 "Not Jim Corbett, but there are certain corners of India whose names need to be 'decolonised' for culture's sake")
Devil’s Advocate is a rolling column that sees the world differently and argues for unpopular opinions of the day. This column, the writer acknowledges, can also be viewed as a race to get yourself cancelled. But like pineapple on pizza, he is willing to see the lighter side of it.
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Contending history is a national pastime that many engage in for different reasons these days. Because we are that vain and unengaged by things more meaningful, we perpetually view history as a wrong that must be righted. It kind of says something of our prospects in the present and those for the future that we tend to lean, so intimately and so ferociously, on such exercises.
When it was suggested/rumoured that Jim Corbett National Park would return to its previous name, Ramganga National Park, understandably there was fury and criticism. In the general roll call of development and governance, renaming schemes and ‘yojanas’ accomplishes nothing. But in a strictly cultural sphere, there are some impending exceptions.
Some streets, chowks, and bazaars of India that could do with a change of name, not because they might purport a certain politics or right what many believe is wrong, but because it is what history, in a cultural sense, demands.
My hometown – Shimla - is known not for its Indian present but for its British past. It takes pride in still calling certain British structures with British names – Gorton Castle, Bantony Castle, Scandal Point, The Ridge – because it helps prospect an image of a place so alien, it is unlike any other in India. It is what allows the place its veil of non-conformity, its ability to assuage the visitor that it is indeed, an escape, a journey to a place that is un-Indian, and therefore a refuge from the rest of the country. Other than the British buildings, which let me admit are regal and stunning, there is always language, that carefully constructs this image of otherness. Streets and buildings are calling cards for a place, memories that last lifetimes. Like pins, they are what memory uses to map a moment that the heart or mind wishes to recall through life. If a place is teeming with British structures, named still after British men, they would naturally give way to a colonial history. Go to a Mussoorie or an Ooty, even places in Lucknow and Kolkata, and you feel no different.
Nobody is arguing that these infrastructural wonders are not colonial leftovers, but in their continued cultural relevance, they have obscured, not only that which existed before but also what came after. For the longest time, while living and growing up in Shimla, I was not aware that Hindi literature’s greatest modernist Nirmal Verma lived here. His home is tucked away in a corner of the city, remembered but hesitatingly. There was no sign that the painter Amrita Sher-gil called this town home for a sizeable part of her life. That artist Jagdish Swaminathan and Satish Gujral trekked through the jungles here, writing Indian art’s foremost chapters. In contrast, it is well established through historical anecdotes online and elsewhere that Rudyard Kipling briefly stayed and wrote in Shimla. Even Rabindranath Tagore’s summer home here is decrepit, castle of smoke, invisible to the person on the street. Not because he or she does not want to know but because our streets are still suffering from hangovers they would rather hang on to.
History, most people forget, is not just a subject, but a lived thread of moments and experiences. Each monument or factoid we encounter during the course of our lives, becomes real when perceived, or felt, rather than mugged or learned. And not everyone, in fact most people, are averse to make the extravagant journey it takes to both learn and unlearn certain things in life. In that context, a handful of our cities and towns are evidence of not what history states, but also what it has hidden, and has the potential to reveal. I am to this day perplexed that my school curriculum in Shimla included not a single story by one of the greatest writers who had called town his home. It does not invalidate Verma’s stature to those who know his work, but it does scupper the chances his life and his work have of being discovered in the place he has actually written about.
None of this is to say that we argue over what constitutes a historical wrong, or we politicise the exercise by suggesting not what is historically, culturally just but what is politically, diplomatically redemptive. Let us also not view this as erasure, but only recalibration of relevance and histories that continue to be seen as ‘alternate.’ Apply logic and not the emotion.
Jim Corbett’s contribution to the efforts of conservation and documentation of wildlife in this country dwarf the pretence of a many a minister who has his or her name on some state property or the other for no reason whatsoever – except the obvious one. But the near universal view that renaming is just chauvinistic imposition of a pompous new standard is probably knee-jerk. Some of these, should they ever be suggested, make sense. To decolonise the mind, and better still, improve its appreciation of a more intimate history that had we known existed, we would have celebrated, we must decolonise spaces and streets we mutually, and often unknowingly, reference as home. Maybe because they are.
Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.
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