‘India’, ‘Bharat’ and ‘Hindustan’ have for long been used interchangeably and have a longer history than anyone can remember. Why rake up the matter now?
(Illustration: Tanmoy Chakraborty)
New Delhi,ISSUE DATE: Sep 25, 2023 | UPDATED: Sep 15, 2023 20:21 IST
The iconic writer from Karnataka, U.R. Ananthamurthy (1932-2014), whom I had the great privilege of knowing, once quipped to me that the entire controversy over renaming Bangalore to Bengaluru—which he had proposed in 2006—was amusingly inane since for ordinary Kannadigas, Bangalore had always been Bengaluru. I suppose the same irrefutable logic would apply to the name changes of Calcutta to Kolkata, Madras to Chennai, and Cawnpore to Kanpur.