Name of the game: Ronojoy Sen
Mar 4, 2010: The Times of India
What’s in a name? Quite a lot actually. Especially when it comes to roads and places in India. The Indian state had long ago discovered that the best way of perpetuating the memory of dead leaders is to name a road – preferably the biggest one in a city – or airport after a prominent leader. So every city has a Mahatma Gandhi or a Jawaharlal Nehru Road besides several stadiums, parks and other assorted public places named after these two giants. Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi too make it with great frequency. There are of course regional variations where a Shivaji in Maharashtra, Netaji Subhas Bose in Bengal and Annadurai in Tamil Nadu is preferred.
But why do politicians dominate Indian streets and public places? One reason is because the central or the state government usually decides names. Not surprisingly, parties in power prefer to fix the names of their leaders to places. And given Congress’s hegemony for so many years since 1947, it’s the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that has benefited the most.
Post-independence there has been a spurt of renaming, something that stems from the urge to shake off the colonial yoke or to give vent to regional chauvinism. So Connaught Place becomes Rajiv Chowk and Victoria Terminus becomes Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminal. But more often than not, the older names continue to linger on in people’s minds. So the Duke of Connaught – a little remembered son of Queen Victoria – has a far greater connect with Delhi’s iconic market for most people than the much more famous Rajiv Gandhi, and VT has a ring to it that CST can never replace.
Few artistes or cultural icons get a place in the roll of honour. There are rare exceptions such as Shakespeare Sarani in Kolkata or Amrita Shergill Marg in Delhi.
It’s a shame that relatively minor politicians like Rajesh Pilot have been honoured with a road, while greats such as Alauddin Khan or Munshi Premchand have been ignored.
Names of roads also reflect the politics of the time. Delhi would never have had a street named after Archbishop Makarios if it hadn’t been for India’s support of the non-aligned movement. Or Harrington Street in Calcutta wouldn’t have been changed to Ho Chi Minh Sarani during the height of the Vietnam War. Of course the latter also had something to do with the American consulate being located on that street.
In the US and Europe, a much greater catholicity is shown when naming streets and places. This has something to do with the role of city councils and the local population in naming or renaming. Early on, many streets were named after a landmark such as a church or market. This was no different from colonial India when streets like Chitpur – one of the oldest roads in Calcutta which has since been renamed Rabindra Sarani – was named after a huge temple dedicated to goddess Chiteswari.
Later, streets in the West came to be named after anything from a tree to a great music composer as well as the odd local notable. It seems in the 1850s the most popular name for streets in America was Oak.
But sadly in India we are stuck with names that we don’t relate to and have little or no power to change.
http://tinyurl.com/name-of-the-game
