Goodbye, Bangalore

Welcome to Bengalooru, garden city of India, capital of Karnataka state; city of exotic temples, of Haider Ali and his son, the 8220;Tiger of Mysore8221;; city of software, technology parks

Welcome to Bengalooru, garden city of India, capital of Karnataka state; city of exotic temples, of Haider Ali and his son, the 8220;Tiger of Mysore8221;; city of software, technology parks, cyber cafeacute;s and globalisation at its most glamorous; city, above all, of cooked beans. And, at the same time, goodbye Bangalore, boring colonial cantonment whose name failed to honour the kind old woman who plumped up a hungry 14th-century king with a small bean feast. Following the examples of Bombay, Madras and Calcutta, Bangalore has rebranded itself, taking the local name for 8220;city of cooked beans8221;.

Will it catch on? Yes, in the end it probably will, just as Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata are slowly taking hold. Sign-writers and printers will be glad of the new business, politicians will claim a blow against British cultural enslavement and a victory for authenticity8230; but many others will give a weary sigh. ..

They have every right to do so, of course, and it seems discourteous not to use their new names if they expressly ask you to. That is why The Economist adopts Myanmar, Cocirc;te d8217;Ivoire, Kyrgyzstan, Timor-Leste and now Bengalooru see article too. But it rankles, for several reasons.

First, the changes, which are nearly always politically inspired, often seem to annoy the locals as much as anyone else. Many Indians, surprised to be told their place names were inappropriate, still talk about Bombay and Calcutta as though nothing had changed. The people of St Petersburg have had to endure first Petrograd and then Leningrad before reclaiming their city8217;s pre-1914 name. The Congolese were startled one day to be told that their country, its main river and the currency would all be called Zaire. After 26 years they got their old name back. Something similar happened in Cambodia, when the ghastly Khmer Rouges imposed Kampuchea8230; Yet many languages have their own words for foreign places, words resonant with associations of travel, history or romance. It seems a pity to lose them. Wasn8217;t Sir John Moore buried after Corunna, not A or La Coruntilde;a? Weren8217;t Rose Macaulay8217;s towers in Trebizond, not Trabzon? Should the Lady with the Lamp really have been christened Firenze Nightingale? Was Chamberlain shamed at Muuml;nchen? After eating chicken agrave; la Kyiv? And even if you pronounce it My-yorker, isn8217;t the island Majorca, not Mallorca?

Only English-speakers, it seems, are expected to kowtow to name-changers8217; whims. No one berates the French for Peacute;kin, Le Caire and Edimbourg8230;

Excerpted from 8216;The Economist8217;, November 9