SMOKERS’ CORNER: WHAT’S IN A NAME?
In his 1984 paper, “What’s in a name?” (Journal of Southeast Asian Studies), Stanford University’s Donald Emmerson writes that “names are rooted neither in reality nor custom but express instead the power of the namer.” Emmerson was talking about how states and governments in the West name regions that were once under their domain.
Reshmi Lal, in an April 2016 article for The National, paraphrased Emmerson to understand why many governments in former British colonies changed the names of cities. For example, Lal explained the recent spree of changing the names of some cities in India as nothing more than “a symbolic gesture.”
The idea behind these changes was to replace names of cities that were named by India’s former Muslim and British rulers. But the fact is, many such cities were founded by these rulers. So renaming them in accordance with India’s ancient Hindu past requires the engineering of some convoluted histories and myths to rationalise the change.
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As Emmerson would put it, it has nothing to do with reality but rather it is an expression of power of the namer — in this case the ruling Hindu nationalist party, the BJP.
The practice of changing names of cities and roads has also been quite common in Pakistan. Markus Daechsel, in his book Politics of Self-Expression, writes that names in this context meant more than the things they were meant to designate.
Daechsel was discussing the fascination certain Indian Muslims had for giving “Islamic-sounding terms” to Western economic and political ideas. For example, in a pamphlet distributed by a group of radical clerics just before Pakistan’s creation in 1947, the authors decided to call the State Bank ‘Baitul maal.’
Daechsel writes that the urge was to do away with the Western-sounding State Bank but, in this pursuit, the clerics did not offer an immediate Urdu translation but an Arabic one to conjure up a link between Indian Muslims and ancient Islamic Arabia.
This practice of replacing names of ideas, roads and cities that have Western origins with those conjured from Arabia’s ancient Islamic past has been rather frequent in Pakistan ever since the 1970s.
Take for instance, the idea of socialism. In the Foundation Papers of the PPP, the word ‘socialism’ largely appears. The party was conceived as a socialist party in 1967. However, after being critically attacked from the right by religious groups, the party added the prefix Islamic to the word socialism. The term ‘Islamic-Socialism’ was not new, as such, having been used by scholars such as G. Ahmad Parvez and Khalifa Abdul Hakim and even by the country’s first PM Liaquat Ali Khan.
The rationale behind it was that Islam was inherently an egalitarian system and the socialism being advocated by Pakistanis was actually the socialism of the welfare state based on this egalitarianism.