Indian cities wrestle with changed names

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

The old rhyme about pronunciation — “Po-tay-to, po-tah-to; to-may-to, to-mah-to” — could be the refrain of most Indians, as well as citizens of other former colonial territories 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 mostly known as Bombay, although much of the world, including the U.S. government and the European Union, officially accepts Mumbai.

Bombay’s rechristening 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. The eastern city of Calcutta — infamous in British history for the brutal imprisoning of colonials in the “Black Hole of Calcutta” — is now Kolkata.

This renaming can create peculiar problems.

Tour operator Hameed Shahul, for instance, notes 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,” Mr. Shahul said.

Adding to the confusion, 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 because altering these would require an act of India’s Parliament.

The Bombay Stock Exchange, Bombay Gymkhana club and the University of Madras also kept their names, for tradition’s sake. 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. “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, feels name changes 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.”

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

“Then someone said, ‘But that’s a tree, not an Englishman,’ ” Miss Dwivedi noted, alluding to the golden-yellow flowered native Indian laburnum trees that line the street.

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