CLAIMING RIGHT TO DEFINE WHERE ONE CAN'T CREATE

No one objected loudly when anglicised place names were being changed. But why change those from the era of Muslim rulers who assimilated fully into India?

- SHASHI THAROOR

The decision of the government of India to rename the town of Port Blair, capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, as Sri Vijaya Puram passed without debate or much national comment. It was, arguably, a justifiable decision—replacing the name of an 18th century British colonial surveyor (Archibald Blair) with one redolent of the derring-do of the great maritime Chola empire, which had ranged over much of Southeast Asia, including the Andamans, from the 9th to 11th centuries.

Srivijaya was actually not an Indian place, but an ancient Sumatran empire repeatedly raided and conquered by the Cholas, whose emperor Rajendra I used the Andamans as his base of attack in the 11th century. The renaming served as a reminder that India had a rich history before the British ruled it, and was in keeping with the ruling BJP government's loudly-proclaimed desire to rid the country of all reminders of its 'colonial slavery'.

Some residents protested that this betrayed their long sense of connectedness to the place and their shared identity; that the name change was a poor substitute for serving the development needs of the city, which suffers from decaying infrastructure, corruption, poor roads, power, water, health care and public services; and that instead of consulting taxpaying residents, the decision has been taken on the whims of an administration that is 'unresponsive, dictatorial, and disconnected'. Their protests have been ignored in the government's chauvinist zeal.

The self-appointed guardians of Indianness, convinced that the names of cities and landmarks reflect the colonisation of the national sensibility, had long set about nationalising nomenclature in the name of Bharatiya sanskriti whenever they had the chance.