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Sarma’s zealous baptism is not concerned with such nuances. Nor with the criticism that his government must set sights on higher goals than polarisation. Ease of doing business and all is fine, but have you looked at the leaps India has taken in the ease of changing names index? It’s as if there is a secret Ministry of Renaming whirring away in the crypts of any and every government, unseating Mughal emperors from street-names, scrubbing Urdu from public view and avenging the slights of history — with the stroke of a pen. Nothing is spared, neither cities nor railway stations, not even poets, as the short-lived posthumous baptism of Akbar Allahabadi reveals. Some might argue that what Uttar Pradesh thought yesterday sets the agenda for the rest of India. But Assam’s chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma is not one to be upstaged. He has announced a portal that will crowd-source names of places across Assam that are “contrary” to the state’s “culture and civilisation.”
The first suggestion has come from the chief minister himself. A hill that overlooks Guwahati has been put on notice. Its name, Kala Pahar, derives from a Muslim general of the Bengal Sultanate, who is believed to have desecrated the Jagannath temple in the late 16th century, and attacked the Kamakhya temple. There’s a simple binary in that tale — of aggression and victimhood — that plays into the politics of divisiveness. BJP leaders, for instance, have decried AIUDF’s Badruddin Ajmal as Kala Pahar. But the legend of Kala Pahar, as it survives in Odisha, Bengal and Assam, might resist being turned into a Hindutva pamphlet. While in some accounts, he is an Afghan plunderer and iconoclast; in other accounts, he is a Hindu man who falls in love with a Muslim woman and is so humiliated by Brahmin priests that he takes his fury out on the temples.
Sarma’s zealous baptism is not concerned with such nuances. Nor with the criticism that his government must set sights on higher goals than polarisation. For all its history of unrest, Assam has always prided itself on its syncretic culture. The Ministry of Renaming might not agree, but that’s a hill worth dying on.
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