There is no question about it, Bengalis in India are justified in wanting to stop calling their state West Bengal. Paschimbanga was the new consensus name, trumping alternatives such as Bangla, Bongodesh and our personal favourite, Bongo Bhumi. Why be forced to twist your tongue around 'Oishte' Bengal.
One way out, of course, would have been to simply 'Bengalify' the spelling and declare the birth of Oishte Bangaal, in the same way that Simla became Shimla and, somewhat earlier, Cawnpore became Kanpur. Local pronunciation prompted Asom, Puducherry and Odisha to become the new names of Assam, Pondicherry and Orissa respectively. Or, perhaps, these were merely reversions to their original names. After all, these were the names that were changed to suit the pucca British tongues that could not get around delicious Southasian sounds like pur, baad, uru and ganj, the most common suffixes denoting place names. So the process of reclaiming these fruity resonances has been gradual but steady, in many cases accompanied by chest-thumping nationalism and sub-nationalism – devotion to the motherland and local culture of course being equated with the volume of resources poured into the paperwork and signboard-painting that accompanies each change.
Name dropping has been a Southasian pastime ever since roads were roads and chowks were chowks, the guiding philosophy being that if you cannot rub shoulders with bigwigs, at least attach their names to sundry streets. Shrugging off the colonial legacy has also meant a slew of new names, with roads, bhavans and airports being named after patriots of various hues. Most assassinated leaders in the Subcontinent have at least one airport named after them, if not a couple of squares, streets and convention centres.
The veneration of certain leaders can also create considerable confusion for guidebook writers and common citizens trying to simply find their way around. In many Indian cities, everything seems to be named after one Gandhi or another, ranging from Mohandas to Indira to Rajiv, doubtless to be followed eventually by Sonia, Rahul and maybe Priyanka. In Bombay – Mumbai, that is – one heads from Chhatrapati Shivaji Airport to Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminal to Chhatrapati Shivaji Chowk to museums, halls, stadia, roads – all named after the famous warrior king, who gallops on his rearing steed and brandishes his sword menacingly from countless statues around the city.