History me Calcutta name kaya the?
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callicat,Kolkata ,Bengal ...
When I moved from California to Calcutta in 2011, I would joke that I had merely exchanged one Cal for another. It was not technically true. Calcutta, the bustling metropolis where I was born, once the First City of the British Raj, had already rechristened itself as Kolkata in 2001.
The British left India in 1947, but they left behind quite a bit of baggage — starchy clubs with antiquated jacket-and-tie dress codes completely unsuitable for Indian weather, a passion for cricket and English and Anglicized names. Every city had streets and squares named after English viceroys and governor-generals: Clive, Hastings, Dalhousie. Soon the new government was busy renaming those roads and landmarks after Indian freedom fighters. Lala Lajpat Rai. Tilak, Gandhi. Nehru. A lot of Gandhis and Nehrus.
The author pronounces "Calcutta" and "Kolkata"
Kolkata was always called Kolkata in Bengali — derived from the name of one of the three villages said to have become the modern city of Kolkata. But the British called it Calcutta. I don't know why Calcutta rolled off British tongues more easily than Kolkata, but then I had American roommates who asked if they could call me Sandy instead of Sandip even though both names were two syllables.
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Kolkata Isn't Just The City Of Mother Teresa
In 2001 the government of West Bengal decided to officially change its capital city's name to Kolkata to reflect its original Bengali pronunciation. It didn't really affect us much. We were used to calling it Kolkata in Bengali and Calcutta in English, and we switched between both names with as much fluency as we switched between those two languages.
Other name changes were far more loaded — Bombay to Mumbai, Madras to Chennai, for example. The rejection of the British styling and the return to Indian roots was seen as erasing some of the cosmopolitan pasts of those cities, of favoring one linguistic group over another, of a rising tide of parochialism where some names tried to mark the true sons of the soil from names preferred by those who came from outside, even if that outside was just another state in India. It became an ideological statement to use one name over the other, a sort of linguistic version of planting your flag in the sand.
But Calcutta became Kolkata with minimal fuss. And for many of its residents it remained both, just as it had always been. Of course, more politically correct visitors tripped all the time, trying to carefully enunciate Kolkata and putting the stress in all the wrong places. To make matters even more confusing, some institutions stayed Calcutta for reasons best known to them. The Calcutta Electric Supply Corp. gave Kolkata electricity. We studied at Calcutta University. The elite partied at Calcutta Club in a city served by the Kolkata Municipal Corp. And if anyone revives that famous Broadway production it will never be "Oh! Kolkata!"