Indian renaming controversy

The Indian renaming controversy is a result of a movement to change the names of Indian cities from those used during the British imperial period, back to regional or Indian names. Beginning in 2006, the ruling Congress Party in India pushed through the renaming of Indian cities to their "pre-colonial" names and pronunciations.

Major cities that have been renamed in English language after independence include Thiruvananthapuram (formerly Trivandrum), Mumbai (formerly Bombay), Chennai (formerly Madras), Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), Pune (formerly Poona) and Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore).

Controversy
While local politicians and some historians praised the move, others, particularly in the business community of the affected cities, felt that it was a step backward in building a global reputation. Nowhere was the controversy greater than in Bangalore, renamed as Bengaluru. On December 11 2005, chief minister Dharam Singh had announced that the Karnataka state government accepted Jnanpith awardee U R Ananthamurthy's suggestion to rename ten cities to their Kannada names. The new names became effective from November 1, 2006. In most of these cases the 'new' names are simply the names by which these cities have always been known in the native language. Thus, local Kannada language newspapers announced that "Bengaluru (Bangalore) is to be renamed as Bengaluru". The reason was that Bangalore had become, in the past 15 years, home to more than 1,500 information technology companies and was nicknamed "India's Silicon Valley". So many American companies had moved their operations to the Indian city that a worker whose job was lost to outsourcing called it being "Bangalored". Others feel that Bengaluru is too provincial, when Bangalore is recognized worldwide as synonymous with high tech.

Earlier, Bombay (a pronunciation of Portuguese origin) had successfully been renamed Mumbai. The new changes concentrated on eliminating the pronunciations from the days of British India, and were carried out in response to the demands of the Hindu Nationalist Shiv Sena party. 'Mumbai' has long been the name of the city in Marathi and Gujarati, whilst Hindi-speakers called it Bambai. However, some argue that as the renaming was part of the Shiv Sena's Bhumiputra (son of the soil) policy, it is an attempt to erase evidence of the city's cosmopolitanism and multi-lingual character.

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