I moved to Delhi from Aligarh in 2015 and found a home in the dense neighbourhoods of Abul Fazal Enclave. Around the same time, the New Delhi Municipal Corporation had renamed Aurangzeb Road to APJ Abdul Kalam Road in Lutyens Delhi. A few days after the renaming, I found a board at the beginning of Abul Fazal enclave road, announcing its renaming to Aurangzeb Road. This unofficial renaming of a road in a Muslim ghetto, unlike the “official” one in the citadel of New Delhi reveals to us the most critical aspect of the politics of toponymy in contemporary India. It tells us that the politics of renaming is not so much about the past but is rooted in the political technology of today, and also in its resistance. It is in this light that we must look at the proposal of the Municipal Corporation of Aligarh to rename the city as “Harigarh”.
Since the news of the proposal came to light in November, the debates around the politics of renaming have largely been framed around the idea that the renaming is an attack on India’s Muslim history. That the Sangh Parivar wants to change the names of cities and urban spaces which refer to the region’s Muslim past to those that (re)assert Hindu-ness in order to erase the history of Islam in India. This line of argument is grossly incomplete.
Firstly, it deposits the “Muslim” history of India in the hands of the Muslims today — reducing their civic and cultural life to an exercise of preserving India’s Mughal or Sultanate past and making them its closest associates, or worse, flag bearers. However, the ancestors of today’s Muslims were subjects under these rulers just like the Hindus and Jains were. And that is true for all monarchs and subjects everywhere. The Muslims, under the Mughals, farmed and traded and begged on the streets, or joined the court to lead more opulent civilian lives just like everyone else did under any other monarch.
The 600 years of rule by Muslim monarchs over parts of the Indian subcontinent is the history of South Asia at large. To reduce it solely to the heritage of Muslims in India creates, reinforces, and imposes on the Muslim today, the image of the Muslim ruler from whom the Hindu must now be avenged. It creates a binary in populations in contemporary India — one whose history is the Muslim past and the other, to whom it does not belong, but parts of which decide to support the Muslims in conserving “their past”.
Secondly, it reduces any resistance against renaming to an act of preserving this medieval Muslim history. This view obscures the fact that the renaming of the built environment is primarily an act of killing memory and not that of rewriting history. It is memoricide and not revisionism. Renaming towns and cities within the binaries of “us” and “them” erases the sense of belonging of the citizen to the city in the present. It displaces memory and its recall to a realm of prompts where one must constantly verbalise “Allahabad, now Prayagraj” to remind oneself and to be reminded by others of one’s own secondary status in civic life.
The act of changing the names of cities and their spaces to Hindu ones is also a ritual of cleansing and revenge in the present moment — a ritual of erasing the Muslim of today and avenging the Hindu from a past where he was defeated. Within the propaganda of the Sangh Parivar, the Muslim subject is constructed in the image of the invader who pillaged Hindu lands and robbed the Hindu of his golden past only to institute an era of despotism and inequality. Some quarters of the right-wing even believe that it was the British who “saved” Hindus from the first colonisation of South Asia by Muslims — often claiming the length of time for which India was colonised to be a thousand years.
The renaming of towns and cities is a ritual of ridding Indian geography of this image of the Muslim subject. It is a symbolic killing and not mere historical revisionism. Once Muslims are vilified by constructing their image in that of the historical invader, they can then be conveniently interrogated about their allegiance to the Indian soil for resisting the change of name. If they resist, they reinforce their historical criminalisation. If they don’t, they watch their memories reframed to those of a second-class belongingness to the city.
We must, therefore, reframe the language of resistance in the politics of renaming. We must recognise that this politics oscillates between the past and present. It uses the past to construct the Muslim subject, and then erases it in space and memory to ritualise a symbolic killing of that subject today. The resistance that Muslims present to the change of names must be understood as a resistance to this erasure of memory and the ritualistic symbolic killing of the Muslim. It is not an act to preserve a historical past, but an expression of equal claim on the spaces of the city.
The anecdote in the beginning of this article provides an insight into this phenomenon. When Aurangzeb Road was renamed APJ Abdul Kalam Road — from one Muslim name to another — the board announcing the renaming of a dusty insignificant road in Abul Fazal Enclave is not an act of preserving the history of Aurangzeb, but an opposition to the erasure of the Muslim citizen from public life. Without the recognition of Muslim agency and the right to resist the ritual of their own symbolic killing and the erasure of memory and belonging to the city, our debates around the politics of renaming are incomplete. To keep repeating facts of the grand design of history diminishes the mnemonic agency of Muslims in India today.
The writer is a graduate scholar of South Asia at University of Oxford
