai as it used to be in Madras. But are we Indians so insecure in our independence that we still need to prove to ourselves that we are free? Is there no comfort, after all, in being able to take places for granted, without the continuing sense that they are still susceptible to being renamed?

In parts of India, it is customary for a bride, upon marriage, to take on a new name - not just a surname, but a first name - chosen by her husband's family. It is as if the rulers of Bombay and Madras wanted to show that they were now the lords and masters of these cities, and to demonstrate the change by conferring a new name upon them.

What these aggressive nativists are doing is to demonstrate that they are now in charge, that the old days are over. They are asserting their power, the power to decide what a thing will be, the power to name - for if one does not have the ability to create, one can at least claim the right to define.

Shashi Tharoor's most recent novel is "Riot." He contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.