I like my name; it perplexes a lot of people. In chagrin, they keep asking me my "real" (caste) name so that they can then classify me socially and culturally. I like my children's names: one is Shefali, the other is Sikandar. My nieces are Irfana and Saraswati-Nandini. Hindus and Muslims, all in the same family! Confusion compounded. I love it. But then we like this momentary anonymity; you have to make the effort to know us. Conventionally speaking, our names give away little.

The process of naming is rarely accidental and never trivial. To begin with, it involves considerable reflection and deliberate choice from a host of possible options. Even the retention (or dropping) of the family name is often deliberate in its intention to maintain (or obscure) a genealogical link. Names serve as identifiers, of who you are, and how others should know you within a larger social constellation. They can, therefore, be important indicators of the choices individuals make concerning group or ideological membership.

It is in acknowledgment of the evidence concerning social and cultural identities that a whole industry of historians study names. Through a record of names kept at pilgrimage sites in medieval Europe, scholars reconstructed historical changes in the composition of families, matrimonial customs and inheritance patterns. Within the Islamic world, names have been studied as indices of religious and ideological identification, the process whereby individuals internalized new ideas or cosmologies over time, and were prepared to make a public acknowledgment of their beliefs.

The history of place-names is as interesting for what it has to tell us about the manner in which people chose to identify their own and others' areas of residence. In India, the region of Delhi has witnessed considerable demographic change through the years, and the city has come to incorporate neighbourhoods dating to different periods in the past. Some settlements are still known by their old names: Bhogal, Yusuf Sarai, Shaikh Sarai, Hauz Rani, Lado Sarai. Some abbreviation and corruption of old names has also taken place: Bagh-i Jud became Jod Bagh, Khirki masjid became Khirki, Badarpur Sarai became Badarpur, Malcha Mahal became Malcha Marg. Perhaps the most interesting process was that of renaming: Ghiyaspur was transformed into Nizamuddin; Siri into Shahpur Jat; Inderpat into Din Panah and then the vague Purana Qila; Kingsway into Raj Path; Queensway into Jan Path; and now Connaught Place, if some people had their way, will be renamed Rajiv and Indira Gandhi chowks.

If we recognize the implication of "naming" as a means of identifying properties which people believed rendered a place socially and culturally significant, then the swath of names from different historical epochs provides a unique entry point into the study of Delhi's history. Hauz Rani or more precisely Hauz-i Rani is interesting, because it is a later thirteenth century name for the site and carries the Perso-Arabic element Hauz, meaning reservoir, together with the Hindi title of Rani for queen. The "Rani" must have either constructed or patronized the reservoir before the Sultanate occupation of Delhi, sometime perhaps in the twelfth century. The thirteenth century chronicles do not provide us with the original name for this tank, but in incorporating "Rani" in their version of the name, the authors of the Tabaqat-i Nasiri and the Fawa'id al-Fu'ad honoured the memory of the Hindu queen. Subsequently, one of the southern gates of Muhammad Shah Tughluq's city of Jahanpanah (The Refuge of the World) was named the "Hauz-i Rani Gate". The city gate and the reservoir were significant enough as centres of local identification to provide the name Hauz Rani to the village settlement established in their neighbourhood. Areas which possessed local significance for a variety of different reasons -- hauz's, bagh's, tombs, or sarais -- and remained stable, if insulated centres of habitation over a long duration of time, sometimes kept their original names. Other areas were not so lucky: the Bagh-i Jasrath near the Hauz-i Rani, disappeared very early from historical and popular memory.

Names were also subject to corruption, especially when changes in the demographic composition of a region introduced new residents, who had little regard for the features believed to provide uniqueness to an area. Thus, for the fourteenth century disciples of Sayyid al-Hujjab, the presence of their teacher and his hospice on the Mehrauli-Badarpur road (near the Qutb minar), rendered the area significant. Their village was therefore named after him. When the original inhabitants were driven out by succeeding Mewatti and Jat migrants through the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, the new residents had little attachment to the old shrine of the saint. The old structures were dismantled and built upon by the later Hindu migrants. In the absence of its original raison d’être, there was nothing to stop the name of the village from evolving from Sayyid al-Hujjab, to Sieud Lujab in 1807 and into its current version of Saidlajab. In a predictable denial of historical change, not merely did the villagers believe that they were the primordial residents, but that their version of the name of the village dated back into antiquity. Through this process of renaming and re-identification, new claims to lands and residence were legitimated. Sayyid al-Hujjab and the original residents of the hospice might just as well have never existed.

The corruption of an original place-name sometimes involved a variety of people not all of whom belonged to the local neighbourhood. The differing names applied to an area provides a valuable insight into the contradictory perceptions of people concerning the significance of the same site. A good example is Delhi's first Jami Masjid, better known today as the Qutb mosque. This mosque underwent construction and reconstruction at various times during the late twelfth, thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. At the time of construction the mosque was uniformly described in the epigraphs and Persian chronicles as the "Masjid-i Jami" (the congregational mosque), and the Qutb was merely referred to as the "Minar". In the Tabaqat-i Nasiri, a chronicle written in the mid-thirteenth century, the Sultanate city of Delhi was called the "Qubbat al-Islam", or "the Sanctuary of Islam", a name which was perhaps also ascribed at a later time to the congregational mosque itself. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, if not earlier, the minar was popularly referred to as "Qutb sahib ki lath", or the staff of the sufi saint Qutb al-Din Bakhtiyar Kaki buried in nearby Mehrauli. The popular cosmology in its fully developed form was wonderful. The sufi saint [Qutb al-Din] Bakhtiyar Kaki was a qutb, the axis, who protected the world from disorder, and this symbolism was articulated in the mosque which was the "sanctuary of Islam" where the minar itself represented the saint as the axis and stabilizer of the universe.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, scholars regarded much of this popular cosmology surrounding the Jami Masjid as superstitious nonsense and sought to discover the "real" name and meaning of the mosque. They concluded that the minaret was first constructed by Qutb al-Din Ai-Beg, and it should therefore be eponymously named after him. They argued that the reference to Qutb al-Din Bakhtiyar Kaki in the "Qutb sahib ki lath" was a corruption, originating from a false etymology. These scholars also concluded that "Quwwat al-Islam" or "the Might of Islam" was the authentic name of the mosque. From a purely positivistic perspective there was no evidence -- epigraphic or documentary --that could support their conclusion. But in the interpretation of history, where Muslims were homogenized into a composite group, all uniformly militant, aggressive conquerors, proud of their iconoclasm, it seemed natural that Delhi's first congregational mosque should celebrate the "Might of Islam". Ironic as it may seem, it was scholars who corrupted the popular version of the name "Qubbat al-Islam" into "Quwwat al-Islam", all the while suggesting that it was their research which had discovered the original name of the mosque. It was a fateful christening, and supported by the weight of scholarly opinion, it was internalized as "truth" by subsequent generations of students. In this process of [re-]naming however, local residents played little role. In fact their understanding of the significance of the Jami Masjid was completely ignored. It was the manner in which a national history was being written, and the direction from which the events in its past were being interpreted, that determined not merely the meaning of the monument, but also its new name.

The end of colonial rule, partition, and the rapid growth in the size and population of the capital, also introduced a frenzy of naming. Post-partition migrants sought to preserve their identities in their Punjabi baghs, Lajpat and Malaviya Nagars, Tagore and Chittaranjan Parks. New colonies of the upwardly mobile, with verdant visions of the future were established: Green Park, Mayfair Gardens, Panchsheel Park and Vasant Vihar, promised lands of plenty. Segregated communities identified their residences as Jamia or Ambedkar Nagars. These were names which reflected the often contradictory and competing "identifiers" which pulled the nation's citizens along different paths. As housing and residential committees searched the scriptures for auspicious names and Janakpuri, Greater Kailash and Saket were established, a different composite identity of the Hindu nation also received popular support.

In contrast to these trends, the state attempted to socialize its citizens along secular, socialist ideals. History and the media consolidated the image of a free India, the culmination of an epic "nationalist struggle", a transition through fire which united the people of the country, and transformed them all into patriots engaged in the making of their motherland. The euphoria of freedom was greeted by the symbolic removal of names from public sites which honoured erstwhile colonial masters. The process of renaming sites after individuals from Indian history was an expansive moment marked by considerable diversity in the selection of heroes: Asoka and Teen Murti, Aurangzeb and Shivaji were all accommodated within Delhi. In the post-independence xenophobic mood of searching for an indigenous identity and self-reliance, the historical lineage of the Indian nation had to erase the memory of "foreigners" who had subverted the country's independence.

The historical genealogy of the nation culminated with the country's latest heroes; the freedom fighters who had brought India to its "tryst with destiny". The ascriptive qualities of these nationalists coincided in one way or the other with the values which were seen to be central in the constitution of the new nation. These were people regarded as martyrs, one and all; they were principled fighters, either non-violent or eventually propelled to violence by grave injustice; they were constructive social workers, not merely dismantling an old regime but providing the moral inspiration for the construction of a new country; their private and public lives were models for all. Men were the responsible wage earners, public citizens and the patriarchs of the home; women were always supportive wives or even better, nourishing, protective mothers, the makers of the heroes of the infant nation. The iconography of India's past was mapped out in the streets of Delhi. If in the past Indians had been "led" to freedom by their heroes, their memory guided the residents of Delhi in the present. There was no 5th Avenue or Main Street in Delhi; instead you took Lala Lajpat Rai Road, into Zakir Husain Marg, took a left at Kasturba Gandhi Marg, and reached downtown.

Genealogies, however, are always prone to challenge and change. Much as the representation of India's ancient past came to be disputed by the fundamentalist Hindu nationalists in the present generation, more contemporary heroes also had to be celebrated to legitimize succession within the collateral lineages of the ruling elite. Until the 1960's there was no major controversy in the choice of the heroes of the "freedom struggle". The Congress party claimed a lineage which went back into 1885 and incorporated the largest chunk of heroes. And since the "good fight" was for a common cause, carefully screened "outsiders" were embraced as spiritual brothers within a polyheaded movement.

With the passage of time this was harder to accomplish, and certainly by 1969, with the split in the Congress and the imposition of Emergency, even the Congress party was utterly divided about who it regarded as its heroes. Today, despite the occasional massive electoral support, no political party represents the aspirations of the majority of Indians. This is not for want of trying. Huge political rallies, massive cardboard cutouts of political figures, sell the virtues of one or the other contender.
From a purely academic perspective therefore, it is intriguing that in an election year, a political party with a bare majority in Parliament, should seek to alter the name of Delhi's central commercial complex. It has been proposed by some members of the Congress (I) that Connaught Place named after the Duke of Connaught, should be renamed as the Rajiv and Indira chowks after the two prime-ministers and the political party's self acknowledged, martyred idols. This brazen attempt to gain electoral support was necessitated as the Congress (I) faced dissension and split within its ranks. The incumbent prime minister, Narasimha Rao has consistently argued that the death of Rajiv Gandhi did not mark a hiatus in the rule of the Nehru-Gandhi family; the charisma of the original dynasts devolved upon the current leader and his supporters. The proximity to the ideals and the vision of Rajiv and Indira Gandhi motivated the "loyalist" faction of the Congress (I) to transform Connaught Place into a shrine immortalizing their beloved, martyred leaders. By exclusion, the dissidents within the party have no moral claims to leadership, a spiritual succession which ignores them as it traverses time into the glorious epoch of the freedom movement.

The Congress (I) also claimed that it was acting within the purest traditions of the freedom struggle in renaming Connaught Place and removing the vestiges of colonial heritage in the capital. But there were other residues of British presence in Delhi which it could have exorcised. The choice of Connaught Place as a site to make a "patriotic" statement was not accidental. In the post-liberation era of the nation's economy, this commercial complex, more so than India Gate or Rashtrapati Bhawan, is regarded as the centre of the city. The centrality of this area in the financial and social life of the metropolis, makes for a perfect shrine; the Indira Gandhi International Airport cannot compare. Once the commercial hub of the capital is named after Rajiv and Indira Gandhi, mother and son can be fêted as the ultimate protagonists of the modern nation, the champions of a new economic order of liberalization which they helped to usher. The fact that the political party and the nation share a common parentage only confirms the Congress (I) credentials to be the historical representators of the nation through the different stages of its chronology. Although the irreverent may blaspheme and suggest that it is apt to name a bazaar after Congress politicians and their money making proclivities, succeeding generations of Delhites would be distant and ignorant of the actions of a dictator and the incompetence of her son. The Congress (I) is banking upon this eventuality, and (to complete the awkward metaphor) see it as a long term investment in the furtherance of their political interests.
The spasmodic reaction of seeking native identities is part and parcel of a larger representation of history indulged in by all nations. The emergence of a nation implies the making of an imagined community hopefully contested over by differing ideologies. Connaught Place was one part of a larger theatre of New Delhi where the British dramatized their rituals of power, and rationalized their historical rights to lead the natives into a universe enlightened by their rule. Today, much like the village of Hauz Rani, the name Connaught Place has remained as a legacy after the disappearance of the power and symbolism of British colonialism. With the changes in the city of Delhi and the sky line of Connaught Place, the commercial complex bears little resemblance to the historical vision of the original constructors. The imposition of a new name upon Connaught Place is similar in many ways to the transformation of "Qubbat al-Islam" into "Quwwat al-Islam", a corruption of the name deliberately and authoritatively imposed upon the old mosque by outsiders. The new name, "Might of Islam", altered the symbolism of the monument and negated a history through which the local people had understood the mosque as the "Sanctuary of Islam". These were not "academic" revisions in nomenclature of limited arcane interest; it reconstituted a history of the past which validated the interpretation of two homogenous communities in a perpetually hostile relationship.

In the case of Connaught Place, even if the name survived through the years without corruption, it was enriched through accretion. A large number of people also call the commercial complex "C.P.", an acronym which had its origins in elite usage but which gradually gained a larger public currency. Like the village of Sayyid al-Hujjab known today as Saidlajab, "C.P." keeps its tenuous links with the past without carrying the historical baggage of the original name. Many residents of Delhi may regret this development, and feel that "C.P." (and Saidlajab) is a vulgarization of the original name. But at least it is part of a democratic tradition to arrive at consensual names for public spaces. In the middle ages a popular imagery had incorporated Delhi's old Jami Masjid within the saint Qutb al-Din Bakhtiyar Kaki's mystical domain and transformed the minaret into his staff, "Qutb sahib ki lath". The rejection of the popular name and cosmology was carried out without consideration of local, and if you wish, "vulgar" sensibilities -- but with tragic consequences. It is precisely this subversion of the popular, democratic sentiment by the process of renaming through administrative fiat which is a colonial exercise. And it is not the presence of Connaught Place, but the renaming of the area as Rajiv and Indira Gandhi Chowks which marks the survival of colonial traditions of governance, the desperate attempts of an unstable government to gain a history by converting a public space into a shrine for its heroes.