Identity Crisis

It’s very likely that being in India is making me dumb, actively sapping what little functioning brain matter I had. In Delhi, I chalked it up to the heat, the dizzying masses, and general cacophony—death by over-stimulation. But here in Cal, I think there is a different culprit. The city itself. You see, Calcutta—ahem, Kolkata—is a city deeply confused. In the midst of a serious identity crisis. First there was the changing of its name from the Anglicized Calcutta to the more authentically Bengali Kolkata, much to the chagrin of non-Bengalis who are loathe to struggle with the odd syllable emphasis and aspirated t.

But it gets worse. In this frenzy to (finally) shake off the mantle of colonial oppression, Kolkata has decided to rename all of her streets, washing away the remnants of the Raj’s Anglophilic names like Lindsay, Auckland, Camac and Canning. Instead, the roads have been rechristened (or whatever is the comparable Hindu ceremony) after illustrious Bengalis: Meghnad Saha, Sarojini Naidu, Leela Roy, Mother Theresa, Shakespeare, Ho-Chi Min… you get the idea. Sometimes the change is logical such as Theatre Street is now Shakespeare Sarani. But the logical is short lived. For one, in the zest to pay homage to all the brilliant, talented prominent Bengalis, streets have been divided so that portions of each are renamed after different people. At any given point, what used to be CIT Road might be Manik Bandhopadhayay, William Carrey Sarani or Sheik Mujibar Rahman Sarani. Depending on who you speak to, the address of a given place may be three to seventeen different things. Indeed, most people ignore the new names all together and often the old ones too in favor of some sort of directional Kolkata shorthand to which I am not yet privy.

Don’t get me wrong, I am all about decolonizing our streets as we decolonize our minds but I have yet to understand governing principles of the name-change. Want to get rid the lingering names of colonizers? Right on. Want to honor the beloved sons and daughters of Bengal? Amen, sister. Want to show Britain that its hold on you is fading, a mere sixty years after the nasty break up? Been there, burned the t shirt. But why strip streets that already bear the names of Bengalis in favor of new ones? I mean, who did Harish Chatterjee posthumously piss off such that his namesake road gets two new names? And the shame of being the apparently-not-famous-enough-anymore-Bengali who loses their street name to Charlie Chaplin? That’s a low blow, Cal. Real low. Who decides who is important enough to not only have a road named after them but important enough to strip some other person of that honor and then get a road named for them? Was there some 25 million person town-hall meeting, where there was a straw poll? Was there some sort of write-in contest? Did Karl Marx win some secret popularity contest by such a margin as to warrant being feted twice? What, Karl Marx Sarani wasn’t enough so he had to get Marx Engles Bithi too? Seems unfair to me. I mean, what about all the Bengalis left behind? The ones not cool enough to get a street name. Seems highly un-Marxist to give old Karl two streets when Ravi Shankar gets nothing. Methinks there’s a little favoritism at work here. And that would be utterly un-Bengali. We are, after all, an intensely just and fair-minded peoples.