Erasing a Name

What is a name? Most would say a title or a specific reference to something. When asked, one word kept coming up: identity. Everything has a name, but everyone may not agree on what it is, primarily concerning the city of Hyderabad, India.

"Just suppose people who live in London and tomorrow people are going to say okay we are going change London's name to Spain. Then how will they feel? It's the same [thing]. It's how I would feel,” said Sharanya Gaddam Reddy, a Hyderabad resident.

It's hard to fathom for Hyderabad's residents, but a name change like the one Gaddam Reddy describes above could actually happen. There is currently a fierce debate on the issue.

Hyderabad is one of India’s biggest cities. It is located in the country's South in a fairly new state, Telangana, formed in 2014. Hyderabad has been involved in some controversy surrounding its name, particularly on whether it should be changed to Bhagyanagar.

To fully understand why there are calls for a name change among politicians, we have to look back at where both names come from. The story isn’t rooted in simple name-calling; it’s much deeper, showcasing division that some allege has been planted, consolidated, and maintained by the government.

India’s ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has been accused of inciting religious violence and furthering Hindutva, a political ideology promoting Hindu nationalism. The party is trying to get more support in the south, especially in Telangana, due to a recent collapse of the local party, Bharat Rashtra Samithi.

“Earlier, Hyderabad was Bhagyanagar, and in 1590, Quli Qutb Shah came to Hyderabad, he changed Bhagyanagar to Hyderabad. At that time, many Hindus were attacked, many temples destroyed. We are planning to rename Hyderabad,” said current BJP Legislative Assembly member (MLA) of Telangana, Thakur Raja Singh, to ANI. “In Telangana, BJP will win in majority, and then our first aim will be developing the state, and second objective will be renaming Hyderabad as Bhagyanagar.”

BJP did, in fact, not win a majority in Hyderabad. Also, the historical claims made by Singh are largely refuted by history scholars, though there still remains discourse on the subject.

Some Deccan historians would beg to differ with Singh’s claims. Professor Salma Ahmed Farooqui said, “We have records of history, and looking at that [information], Bhagyanagar does not come up…French historical records show that the gardens outside Golconda were referred to in Urdu using the word bag. Hence, the name Bagnagar.”

Farooqui teaches at the H.K. Sherwani Centre for Deccan Studies at Maulana Azad National Urdu University. Bagnagar eventually transformed into Bhagyanagar and has been wielded by politicians.

“There is no material evidence for the name Bhagyanagar, and that’s generally accepted among historians,” added Farooqui.

Growing up in Hyderabad, I, too, would also hear legends related to Bhagyanagar. Tales of the sultan of Golconda and founder of the city, Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah’s love for a woman named Bhagmati, but they were always framed as folktales and not tools of division.

A fourth-generation resident of Hyderabad and self-proclaimed “proud Hyderabadi,” Deepak Gir, also relates to the sentiment of hearing many fables of the city’s origin. Still, he sees no issue with the name and believes it represents the city’s secularism and rich heritage.

“I am no expert in history, so I cannot make any assertion as to what is true, but as a family that has lived here for generations, we have imbibed the many diverse cultures in more ways than one. We have actively married into almost all the major communities of India, and our food and dress habits are anything but Hindu,” Gir stated. “Once I said I was from Hyderabad, only to have a friend butt into the conversation saying, “he's not from Hyderabad, Hyderabad comes from people like him” implying the culture of this city owes its genesis to many of the old families who made this city their home from its early years, of which my family is one.”

The quest to change Hyderabad’s name is not one of historical accuracy; it instead follows a trend from the BJP to remove instances of Mughal and Nizam rulers. All over the country, cities have seen their names change to non-Islamic-leaning names, for example, when Allahabad became Prayagraj.

Laad bazaar in Hyderabad is world renowned for lacquer bangles, many of which are colored Saffron. /Vishu Reddy

Name changes reflect a larger issue in India with erasing or refocusing history. It is a phenomenon known as Saffronization, which is “the recontextualization of the country's history through public space, social practice, and education,” according to Dr. Aditi Bhatia, professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

"Saffron is a color that has long been associated with Hinduism and its deities. It is also the color the BJP uses to represent itself," said Bhatia. “It’s not coincidental as many politicians in the BJP position themselves near deities like Hanuman and Ram.”

The National Council of Educational Research has taken steps to change school curricula since 2017 when bouts of content were removed and the policy initiatives of Prime Minister Narendra Modi were highlighted. Most recently, they have removed chapters related to the over 200-year rule of the Mughal Empire.

In the history textbook from my days in school, a line reads, “Mahatma Gandhi was convinced that any attempt to make India into a country only for Hindus would destroy India.” This line is absent from current editions, removing the negative connotations associated with Nathuram Godse, the Hindu nationalist assassin of Gandhi who was in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The RSS is a right-wing paramilitary group that is presently closely associated with the BJP.

According to many experts, like Vinay Lal, a UCLA professor, the BJP party represents a Hindu Rashtra. Rashtra meaning state in English. “If you have any government promoting this sort of idea of Hindu nationalism, minority groups, like the Muslims or Sikhs, will be at a disadvantage,” said Professor Lal.

India’s ruling party has used public knowledge to consolidate and maintain its power, manifesting itself in the renaming of cities, buildings and streets. As mentioned before, this is also done by changing the wording of history textbooks. Scholars have also documented this trend.

Dr. Sayan Dey, a professor at Bayan College in Oman, wrote a publication on Saffronization and how the BJP weaponizes this public knowledge, writing, “The Hindu Puritan image is connected to a fictional pre-colonial high-caste Hindu India that the BJP has successfully imagined and executed by introducing ancient Hindu texts…within the mainstream public spheres.”

The attempts to change Hyderabad’s name seem part of an intentional ignorance of the region’s historical rule by different dynasties with different cultures. To many people in Hyderabad, this notion of religious supremacy goes against their multicultural identity.

“For me, my family has been here for generations. I was born and brought up in Hyderabad. In every sense of the word, I am a Hyderabadi,” said Reddy. “We are very, very, very proud of our city and our unique culture. That is why we have such amazing religious tolerance here.”

The ideology of saffronization has roots in colonial times during the Indian independence movement. The RSS was active during this time and played a pioneering role in propagating the anti-colonial mindset, but it was also intertwined with Hindu nationalism. This idea of decolonization had a resurgence in 2014 when the BJP started using it, according to Dey.

“[decolonization] became a public word. Prior to that, decolonization was very much restricted to classroom theories…within very elite guarded four-walled academic locations,” said Dey. “What is happening under the BJP is a very distorted, fictionalized, and extremely propagandist version of decolonization.”

The BJP made decolonization accessible, although in a distorted sense. It allowed the Indian public to engage with a concept primarily held out of reach, except for the highly educated. The BJP marketed the idea of restoring India to a pre-colonial glory, but according to scholars like Dey, it promoted “converting India into a high caste Hindu fundamentalist nation.”

There has been a widely observed phenomenon among the Indian diaspora where there is strong support for Modi and the BJP. This is confusing, considering that, especially in the United States, the Indian diaspora is highly educated. I asked Dey about why people may think this and whether he noticed it, too. He offered insight into why this might be happening.

“The urge to maintain cultural roots is always way more prevalent in the migrant community than the people back in the country, so every day, you won't grapple with this tension of whether you can maintain your cultural roots or not,” said Dey. “Indian migrants experience a type of othering from society that makes them more patriotic.”

In 2019, Modi and President Trump held a rally in Dallas, Texas, called “Howdy, Modi!” 50,000 people attended, the vast majority of whom were ethnically Indian. President Trump even made comparisons between the U.S.-Mexico Border and the India-Pakistan border. Even though scholars like Lal and Dey drew comparisons between Trump and Modi while talking to them, it does not translate to the diaspora. Despite 47% of Indian Americans supporting Modi, six out of ten would still vote Democrat in the U.S. elections, according to a survey from the Carnegie Endowment in 2024.

So, how does changing a city's name factor into this? According to academics, it is a type of intellectual sanitization.

“It is an oral element of sanitization; you are peppering your surroundings with words because you can consistently feed the people with ideology, answered Dey. “Just imagine 100 years from now, people won’t even read that there was a place called Allahabad. It was always Prayagraj.”

As someone who was raised in Hyderabad, it feels like people are actively trying to erase the city’s history. Before ending our conversation, I asked Dey what he would say to people who say things like a name change is inconsequential.

“It’s not just erasing a name. You’re erasing a whole archive of narrative that was associated with it. You erase a whole historical, cultural, ideological archive with that. Which is exactly what they are looking to do,” said Dey.

Younger residents of the city feel a similar tie to their identity that older ones do. Sohini Kasu, a Hyderabad resident in her twenties, ardently believes Hyderabad is a place where everyone comes together, regardless of religion or ethnic group.

"The word Hyderabad is the identity. It's the culmination of so much history and culture, it signifies a historical revolution," said Kasu. "Changing it would betray the people who have worked to create a city that's a place for everyone."

Knowledge is among the most important tools we can wield. It is power that we can gain, but if our ability to receive it is stifled, then we lose the ability to fight against those who weaponize it. We become victims to the false narrative and facts we are allowed to possess. So, no, it is not just a name. It is an identity central to my understanding of being Hyderabadi and being Indian.

“The reality I can speak of is that this city named Hyderabad actually represents the secular spirit of India,” stated Gir. “No Hindu or Muslim can rise to suggest it was built entirely by them. It's too many people from too diverse a range of cultures that makes Hyderabad what it is.”