Now, paribartan in the name too

So will it be Paschim Banga, Paschimbanga or PaschimBanga? If the third, will the state currently known as West Bengal get a unique place name with a capital letter in the middle of a word? All three spellings have been used in recent weeks to describe the new name of West Bengal,

as Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamul Congress takes its “paribartan” (change) drive to nomenclature as well.
The story of how Calcutta became Kolkata a decade ago, and of how West Bengal threatens to become Paschim Banga (the literal translation) in 2011, is not just one of a once-colonised community effacing an imperial legacy. It is fundamentally ahistorical and reflects the provincialisation of the Bengalis as a people.
Why is the name Kolkata ahistorical? Simply because there was no great city or metropolis of that name till the British founded Calcutta. This is unlike, say, Patna, which is descended from Pataliputra, a flourishing city in the Maurya era. Patna itself was an important urban location in pre-British India.
This is not to suggest Patna should be renamed Pataliputra. It is only to stress there could be a case, however slim, for making that demand. Yet the evidence and the weight of history that can be cited by Pataliputra’s advocates simply cannot be put forward by Kolkata’s. To remove the name “Calcutta” amounts to wishing away the British period and pretending it never existed. It is as if Kolkata suddenly appeared on the landscape, without any warning at all. Its link to British-created Calcutta is denied; its link to any pre-colonial city is non-existent.
As an apocryphal story goes, the demand for Kolkata was made in the late 1990s by a Bengali writer who found himself superseded at the literary magazine he worked for. His new boss was a foreign-returned Bengali. This perceived professional slight led the writer to turn against a variety of foreign impulses and influences, including names, and invoked some long-suppressed nativist gene. He began a crusade for the “restoration” of Bengali pride by deleting Calcutta and replacing it with Kolkata. The Left Front government, which had pretty much nothing better to do, quickly gave in.
Admittedly, the term “Paschim Banga” is more problematic. For one, it has provenance. It derives from Vanga or Banga, which have been previous names for part of the territory of West Bengal. Even so, the reasons for renaming that the Mamata Banerjee government has given are just not convincing. It has argued that with a name beginning with W the state is among the last to be considered in any roll-call of states.
This is specious reasoning. Will moving up a few letters to P (for Paschim Banga) remedy matters? Why not drop the “West”, which is an obsolete expression since there is nothing called East Bengal anymore, and resort to plain Bengal? This will put the state well up the alphabetical order.
As disputes over geographical indicators bear out, place names can be big and in some cases lucrative brands. “Darjeeling tea” would simply not be the same if it were called “Gorkhaland tea”. Australia and California can make top quality sparkling wine, but they can never call it Champagne.
In “Bengal” and “Calcutta”, the state currently known as West Bengal has two of the biggest geographical brands in India. These have name recall, legacy and worldwide recognition. Despite West Bengal’s abysmal failures in recent decades, the names are still well-known. Many other states, and even countries, would pay a king’s ransom for such brand names. Yet it says something about Bengali politicians and the Bengali intelligentsia that both these valuable commodities have been chucked away by the state, without a thought at all.
Calcutta and Bengal once represented the best of India. One was a cosmopolitan city, a business centre home to Baghdadi Jews as much as Bengalis, Awadh’s aristocrats as much as Anglo-Indians, Parsis as much as Punjabis. The other was a rich province, among the early Indian industrial zones, with a jute industry that affected fortunes as far away as Dundee.
Gradually both these identities were allowed to be whittled away. The Left Front government accelerated the process in its 34 years of government and made the state and its capital city extremely inward looking. If Ms Banerjee wants to change things in West Bengal, she has to begin by altering this mindset, and this nativist defeatism. Succumbing on the Paschim Banga issue and giving the world its most unpronounceable place name since Ouagadougou isn’t the way to do this.
It is nobody’s argument that Bengali society should remain obsessed with the Raj. However, there is a difference between moving on from the British legacy and becoming an ostrich society. West Bengal has a future as a modern Indian state that uses economic opportunities of the present, whether in the context of India or of global trade and socio-cultural exchange. Will these imperatives be better served by Paschim Banga or by Bengal?
Perhaps a halfway house can be found. Many places have local as well as world (or “English-language” names). Firenze is also Florence, Misr is also Egypt. As such, Paschim Banga may well be sanctified as the Bengali-language translation, but Ms Banerjee should let West Bengal stay as the official name. For that matter, she should also bring back Calcutta.

Ashok Malik can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com