The Name Game

Mahesh Vijapurkar

The passion for renaming places and facilities, including institutions, remains unabated in Maharashtra. The well-known Pune University is Savitribai Phule Pune University. Other universities too had such new prefixes. That was much after Bombay became Mumbai. Now a local railway station named after a Bombay Governor (1853-60), John Elphinstone, will change to Prabhadevi.

John Elphinstone’s uncle, Mounstuart Elphinstone had preceded him in that post between 1819-27. A new college built with public subscription was named after him. The nephew, however, had a bridge, a station, and even a textile mill named to honour him and perpetuate his memory. He had built the first piped water system for the city though it led to several tanks closed, including the Gowalia, from where the 1942 call for Quit India was issued.

The Bombay Green, on whose edge stands the imposing Asiatic Society of Mumbai, founded in 1804, easily the oldest public institution, became Elphinstone Circle. His name was erased soon after Independence, to commemorate Benjamin Horniman, editor of Bombay Chronicle, who supported Indian independence. It is not as if new places could not be found to name after emerging heroes. It was due to the nationalistic fervour.

Rest assured that even after the renaming of the station, the users are likely to get familiar and universally use it only after several years. To many, Mumbai is still Bombay, Victoria Terminus even after its rechristening a as Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST), and now recommended for rechristening as Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT). It is because of the mistaken notion that absence of ‘maharaj’ was disrespectful of the Maratha emperor.

Shivaji, no doubt the icon of the state, had been endearingly called Shivba. Google that and you would find 73,100 links to it. Maharashtra does call Vittala, the presiding deity of Pandhapur, who was simply called Vittu or Vittoba by those who prayed to him – Tukaram included. The excuse to add a ‘maharaj’ is inexplicable, expect to pander to parochial sentiments, even as a huge memorial to Shivaji is to be built in the sea, off Mumbai.

The futility of renaming all things English after Indian, and now preferably Marathi, to stress the localness of the region has not hit the authorities which succumb to local interests. In the 1960s, the statue of King Edward the VII, astride a black horse, was uprooted from a prime South Mumbai district. It is Kala Ghoda, as if history means nothing. Close by Prince of Wales Museum was also named after Shivaji.

The statuary was taken away unceremoniously discarded in some corner of Victoria Garden, also of the British vintage. The garden itself is locally the Rani Baug, not the JeejamataUdyan as renamed. That Jeejabai was Shivaji’smother is not to be forgotten. Strange are the ways of public’s memory. Now a black horse’s statue is to be set up there, probably to fit the street’s adornment to its name. An annual festival is held there every year, called the Kala Ghoda Festival.

It could be understood if Elphinstone Station was reverting to its original name, like Bombay did to Mumbai, but there is no such thing because that is how it was christened when the first railway system opened in 1853, between BoriBunder (now CST to become CSMT) and Thane. There was no compulsion to change it by recognising a 300-year-old temple, but it will add pressure on the government to rename Dadar, a railway terminal, as Chaityabhoomi.

Chaityabhoomi is the spot on the seashore, two km away from the station, where Dr Ambedkar was cremated and is now a place of pilgrimage to Dalits on December 6 each year. In hailing distance, an entire defunct textile mill is being converted into a huge, and as they say, grand memorial to the man who drafted the Constitution. This may not necessarily weaken the demand, and when politics becomes the yardstick, anything could happen.