This time, however, there was more resistance.
To add to the geographical confusion of hapless tourists, we were a West Bengal located in the eastern part of India. That's long been the independent country of Bangladesh. 4 by simply dropping the "West." It actually made sense in practical terms. The state's chief minister decided to leapfrog to No. West Bengal came alphabetically dead last in the long list of Indian states. Just this August the entire state of West Bengal decided to rechristen itself. Now an even more dramatic name change is underway. It was a sort of pick-and-choose Anglicism. The Mitras who had become Mitters stayed Mitter. The Thakurs still called themselves Tagore.
And if anyone revives that famous Broadway production it will never be "Oh! Kolkata!"Īlso, many Kolkatans whose names had been Anglicized retained those surnames. The elite partied at Calcutta Club in a city served by the Kolkata Municipal Corp. To make matters even more confusing, some institutions stayed Calcutta for reasons best known to them. Of course, more politically correct visitors tripped all the time, trying to carefully enunciate Kolkata and putting the stress in all the wrong places. And for many of its residents it remained both, just as it had always been. It became an ideological statement to use one name over the other, a sort of linguistic version of planting your flag in the sand.īut Calcutta became Kolkata with minimal fuss. The rejection of the British styling and the return to Indian roots was seen as erasing some of the cosmopolitan pasts of those cities, of favoring one linguistic group over another, of a rising tide of parochialism where some names tried to mark the true sons of the soil from names preferred by those who came from outside, even if that outside was just another state in India. Other name changes were far more loaded - Bombay to Mumbai, Madras to Chennai, for example. We were used to calling it Kolkata in Bengali and Calcutta in English, and we switched between both names with as much fluency as we switched between those two languages. In 2001 the government of West Bengal decided to officially change its capital city's name to Kolkata to reflect its original Bengali pronunciation. Goats and Soda Kolkata Isn't Just The City Of Mother Teresa
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