Changing name from West Bengal to Bangla: Mamata’s desperate populism or revival of state pride?

Illustration by ThePrint team.

The West Bengal assembly unanimously passed a resolution Thursday to rename the state Bangla.

A similar proposal by the Mamata Banerjee government to raise the state’s stature in the alphabetical list was previously turned down by the Narendra Modi government in 2017.

ThePrint asks – Changing name from West Bengal to Bangla: Mamata’s desperate populism or revival of state pride?

Leapfrogging from West Bengal to Bangla won’t bring any real progress

Sandip Roy
Author and feminist

There’s no point in holding on to the ‘West’ in West Bengal when for most of us ‘East Bengal’ is just the name of a football club. The name change was long overdue. The confusion was whether it would be ‘Banga’ or ‘Bangla’ or for one confounding moment ‘Paschimbanga’, which would have been entirely pointless.

Those who think that calling the state Bangla will erase the history of Partition should be more worried that our sense of history is so fragile. The history of Partition should be part of textbooks, not a name. This is not about erasing history, but accepting it and moving on. We cannot live our lives in the rearview mirror. A state in eastern India with ‘West’ in its name has always seemed a geographical anomaly to an outsider.

Mamata Banerjee understands Bengali pride very well and loves positioning herself as the guardian of Bengali culture, even if that sometimes means Rabindrasangeet being played at traffic signals. The name change to Bangla is certainly part of her symbolism politics but it’s hardly likely to set the Hooghly on fire. In Bengali, it’s often referred to as Bangla anyway.

We should not read too much into the state formally wanting to become Bangla. West Bengal has lagged in many aspects over the years but that’s not because it came at the alphabetic tail-end of the states of India. Leapfrogging from W to B might be an alphabetic advance but let’s not confuse it with any real progress.

Bangla is by far the best option, and for good reasons too

Devalina Mookerjee
Publisher, researcher, teacher, Jadavpur University

What’s wrong with West Bengal being called Bangla? I think it’s a crisp, clean name with a ring to it, and quite happy connotations for those who grew up around here. But that’s my opinion, and it’s always wise to consider counterfactuals, so let’s look at the other options.

Option 1: Bongo (noun, hand drum). No, please. All those phonetic ‘o’s remind me of well-meaning north Indian colleagues popping over to my desk at work to grin and say ‘rosogolla’ or ‘ami tomakay bhalobasi’. Some tongues don’t roll the ‘o’ particularly well.

Option 2: Poshchimbongo. No. Besides the omnipresent ‘o’ issue, perhaps, almost half a century after the 1971 Partition of Bengal, it’s time to move on by not constantly signalling it in our name.

Option 3: Bengal. Gets points for being familiar, but Bengal was what the British named us. It’s bad enough that the British created the Indian middle class out of thin air to be interpreters between themselves and the ‘millions’ they governed. What is worse is that we hold onto the nomenclature for so long after we successfully threw them out.

Which brings us back to Bangla. The Bangla language is astonishing in its range and clarity of expression across the spectrum, from high literature to cuss words. The word itself is in Bangla, which is a definite plus. And really, I could think of many other things more upsetting than being named after a people’s drink. Be happy, Joy Bangla!

Neither in cricket nor in government does one like to be a tail-ender

Sandip Ghose
Marketing executive and commentator

Although there may be an attempt to retrofit logic to the proposal for renaming West Bengal, the genesis of the idea was straightforward pragmatism. In its present form, West Bengal comes up last whenever states are listed in alphabetical order, which is usually the case at all central government meetings. That means the West Bengal representative gets to present her/his case right at the end.

Neither in cricket nor in government does one like to be a tail-ender, especially a firebrand chief minister with ambitions in national politics. Imagine the finance minister at the GST Council waiting for his turn to speak after the BIMARU states and the new kids on the block, such as Uttarakhand.

At a subliminal level, however, there may be some element of regional chauvinism at play. But, to say it has got anything to do with the wounds of Partition would be a stretch.

The generation who would long for their villages in East Bengal have long passed. Besides, few felt they were worse off across the border because West Bengal was always considered relatively more advanced economically and culturally with greater commercial activity and larger number of premier educational institutions.

Over the last 40 years, as West Bengal’s economic fortunes went southwards and politics took a toll on academic standards in once-prestigious colleges, there has been a rise in regionalism. Perhaps, this was to compensate for the increasing feeling of isolation from the mainstream.

This was palpable to such an extent that some eminent political analysts said the CPI(M) was able to rule for 30 years because it was perceived more as a regional party than a communist party. No wonder it was replaced by another strong regional party – the Trinamool Congress.

So, renaming West Bengal as Bangla will only reinforce that Bengali pride.

 

Bengal’s intellectuals argued name change will help erase bitter memory of Partition

Rajat Roy
Senior journalist and political analyst

Finally Mamata Banerjee government has passed a resolution to change the name of the state from West Bengal to Bangla, exactly what the earlier Left Front government had tried to do.

In 1999, the Jyoti Basu government passed a resolution in the state assembly that proposed to change the name West Bengal to Bangla. Sovandeb Chattopadhyay, the only TMC MLA in the assembly, had opposed it, reflecting leader Mamata’s position at that time. However, the move fell flat as it did not get concurrence from the NDA government at the Centre.

After coming to power, the Mamata government passed a resolution in the state assembly on 29 August 2016 to have three different names that would replace West Bengal —
Bangla in Bengali, Bengal in English and Bangaal in Hindi. The Centre rejected the proposal saying the state could not have three different names.

In going back to Bangla, the Mamata government’s justification echoes that of the Left Front government. Basically, both the Left Front and the Trinamool Congress viewed it as a question of tactics. In meetings where the Centre and states interact, the chief ministers of various states are invited to speak in alphabetical order. West Bengal always comes last, thereby losing the attention of other participants. By changing the name to Bangla, the state wanted to come up in the alphabetical order.

But as the proposal was doing rounds for the last several years, the debate developed in other dimensions too. People like historian Barun De, writer Sunil Gangopadhyay and CPI(M)’s Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee argued that with the advent of Bangladesh as a sovereign country the name West Bengal for a state became redundant, and they welcomed the change of name to Bangla as a positive move to erase the bitter memory of Partition.

Compiled by Neera Majumdar, journalist at ThePrint