Is this in Chennai or Madras? Whichever one you prefer, I say.

.

When I landed in Chennai, I realized I was also in the city of Madras. But when I wanted to explore the state of Madras, I learned I would be hopping around Tamil Nadu.

I haven’t been on this planet long enough to know a lot, but I never heard of a country that loves to change the names of its places as much as India.

As Istambul was Constantinople, Mumbai was Bombay, Kolkata was Calcutta, Bengaluru was Bangalore, Haora was Howrah.

And those are just the major ones.

This all started happening the the nineties, nearly fifty years after independence, when a new breed of politicians sought to assert their Indianness and do away with all vestiges of colonization.

Many of the changes were justified. The British gave some Indian cities ghastly spellings to suit their tongues: They called Kanpur “Cawnpore” and Pune was reduced to “Poona”.

Those were mercifully reversed. But as Shashi Tharoor opined in his excellent book of essays on India, The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone, some of it went too far at the expense of “tradition, historical accuracy and linguistic common sense.”

Bombay, Tharoor noted, came from the Portuguese Bom Bahia: good bay. But the city itself never existed before the colonial period; it was a confluence of fishing villages, one of which may have been called Mumbai.

Madras, a name that evoked so many images of tradition, flavours, and exoticism – and that christened so many recognizable items like jackets, kerchiefs, and curry sauces – was euthanized.

At least officially. When in Chennai, I heard the old name used interchangeably and with the same frequency as the new. Then I learned that Madras, contrary to a local politician’s protests, might have come from a Tamil word after all.

These name changes had less to do with restoring identity and were more of an F-you to the British. It was a way of scoring political points by making the colonizers (most of them dead by then) warp their tongues with an uncomfortable pronunciation.

How else to explain the change in name of Bombay’s main train station, Victoria Terminus – which went by the neutral and efficient “VT” – to Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus?

Yes, it’s debatably silly to do away with the brand recognition and the rich history some place names carry. “We are what we are,” Tharoor writes, “the product of a history we cannot deny, and the names of our towns and cities will reflect the centuries of influence from various quarters that have gone into making the India of today.”

But sillier still is to pressure speakers of other languages to abide by the new names. Cross-border naming conventions have always been arbitrary. A defender of cultural sensibilities might correct me if I refer to Bombay, but she wouldn’t blink an eye if I say Naples and not Napoli, or if I talk about Germany and not Deutschland.

English speakers aren’t pressed to call Athens Athina, Damascus Dimashq, or Japan Nippon.

Côte d’Ivoire is translated as Ivory Coast, but Rio de Janeiro isn’t River of January, nor was Buenos Aires made into Pleasant Winds.

The French, in their endearing rejection of all things English, call the American states Californie and Floride, despite the names coming from Spanish. But New York is left alone.

And hardly any language, barring English and Hungarian, calls London London.

Tharoor compared this renaming mania to the quaint and insensitive Indian tradition of giving a woman new names – both a surname and a first name – when she marries. It’s a signal that her old life is over and her identity is entirely determined by her new family.

I like Bombay. I like the way it sounds. I’m going to keep her maiden name intact.