Any nationalist can visit Allahabad as a shrine. The fourth session of the Indian National Congress in 1888 was hosted in this city, following which it became a centre of India’s freedom movement, and Anand Bhavan, Jawaharlal Nehru’s ancestral home, was donated to the Congress as its headquarters.
Besides the Nehrus, other Congress nationalists from the city included Mangla Prasad, Muzzaffar Hasan, Kailash Nath Katju, Lal Bahadur Shastri, and Purushottam Das Tandon. Allahabad proved to be the urban cradle of four of India’s prime ministers ~ Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, and Lal Bahadur Shastri.
But for a government that wants to unshackle the country from its Nehruvian past and its anxiety to ensure a Congressmukt Bharat, might insist that the city is renamed as Prayagraj. The Congress association with the city can itself be a trigger for the RSS and the BJP-led NDA to seek a name change. To view a cosmopolitan city such as Allahabad through a decidedly Hindutva prism is an affront to its spirit. The recent proposal to change its name is of a piece with the erratic tradition of rechristening names of old cities that is, sadly, passed off as communis opinion.
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Not that names of cities have not been changed before. The trend has progressed from the classical to the modern. Like for instance the renaming of the famous city of Constantinople as Istanbul in 1930. Sometimes the change was effected on the plea that the colonial connection needed to be dropped.
The other two compelling factors were the express need to buttress nationalism or merely to provincialise as an expression of populism. Mumbai had undergone a series of changes; it was referred to Mombayn (1525), Bombay (1552), Bombain (1552), Bombay (1538), Boon Bay (1690), Bombaim (Portuguese 1666) before finally being renamed as Mumbai in 1996. Paying tribute to Mumba or Maha-Amba, the patron goddess of the city, might be one reason but Bombay was dropped because it sounded too anglicised.
An almost similar reason prompted the change of Calcutta to Kolkata. If British rule is so risible, the reason for the transition of Madras to Chennai has not been fully explained if one reflects that the name Madras predates the arrival of the British in India. It was reportedly derived from the term ‘Madraspattinam’, a fishing village situated north of Fort St George. The exercise of changing names of a historical place should always be carried out judiciously not the least because to change the name of a city is to divest it of its past moorings and associations.
History posits Allahabad as a city that is surrounded by sites dating back to ancient times. To its east lies Jhusi, ancient Pratisthanpur, the capital of the Chandras; to its west lies a medieval Kara fort, a testimony to the Rajput Jayachand’s influence. Recognising the commercial potential of the city and the social and religious importance of its rivers, Akbar elevated Allahabad to the status of a Mughal suba or provincial capital.
He even built a fort overlooking the Yamuna. The presence of an Ashokan pillar testifies to the influence of the Mauryas. The Marathas had plundered Allahabad before the British declared it their capital of the North-West provinces in 1834.
The British decision to set up a High Court there soon turned the city into a thriving centre for legal studies, as well as the home to a leading university. However, the British moved their capital to Agra a year later. The sepoys captured the city during the Revolt of 1857.
When I visited Allahabad last year, I was eager to take a dip at the junction of the two rivers. The traditional belief is that that the two visible rivers are joined at the confluence by a third invisible river, the Saraswati. I really enjoyed the experience.
A motor-driven boat took us to the sacred bathing (snana) ghat from the foot of the mighty fort that Emperor Akbar had built. Two separate boats, conjoining one another, had one wooden platform under the water at the place of the confluence for the bathers to stand. It is a deep confluence and one has to hitch oneself lower between the boats, stand on the floating platform pegged on to the two boats, and take a holy dip. Back to the boat, one has to change clothes with makeshift curtains in place. The view from the boat was a glimpse of eternal India, and not necessarily a Hindutva India, of a kind that one can easily experience in this city that is considered to be holiest of the holies to host the Kumbha Mela.
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I did not have occasion to see the mythical akshaya vata, known to be the “indestructible banyan tree”. In Hindu mythology, this is a banyan tree that existed before the creation of the universe and will be the only creation, according to sage Markandeya, to survive the cosmic dissolution (pralaya) at the end of the cosmic cycle.
It is this single tree, under which lay the god Krishna as an infant. The tree is now enclosed within what was once Akbar’s fort. It was yet another aspect of confluence as it conjured up the image of a secular emperor protecting a shrine that was venerated by the Hindus.
The syncretic tradition of Hinduism has somehow been overlooked by the present government. History lends scope for subjective reflection, especially by those in power. In some school textbooks, Savarkar has been accorded pride of place in the freedom struggle, not alongside Gandhi and Nehru but above them.
Subhas Chandra Bose is considerably marginalised. By just changing names, the present dispensations in Uttar Pradesh and the Centre cannot turn their back against India’s Islamic (or British) past, as the huge architectural programmes undertaken in Agra, Delhi, Lahore, Ajmer, and Allahabad testify to the wealth, artistic talent, and administrative acumen in Mughal India. Prayag is the traditional name of Allahabad and will forever be.
The writer is a Kolkata based commentator on politics, development and cultural issues.