Thiruvananthapuram: “What’s in a name?
That which we call a rose
By another name would smell as sweet.”
This is Juliet, the star-crossed heroine of one of William Shakespeare’s most celebrated plays — Romeo and Juliet.
These oft-quoted lines convey that names do not have any intrinsic value. Still, names have been the most basic identity markers of persons, places or things since humans started living in communities.
By this logic, the passing of legislation by Parliament officially naming, or renaming, the state that has long been called ‘Kerala’ as ‘Keralam’ is significant.
The Kerala (Alteration of Name) Bill, moved by Minister of State for Home Nityanand Rai in the Lok Sabha, was passed by the House without a debate a few days ago.
It came to the House on a day when both the opposition and treasury benches were in a confrontational mood over live political issues. So, they appeared not to have much time to spare for this matter concerning the southernmost state. Even the MPs from the state, a majority of whom are from the opposition INDIA bloc, did not bother much.
Had this Bill been introduced by Home Minister Amit Shah, as was expected earlier, it would have garnered a little more attention, not because of its content and purpose but due to the mere presence of the senior minister, whose presence in the House the opposition had been pressing for.
The Rajya Sabha on Wednesday ratified the Bill, putting the final stamp of parliamentary approval.
What remains are a few routine procedures to be completed.
The Kerala Assembly had passed a unanimous resolution in 2024, urging the Union Government to formalise the proposal by bringing in a Bill in Parliament.
Be that as it may, what is interesting is that the name change has not given rise to any celebration in Keralam, as if it were just a nominal issue that did not deserve to be greeted with pomp and fanfare. Leave aside the political class, even the hyper-active cultural ecosystem has largely overlooked the occasion.
It seems that an issue over which there is a convergence of views makes a dull subject for deliberation. Even the topic-starved local media, both print and visual, showed little enthusiasm to spare some space or talk time for the matter. Some national television channels had already started calling the state Keralam before the name change was formalised.
Good Old Keralam
Keralam has always been known as Keralam in the collective memory of Malayalis. In medieval and modern literature, the land was always mentioned as Keralam, shaping the socio-cultural identity of Malayalis.
Even though Malayalam-speaking people had remained politically divided for centuries, they had been knit together by a cultural thread, which eventually came to be referred to as “Malayanma”, which broadly translates as “Malayaliness.”
The collective identity of Malayalis is basically defined by the geography they occupy, stretching up to Kannada- or Tulu-speaking areas in the north and the Tamil-speaking areas in the deep south and along the eastern flank. The Arabian Sea sets its western periphery and has served as a gateway for the ebb and flow of cultural cross-currents that played a critical role in shaping Malayali society.
In political terms, Malayalis had remained subjects of umpteen local rulers, chieftains and tribal heads for much of the time before they were packed into three separate regimes by the turn of the 19th century — British Malabar (the northern districts) and the princely states of Cochin (broadly the central region) and Travancore (the southern region).
Though the princely states enjoyed administrative autonomy to a great extent, the British regime kept a firm hold over them, especially when it came to their educational policies. Obviously, Keralam became Kerala in English textbooks, eventually making its way into official documents.
With India attaining independence from British rule in 1947, Cochin and Travancore merged into the state of Travancore-Cochin (Thiru-Kochi in local parlance), while Malabar remained part of the ‘composite’ Madras state for almost another decade. The final political integration of the Malayalam-speaking people happened in 1956 as part of the reorganisation of Indian states, with language as the basic criterion.
Despite the political division, the idea of a United Kerala had been leveraged by socio-religious reformers and trailblazers of the freedom movement. So, well before the integration of the state, both the Congress and Communist parties saw the entire Kerala region as a single unit for all practical purposes.
Though the first organisational unit of the Communist Party in the state was formed at a meeting held in a north Kerala village, activists from Travancore and Cochin had played a critical role in shaping the movement across the state.
Even after the formation of the state on November 1, 1956, it continued to be referred to as ‘Kerala’ in official documents. However, all anglicised place names were reverted to their original spelling and pronunciation, including Trivandrum to Thiruvananthapuram, Cochin to Kochi and Calicut to Kozhikode.
