I grew up in a small neighborhood in Bangalore called Wilson Garden. I always thought it was an odd name - very British-sounding - for a suburb in an Indian city, where many neighborhoods either end with the suffix ‘nagar’ meaning ‘area’ (Jayanagar, Indiranagar, Rajajinagar), or ‘halli’ meaning village (Marathahalli, Chinnapanahalli, Kodihalli).
But indeed, many Indian geopolitical entities like cities, neighborhoods, parks, even roads have retained the name given to them by the British government pre-Indian independence in 1947. When I’m home I regularly meet my friends at Commercial Street, take my dog for a walk at Cubbon Park or go shopping on Lavelle Road. And I think Bangaloreans have seamlessly adapted to this double identity that the city holds, with remnants of the country's colonial past intertwined with its regional denominations. Sometimes it's just a matter of convenience: many of us still refer to the city as Bangalore, although the city's name was changed to "Bengaluru" in 2007 to match the way the name is said in Kannada, the state's official language (and my mother tongue).
These name changes have happened across the country ever since independence. They're a way to reclaim the diverse identities of India's many regions. I scraped Wikipedia using WebScraper to compile a list of cities, their old names and new, and the year their name was changed. Some did not have the year, so I had to manually input it in. And then I cross referenced when the name was changed to what local political party was in power at the time, and manually inputted that as well. Here's what I found:
Most name changes happened under the Indian National Congress government. This makes sense: the Congress rose from what was India's first modern nationalist anti-colonialist movement, they were the party in power right after India took its independence. Of the 29 name changes that happened under the Congress, 25 took place less than 10 years after independence.
The more recent name changes, however, are not a push towards decolonization, but towards Hindu nationalism. The Bharatiya Janata Party, which is the ruling party in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh and in the center, changed Allahabad to Prayagraj in 2018. Officials said the reason for the change was that they wanted to restore the city's ancient identity as a site of pilgrimage for Hindus.
Here are the states where most name changes happened. My home state, Karnataka, is in the lead here, with 12 name changes, all of which took place in 2007. Bangalore changed to Bengaluru. Mysore changed to Mysuru. Likewise, in other states, cities were re-spelled in the transliterated form of the regional dialect as opposed to the transliteration of the way the British preferred to pronounce city names. In Tamil Nadu, Conjevaram became Kanchipuram, and in West Bengal, Calcutta became Kolkata.
But many old names persist. I attribute it to a national sense of stubborness towards change. Many still refer to Mumbai as Bombay, for example, a name whose origin can be traced back to the port city's Portuguese colonizers. They named the city 'Bom Bahia' or 'Bombaim' which means 'the beautiful bays.' High Courts in different cities still go by the city's old name, like 'Bangalore High Court' in my city, or 'Madras High Court' in Chennai.