Students and others born much after India got independence are often confused why a state in eastern part of the country is named as West Bengal. Only old-timers know that since western part of pre-independence undivided Bengal came to India, the state was named as West Bengal, and East Bengal turned into East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). To remove unnecessary confusion from minds of students and others, prefix West should be removed from the name of the state. Even name Pashchimbanga once suggested by the state government is not correct because again it has Hindi pre-fix Pashchim in the suggested name. To avoid abbreviations like UP for Uttar Pradesh, MP for Madhya Pradesh etc, states should be named in the single word.
The distorted spelling of country’s capital Delhi should also be rectified as Dehli which means entrance. Already neighbouring countries like China and Bangladesh have changed spellings of their capital cities from earlier Peking and Dacca to Beijing and Dhaka respectively. Though spellings of many other cities like Jalandhar, Shimla are already changed, Bareilly and Meerut still remain to be re-spelt.
Union Government should also adopt the single name Bharat for the country abolishing British given name as India, in tune with an unanimous resolution once passed by UP state-assembly. Otherwise, also it is senseless to have two names for a country. Countries like Sri Lanka and Myanmar have already done away with such British legacy when these countries are no more known as Ceylon and Burma.
Madhu Agrawal
(The views expressed by the author in the article are his/her own.)
