Names people play

Generally speaking, this writer does not support name changes for streets and cities. Yet, this principle is not absolutist. One has to make allowance for a society’s evolution over time, and for new heroes, events and iconic phenomena deemed worthy of memorialising. In the case of the Delhi road now known as A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Marg, there is an additional factor. Aurangzeb, who lent his name to the road till this past week, is simply not a cause worth defending.

Left to myself, I would have renamed Aurangzeb Road after Dara Shikoh, the more worthy of Shah Jahan’s sons, the heir-apparent so cruelly killed by Aurangzeb for the prize of the Peacock Throne. To have had Dara displace his brother in the very metropolis where he was paraded before being executed would have, to some degree at least, righted a wrong of history, insofar as it is possible to right history’s wrongs.

Nevertheless, and regrettably, Dara has become an obscure figure in our historiography. Those who criticise the removal of Aurangzeb’s name from a street contend that this is part of a mission to wipe out whole centuries of Indian history — an assault on the pluralistic and diverse culture of India, as it prevailed before the barbarians took over in May 2014. It is a wonder that the pluralistic and diverse India that existed till then had little place for Dara Shikoh.

In 70 years as a free country, was even a lane in the capital named after Dara? About 15 years ago, the previous National Democratic Alliance government proposed to name a park in Old Delhi after him. The idea was abandoned after protests from local residents. These are inconvenient facts, but facts all the same.

Dara is a personal obsession for this writer, as he is for a few others. President Kalam is, of course, a much more modern figure. Having said that the point here is not so much the merits and demerits of Aurangzeb vis-à-vis his brother or the recently-deceased President, but the idea that the renaming of a road is an erasure of history. This takes us to a larger question: ideally one should approach history with equanimity, but can one disregard the reality that debates of history could be very alive and contemporary for many people?

Take an example. About 10 years ago, the Hollywood film Alexander was greeted with protests by Zoroastrians in India and the United States for its glorifying of the Greek conqueror, the failure to show his desecration of the Persian city of Persepolis, and the use of a Zoroastrian religious symbol in some scenes. So angry was the community that Zubin Mehta, the musician, personally contacted director Oliver Stone and persuaded him to change the film’s promos.

Alexander lived 2,500 years ago. Aurangzeb died only 300 years ago. Many of his actions are still with us. The social divide he created — and which could perhaps have been avoided or at least extenuated if Dara had become emperor instead of him — still resonates in discourse in India and other parts of the subcontinent.

As such, the clear-eyed, disinterested view of history that academics urge, while eminently desirable, is not always possible at a mass level. This explains the popularity of the decision to rename Aurangzeb Road, an endorsement that cannot be entirely wished away in a democracy. Opponents of the name change have fired two arrows. The first is a petition moved before the Delhi high court that says the renaming vio-lates guidelines issued by the home ministry on September 27, 1975, that no historical road and place names will be changed in Delhi.

The petition says that in ignoring these guidelines, and replacing Aurangzeb Road with A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Road, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led govern-ment has practised “sick and communal politics” and that it “lacks understanding of history”. India is a determinedly litigious country, but even by its standards this petition is over-the-top. If the home ministry guidelines issued during the Emergency are to be followed to the letter, then no place names can be changed in Delhi, while this can happen elsewhere in India.

It also follows that all name changes since September 27, 1975, are against these guidelines and need to be retrospectively altered. As such, should we now expect to fly out of Palam Airport (as opposed to Indira Gandhi Airport) and meet doctors at Willingdon Hospital (as against Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital)?

The second arrow is a narrative that equates name change with whitewashing of history. Indeed, a case can be made that places associated with a historical character or epoch cannot have their names changed abruptly. Here again, Aurangzeb Road is a bad example. After all, this was not a road built or used by the last of the major Mughal emperors.

On the other hand, there is a much stronger argument to be made for letting Aurangabad stay as it is, since the city (now in Maharashtra) was renamed in Aurangzeb’s time, while he lived here as governor of the Deccan, and has monuments that bear his imprint. There is no such experience or linkage in the case of Aurangzeb Road.

Where Indian governments have been genuinely ahistorical is in the rampant renaming of British-era landmarks that were clearly products of the colonial epoch in our history. The most egregious case was the crude and slavish campaign Mani Shankar Aiyar ran 20 years ago to have Connaught Circus and Place renamed after Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. This was clearly a British creation in a city designed in the imperial era. It had much to do with the British and little to do with the Nehru-Gandhis. Even so, the renaming went ahead.

In the end, names depend on users. Two decades on, “Connaught Place” is still more popular than “Rajiv Chowk”; four decades later, it may not be. Aurangabad retains its name, Shahjahanabad not quite. It is more frequently referred to as the bland “Old Delhi” or the unprepossessing “Walled City”. Few remember Agra was once called Akbarabad. As for Jahangirnagar, hardly anybody in the capital of Bangladesh (a predominantly Muslim country) uses that name, preferring Dhaka, a noun that possibly owes its etymological origin to the Hindu deity Dhakeshwari.

That’s why the contest between Emperor Aurangzeb and Citizen Kalam will not be decided by historians, columnists and petitioners. It will be decided by those who use and refer to the road in their everyday lives. Let’s leave the verdict to them.

The writer is senior fellow, Observer Research Foundation. He can be reached at malikashok@gmail.com