What's in a name?

THE Mumbai of 2001 does not outwardly resemble the Beirut of 1980, and its streets are not divided by barbed wire fencing or scarred by shrapnel. But the cartographers of dislocation can operate undetected, and the metropolis has been sharply fragmented along ethnic lines since the riots of 1992, which followed in the wake of the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya by Hindu right-wing goons. Somewhere, among the jostling commuters on the suburban trains, the protest marches of striking workers, the buzz of the plastic-canopied souks and the neon arcades winking in the unseasonal rain, the violence waits patiently to be ignited.

That is to say, Bombay has been transformed conclusively into Mumbai. In such an eerily fraught situation - when every traffic signal bears a saffron, green or blue banner, depending on the party that dominates the neighbourhood - there is a comforting neutrality to the names that places acquired during the colonial period.

These are songs of absence, bookmarks inserted among the pages of a book that crumbled away long ago. Charni Road marks a vanished pasture, Walkeshwar a destroyed Shaivite shrine, Pydhonie a ritual of foot-washing rendered archaic by reclamation and vehicular traffic. The romance of an Iberian princess hovers about Bandra, and if Mahim was once a fisher-king's demesne, Malabar Hill delights in the memory of pirates and mariners playing desperate games of hide-and-seek along the west coast.

Emerging organically from the lives and memories of people as they have, these names demonstrate a lively collective imagination at work, mapping and re-mapping the currents of experience, alternately colluding with and dissenting from the narratives of official mythology. These place-names evoke histories of arrival and departure: they graph waves of settlement, the ebb and flow of community. Above all, they embody the sensation of locality, the distinctive experience of sights, sounds, smells and emotional associations, that turns space into place.

The Malabar Hill area is usually thought of as Mount Affluence, but it is also an exceptionally sacred site to several million people. Banganga, the tank-temple complex on its western slope, elaborates the spiritual universe of the Gaud Saraswat Brahmin pioneers who established it. The temple of Babulnath Mahadev on the hill's east slope records the aspirations of the Bhatias and Kapols who first worshipped there. The Tower of Silence, a wooded sanctuary, is where the Zoroastrian dead make their way into eternity. And yet, significantly, even as it describes a vast cosmology from various perspectives, the Malabar Hill area does not lose its specific, and detailed, identity as place; indeed, it is the unique weave of details that produces such a sense of place.

It is when they are rootless, when they have no sense of connection with the space they inhabit, that people escape from locality into rhetoric. Lacking the sensitivity, the knowledge of particulars that allows people to construct a vibrant and unique folklore around themselves, they reach for a one-size-fits-all mythology, an encyclopedia of new names that bear no meaningful relationship to the places to which they will be tagged. The disease is endemic among politicians, a tribe of wandering illusionists who have forfeited their sense of specificity in pursuing their ambition to hypnotise the masses. That is why a local politician was inspired, several years ago, to demand that Malabar Hill be renamed Ramanagari.

So far as such demagogues are concerned, voices are only considered audible when they carry over a megaphone, and events that do not appear in the newspaper headlines have not happened. Politicians of this stripe do not recognise the idea of an unemphatic culture, a culture that does not make proclamations but works its way quietly from past to future, a mercurial bloodstream. To them, the only viable culture is one that grows out of the mythological nautankis of the TV screen, charades set in cardboard Ramanagaris which the prop-boys will dismantle once the scene has been shot.

The passion that some of our politicians have conceived for renaming places puts me in mind of an episode recorded in Amitav Ghosh's 1998 book, Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma. Ghosh recounts a fascinating conversation he had with Aung San Suu Kyi in 1995, an exchange that reveals her warm and humane understanding of people and their motivations. When Ghosh asks her what she thought of the Burmese ruling junta's decision to erase the past by launching a comprehensive renaming programme - under which Burma has become Myanmar and Rangoon is now Yangon - Suu Kyi bursts into laughter. Ghosh writes: "She laughed. 'Yes, please use the old forms,' she said. 'As support for a sensible way of looking at things. I do not like narrow-mindedness. Even if these names were given by the British colonialists, so what? After all, India is called India, and not Bharat; and China is China. I think if you have enough confidence in yourself, you should not worry about what you are called'."

RANJIT HOSKOTE

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : Hydrological poverty
Next     : Ear buds - exercise caution