FROM ALI TO HARI

Get set to rewire your mental map once again. The BJP-controlled Aligarh Municipal Corporation has passed a resolution to rename the town as 'Harigarh'.

- Prashant Srivastava

The file will now be sent to the state government for consideration. The district councils of Aligarh had passed a similar resolution in 2022 as well, but now, after the municipal corporation move, the Uttar Pradesh government is said to be seriously considering the name change.

Such an inclination would hardly be out of character for the Yogi Adityanath administration. Aligarh will only be getting in line to join a long list of towns and cities that have gone through a name change after Yogi first came to power in Uttar Pradesh in 2017. What makes it more striking, of course, is its eponymous association with the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), which got its present name 103 years ago, nearly half a century after it was born in 1875 as a child of the Aligarh Movement led by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan to bring modern education to Indian Muslims.

All that may get coloured a deeper shade of sepia very soon. Sources in Lucknow say the name change may happen before the 2024 Lok Sabha election. Aligarh mayor Prashant Singhal says the renaming has been a long-standing demand. "The proposal got unanimous support from all councillors," he says, though that claim is contested by the Opposition. "Many people tell me that before the old name 'Koil' and later Aligarh, the region was called Harigarh. We respect the people's sentiments, so are taking forward the issue," he says. Historians, though, reserve universal endorsement, many of whom see this spree of renaming as a nomenclatural erasure of any non-Hindu element in UP's history.