Delhi’s street-namers appear to haveleft very little room for the marking of places and events. Elsewhere, invilayat, if even a postbox has to be relocated, the locals are notified andobjections invited. We seem to elect our city councillors largely for theirname-changing prowess. And what a job they have done! Where there is alarger--historic or poetic-- point to be made, the rechristening of streetsmakes sense. Otherwise, it is, well, nonsensical. Expectedly, a large number ofroad-changes fall into the nonsense category.
Kingsway has changed nicely into Rajpath, yoking the firangi ‘Raj’ to thecause of desi state-power; Queensway is widened into a bustling Janpath. Whetherthe imperial pro-consul Curzon should have been replaced necessarily by Kasturbaor Lord Cornwallis by Subramania Bharati is an open question. Or the Duke ofConnaught by Rajiv for that matter. Couldn’t we have downsized the Duke bysimply abbreviating Connaught Place to CP? For two generations, students of DUhave called Kamla Nagar ‘K-Nags’, sundering the connection between our firstPM’s wife and this prosperous post-Partition locality. Could not the adjacentKamla Nehru Ridge have been allowed to remain the Northern Ridge?
Further west, ‘Upper Ridge Road’, which connects Pusa Road to Dhaula Kuan,has suddenly become ‘Bande Matram Marg’, for no clear reason whatsoever. Itmade sense to rename Imperial Avenue, the high-colonial road that separated theHindu and St Stephen’s colleges, after Sudhir Bose, a revered Delhi Universityteacher. But why rename Chauburja Road, where a 14th-century four-domed mosque,a rarity, had been reduced to a single-dome pockmarked structure after the 1857bombardment of the Northern Ridge, into Acharya Sushil Muni Marg?
And why did our renamers not think of changing the Lal Qila-Daryaganj Road intoDilli Chalo Marg (or even San Sattavan Marg), for unlike Subhash Bose, who onlyexhorted the INA soldiers to march on to Delhi, the 1857 rebels had actuallymarched from Meerut and wrested the city of Shajahanabad from the British?
The most recent bit of quaint name-change has to do with the sheer accident ofconstruction work. A few years ago, the house on Alipore Road (Shamnath Marg) inCivil Lines, where B.R. Ambedkar lived in the late 1940s, was acquired andturned into a museum. When the last PM came to inaugurate the memorial, directaccess to Shamnath Marg was barred because of underground digging for the metro.A side entrance was found from the adjacent road to Ambedkar’s erstwhilehouse. And, as a consequence, a small stretch, appropriately called FlagstaffRoad, for it wound up the ridge to the 19th-century Flagstaff, where the Britishhad huddled during the siege of Delhi in 1857, was renamed overnight as B.R.Ambedkar Memorial Marg. Could not the denizens of this historic city be allowedsome say in such street-matters? Could we now ask for the street-name filesunder the new Information Act, please?
This article originally appeared in Delhi City Limits, December 15,2005
