Mapping history

History gives us many things. Besides the stories of heroes and villains that fascinate us and provide grist for movie makers and writers of weighty novels, history gives each of us a sense of perspective.

It tells us what has gone before, what mistakes people made, and what we can learn from those mistakes. It also tells us our past, as in the many factors that shape who we are today.
I find history in strange little things. In place names and road signs and in the clothes we wear and the accents we speak in. It’s not true only in India, but relevant to any part of the world. Any nation, people, tribe, or individual is the sum total of the
history of his region.

That, I believe is what makes us different one from the other, and in a metropolis like Mumbai, the mix of cultures and histories makes for a slice of humanity that could well represent the world as seen under a microscope.

Take any city. Street names tell you so much about its past. Mumbai is full of examples of this. The Butcher Street and the phanaswadis, the Rampart Row and Bhendi Bazaars are eloquent and, despite their present state, speak stories that kindle the imagination of anyone who wishes to daydream about the city as it must have been not so many decades ago.

Or Pondicherry, which tells a very different tale from all the other parts of India, with their oh-so-British street names. The rues in Pondicherry, transport you by the very cadences of their names to the world across the English Channel from the land that the rest of India still holds traces of. The French wrought iron gates, the
wooden doors and large courtyards are as European as the buildings of colonial India are British.

So too part of Goa’s charm is in the winding roads that are dusty with sand blown from the beach and the swish of palms that hide the tiled cottage roofs of a people both proud and individual. The names of the towns and villages, sometimes not easily pronounceable by the visitor to this idyllic paradise, hark back to the time when Portuguese mingled with Konkani and other local dialects to create a mix all its own. The food, the drink, the music, the very air is rich with the history of the space that is
today fast changing to join the mainstream of development that flows through the rest of India like a ravaging wave.

And beyond all this is the unique fact that history is recorded in
layers… as across India, roads with names left behind by the westerners who lived and ruled over the different parts of this country, run alongside or are bisected by a Mahatma Gandhi Road or a Lal Bahadur Shastri Road… Signposts for anyone who wishes to peel the layers and make his own notes of what must have been.

That is the magic of India. And a magic that could well disappear in a politically motivated move to play to a gallery that does not quite understand the implications of the tune they applaud.

Thus renaming colonies in Goa as Shanti Nagar or Rajat Nagar, or changing a road dedicated to a Frenchman to a local minister’s name is , in my eyes a step towards obliterating the history of the place. It is like the move that tore off the ethnic clothes of the Chinese and dressed them in shapeless trousers, men, women, children et al.

Variety, assimilation, a virtual Din Ilahi of cultures has been our heritage and our strength as a nation. By rubbing off the evidence of this, and bringing everything down to a soulless adherence to “Indianness”, is taking just that Indianness away from India.

It’s something we need to ponder over, before agreeing to lose!