India’s decision to change the name of the southern state of Kerala to Keralam has led to demands for the renaming of other regions, including the national capital of Delhi, to reflect local languages and pre-colonial identities.
Earlier this week, prime minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet gave the green light to officially rename Kerala to Keralam – the name used in the local Malayalam language by almost 35 million residents of the state.
Modi said the decision “reflects the will of the people of the state” and is “in line with our efforts to strengthen the connection with our glorious culture”.
In Malayalam, “kera” means coconut tree, and “alam” is land – the name translates to the “land of coconut trees”. The state, popularly known as “God’s own country” for its palm-fringed backwaters and beaches in the south and lush hill stations and plantations in the north, produces nearly 45 per cent of India’s coconuts.
The move is seen largely as an effort to gain votes just months before assembly elections in the state where Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been trying to make inroads for years.
Over the years, Modi's government has been changing colonial names, claiming it is to help India move past what it has termed a mentality of slavery.
The movement began with the renaming of states and cities from their English-derived names, such as Bombay becoming Mumbai, Orissa becoming Odisha, and Madras being renamed Chennai.
This week there was controversy when a bust of British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens was removed from the Rashtrapati Bhavan – the official residence of India’s president, formerly the Viceroy's House – which he designed in the 1920s along with many other New Delhi buildings including India Gate. The bust has been replaced with that of the first and only Indian Governor-General, Chakravarti Rajagopalachar, as part of what the current president called “series of steps being taken towards shedding the vestiges [of a] colonial mindset and embracing, with pride, the richness of India’s culture.”
Chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan, who has pushed for renaming Kerala since 2023, had said the state should be known by the name its people use. The left-party alliance leader was backed by the opposition party chief in the state, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, who argued that it highlighted the state’s cultural roots.
“The demand for a united Keralam for the people who speak Malayalam as their mother tongue has been strong since the days of the freedom struggle,” he had then said.
Shashi Tharoor, MP from the state capital of Thiruvananthapuram for the Congress party, welcomed the change with a caveat.
“All to the good, no doubt,” Tharoor wrote on X. “But a small linguistic question for the anglophones among us: what happens now to the terms ‘Keralite’ and ‘Keralan’ for the denizens of the new ‘Keralam’?”
“The name Kerala is often viewed as from the colonial era and subsequent official documentation," Sree Prakash Purayath, general secretary of the Indian Association Sharjah (IAS), told the UAE-based outlet Khaleej Times. Several Gulf countries have a sizeable population of Keralites as expatriate workers. Since the 1960s, remittances from the Gulf have been the backbone of Kerala's economy, making up a third of its gross domestic product.
The proposal will next be introduced in parliament, and once passed, Keralam will become the state’s official name in English-language records.
However, the renaming of one state has left the chief minister of another in the east seething. It has separately also led to mounting calls for renaming Delhi.
Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of the eastern state of West Bengal, claims that Kerala’s proposal has been accepted because there was an understanding between the state’s “CPM [Communist party of India] and BJP”.
Banerjee, who has been trying to get her state renamed since being voted to power in 2011, claimed that her efforts were rejected by the government because of its anti-Bengal stance.
“They disrespect the icons and visionaries of Bengal. They only use the word 'Bangla' during polls to get electoral benefit. That is why they have not given the approval to rename the state,” she says.
Bengal, along with Kerala, will head to the polls this summer.
Banerjee says she had repeatedly tried to rename West Bengal as “Bangla” and hoped it would happen once the federal BJP government is voted out of power.
The chief minister said the bid to rename West Bengal was made to avoid being called last in alphabetical order at official meetings. She argued it was often given the floor only in the latter half, when attention had waned.
Meanwhile, a BJP MP has written to the federal home ministry, requesting that the national capital, Delhi, be renamed to Indraprastha – a city cited in the Hindu epic Mahabharata as the designated capital of the brotherly quintet of the Pandavas.
Praveen Khandelwal says the name Indraprastha reflects the city's “original civilisational identity”.
He says historical texts and archaeological findings suggest that present-day Delhi was once Indraprastha, according to NDTV.
In 2023, invites sent by Indian president Droupadi Murmu calling herself “President of Bharat” for a dinner on the sidelines of the G20 summit stirred speculation that the government may be about to change the country's name.
Given the Hindu-nationalist ideology of Modi’s government and its push for increased use of Hindi, critics responded to the use of Bharat in the invites by suggesting the government was pushing for the name to be officially changed. In English, the South Asian giant is called India, while in Indian languages it is also called Bharat, Bharata and Hindustan.
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