Ministry confirms historical revision of previous historical revision is distinct from original revision and represents new historical revision with different historical justification
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
NEW DELHI, INDIA — The Ministry of Culture announced Wednesday a proposal to rename a major New Delhi thoroughfare that was renamed in 2021, noting that the 2021 renaming had restored a pre-colonial name but that archival research commissioned since the 2021 renaming has established that the pre-colonial name used in 2021 was itself a later name applied during the Mughal period, and that the actually original name, predating the Mughal period by approximately four hundred years and documented in what the Ministry describes as “recovered vernacular historical sources,” would be more accurately reflective of the road’s authentic historical identity, making the proposed renaming “a correction of the correction” and therefore distinct from both the colonial name and the 2021 Mughal-era replacement.
The Renaming History
The road in question, which carries an estimated 180,000 vehicles per day and whose name appears on approximately 14,000 official documents, 240 registered businesses, the GPS databases of eleven major navigation services, and what the Delhi Traffic Police estimates is “a substantial number” of handwritten delivery instructions maintained by courier networks that have not yet updated to digital systems, was known by its colonial British name from 1912 to 2021, renamed to a Mughal-era designation in 2021 as part of a broader decolonization initiative, and is now proposed for renaming to what the Ministry calls its “foundational pre-Islamic indigenous designation.”
The Ministry’s 2021 renaming was accompanied by a press release describing the Mughal-era name as “the authentic pre-colonial identity of this important artery, restored to honor India’s civilizational heritage.” The current proposal’s supporting document describes the Mughal-era name as “a later imposition from the medieval Islamic period” that, while “historically significant,” is “not reflective of the road’s deepest indigenous identity,” a characterization of the same name that the 2021 press release celebrated as historically authentic and the 2024 document describes as historically insufficient.
Administrative Implications
The All India Institute of Address Management, a body that does not exist but whose functions are performed across four ministries and two departments that do not formally coordinate, estimates that the 2021 renaming generated approximately P2.4 billion in administrative costs across the public and private sectors, covering document reprinting, signage replacement, database updates, GPS map corrections, and what a national courier association described as “six months of deliveries going to wrong addresses because drivers’ muscle memory was ahead of the new names.”
A third renaming, the association’s director told the The Hindu, would generate comparable costs, which the Ministry said was “a secondary consideration relative to the importance of historical accuracy and civilizational pride,” a position the courier association said it “respected in principle” while noting that civilizational pride did not cover the cost of resprinting 14,000 official documents or the three months of misdelivered parcels it anticipated during the transition period.
Historians Are Divided
Academic historians contacted by this publication offered responses ranging from support for the historical principle to skepticism about the specific evidence. Professor Radhika Chopra of JNU’s Department of History said the recovery of pre-Mughal vernacular names was “a legitimate area of historical scholarship” and that if the archival evidence was robust, it represented a genuine contribution to understanding the subcontinent’s pre-medieval urban geography.
Professor Arjun Mehta of Delhi University’s History Department said he had reviewed the “recovered vernacular historical sources” cited in the Ministry’s proposal document and that they consisted of a single fourteenth-century manuscript held in a private collection whose provenance had not been independently verified, and that the Ministry’s characterization of this as establishing a historical name with four hundred years of precedence was “an enthusiastic interpretation of limited evidence.” He said he had communicated this to the Ministry. The Ministry had thanked him for his input. The proposal had proceeded.
What Happens Next
The renaming proposal must pass through a Delhi municipal committee review before taking effect, a process the Ministry said typically takes six to eighteen months. The municipal committee has historically approved Ministry renaming proposals. The 2021 renaming was approved in four months. The delivery networks are watching the committee calendar. The GPS companies have been notified. The 14,000 documents have been informed of nothing yet because official communication of a proposed renaming of an already-renamed road is, the Ministry confirmed, “a communication requiring careful drafting.” The draft is in progress. The road carries 180,000 vehicles per day. They do not know what it is about to be called. They are driving on it anyway. They do not have a choice. It is the only road there.
Opposition MPs in Delhi have described the proposed renaming as “a distraction from governance priorities” and questioned whether the Ministry’s research budget, which funded the archival discovery, could have been allocated to “matters with more immediate public benefit.” The Ministry responded that historical accuracy and immediate public benefit were “not competing values” and that restoring indigenous place names was itself a public benefit of a civilizational character that transcended immediate practical concerns, a position that the courier association said it understood philosophically and that it nevertheless needed the Ministry to understand was going to cost them money they did not have. The Ministry said it would work with relevant departments on a transition support framework. The framework has not been developed. The committee review begins in six weeks. The GPS companies are waiting. The road, for now, has the name it was given in 2021. People are still adjusting to that one. Several businesses still have the 2012 name on their letterhead. Nobody has said anything about it because the 2024 update is coming and at a certain point you stop updating until the situation stabilizes, which it shows no current sign of doing.
Historically accurate at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine.
Also renamed at The Onion | Waterford Whispers | The Daily Mash
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/india-government-renames-road-renamed-three-years-ago-new-delhi/
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