NAME CHANGERS MAY NOT BE GAME CHANGERS

COLONIALISM is something we need to live with—at least in memory.

- MADHAVAN NARAYANAN

And the memories might persist in bittersweet ways and spawn delicious ironies at times.

"What's in a name?" asked William Shakespeare. The Bard of Avon might have been surprised by Bollywood's response. Vishal Bhardwaj's trilogical tribute to the litterateur changed his plays' names to much acclaim. Othello was adapted as Omkara, Hamlet as Haider, and Macbeth became Maqbool. Each of these films manages to convey the essence of Shakespeare's deeply human perspectives to a distant, post-colonial audience in a language and ethos alien to the original playwright, precisely because the director manages to make viewers from another culture relate to the core of the works. Name changing was a part of the effort.

The politics of renaming re-emerged last week as the Union home minister announced that Port Blair would be renamed Sri Vijaya Puram, raising cheers in some islands of humanity and jeers elsewhere. The new name's signal of shedding the colonial baggage seems appropriate enough.

But name changes are not necessarily game changes.

The government renamed the capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands because Tamil king Rajendra Chola had used the archipelago as a naval base to launch an attack on Sri Vijaya, as a part of modernday Indonesia was once called. It's ironic when a decolonisation effort takes a name from a campaign linked to what looks like a colonisation effort by an ancient ruler.