THE POLITICS OF NAME CHANGES
The Modi government is often accused of tying new name-ribbons around existing welfare schemes and presenting them as new. While this goes on at the Centre, some BJP state governments and many in the larger Sangh parivar have gone on a seemingly unending name-changing spree. Uttar Pradesh has taken the lead, but there are also murmurs about Ahmedabad (Gujarat) and local demands to rename Aurangabad and Osmanabad (Maharashtra), and the tempo is sure to pick up.
The past is always in the repertoire of identity politics, and legends and leaders consigned to the past tend to find place in the contested terrain of statues and symbols. Rulers and ruling classes are keen to turn their legacies into monuments and memory. This is true not only of pre-democratic rulers; in democracies too, the bid to create enduring legacies and leave imprints on public memory form an essential part of the politics of culture. So, rulers and political figures are memorialised, often posthumously, in currency notes, in statues at busy public squares, on signboards and road names. If anything, in the time of selfie-love, the narcissistic impulse to make themselves a part of history is greater for our current democratic rulers. Just as rulers of pre-Independence India—British or Mughals or homegrown, and of various religious persuasions— ensured they live for posterity through memory, so do the rulers today want to create new memories. What is happening in our midst may be understood as the politics of memory, the politics of symbols, at multiple levels, as an easy way to hold sway in the politics of culture.
One level of this politics is to attempt to erase parts of our history: by changing Muslim-sounding names or names given by Muslim rulers, the current attempt is to obliterate the history of more than six centuries. That period is seen by the current regime as a period of ‘external’ aggression that wounded ‘our’ selfhood, and the attempt to expunge this swathe of memory from the public imagination is an attempt to heal the perceived scars of defeat retrospectively. It is as if history got suspended circa 12th century and resumed only in the 20th or is it the 21st, when the Modi era began?
The other level at which this politics plays out is the assertion that India is a ‘Hindu’ nation (Hindu, used in the religious sense) and, therefore, the basis of not only history and memory, but also of identity, morality and, hence, politics must be Hindu religious ideas. This is not just about history; it is part of the project to redefine our collective selfhood. The urge to change names—of cities, roads and so on—is indicative of a deeper unease and uncertainty about the more inclusive identity India adopted post-Independence.
The third level at which this politics is bound to diversify and expand is in the retelling of the more recent history of our national struggle and the building of a democratic society. This enterprise is already under way beyond the current phase of renaming, and in the larger battle of ideas, there will be efforts to diminish the stature of, or even remove from public attention, those leaders whose ideas the current regime abhors. Of course, the argument begins with the sense of injury that ‘our’ leaders were not adequately memorialised whereas ‘their’ leaders were everywhere. But the real issue is not the space or memory estate Nehru or Deendayal Upadhyaya occupy, it is which ideas should form the ideological basis for defining India’s collective identity. That project won’t stop at undoing the memory of Mughal or Muslim rulers, it will extend to erasing the sense of a more inclusive Indianness, by presenting a false claim that only Hindutva is true Indianness.
The current rush to change names is part of the politics of memory, as a way of holding sway in the politics of culture