FIRST Bombay became Mumbai. Then Madras switched to Chennai and Calcutta to Kolkata. Now Bangalore, India’s call-centre capital, is changing its name to Bengaluru, in the latest move to shed the linguistic legacies of colonial rule.

The change is stirring unusual controversy among business leaders, who argue that Bangalore is a respected international brand and that tampering with it is a waste of time and money.

An additional dispute has erupted over whether its pre- colonial name should be spelt Bengaluru, Bengaloru or Bengalooru. It is the latest evidence of the tension between India’s desire to integrate with the global economy and its concerns about globalisation.

Bangalore is the anglicised version of the city’s name in the local Kannada dialect and was adopted after the British took over the ancient kingdom of Mysore in 1831. Today the city is the capital of the southern state of Karnataka, where two-thirds of the population of 56 million speak Kannada.

It is also India’s Silicon Valley, home to 1,500 IT companies including the Indian giants Infosys and Wipro, and multinationals such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Cisco. So many US companies have moved back-office operations there that employees whose jobs are outsourced to India complain of “being Bangalore-d”.

Academics in Karnataka fear that the influx of workers from overseas and other parts of India is eroding the state’s rich local culture and indigenous languages. Left-wing politicians complain that the use of English benefits only the educated middle class.

H. D. Kumaraswamy, Karnataka’s Chief Minister, will respond today by announcing Bangalore’s renaming at a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of the founding of the state. H. D. Dinesh, a spokesman for the Chief Minister, told The Times. “It’s not anti-British — but it is a very emotional local issue.”

The change was proposed in December by U. R. Ananthamurthy, a prominent author who writes in Kannada and won the illustrious Jnanpith Award in 1994.

“We are fast losing our cultural plurality which is based on the innumerable rich languages of India,” he said. “Along with Kannada and its culture I will also fight for all the bhashas [dialects] of India, which are threatened in the globalising world.” He has also proposed that the city of Mangalore should change to Mangaluru, Belgaum should to Belagavi and Mysore to Mysooru. He insists that Bangalore’s new name should be spelt Bengalooru.

Critics doubt that the change will be cleared by the federal government, although Pondicherry, a former French colonial outpost, switched its name to Puducherry last month.

Others have questioned the wisdom of adopting a name said to have derived from the Kannada phrase Benda Kaal Ooru, which means “town of boiled beans”. Legend has it that a king, Vira Ballala, got lost on a hunting expedition. When an old woman offered him some boiled beans he was so grateful that he named the area after the dish she served.

NAMES AND TIMES

THE official restyling of Bangalore highlights the charged cultural and political debate over place names, Richard Dixon, chief revise editor of The Times, writes.

In the Indian context, many readers ask, for example: “Surely Bombay is known as Mumbai now?”

Mumbai is the city's official and Hindi name. For an English-language newspaper in Britain it is always difficult to know whether to stick with the Anglicised version of a place name. We have erred on the side of caution with Mumbai, preferring for now to use the more traditional Bombay, from the Portuguese Bombaim. The dilemma becomes worse as the web plays a bigger role in the newspaper’s global reach.

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