Renaming Without Reform: Memory Politics, Symbolic Power, and the Poverty of Cosmetic Decolonisation
Abstract
The contemporary surge in renaming cities, streets, monuments, and even welfare schemes is increasingly presented as an act of historical correction or cultural decolonisation. This essay argues that such practices, when detached from institutional reform and material redistribution, function primarily as symbolic politics rather than transformative governance. Drawing on Indian and international scholarship, the paper situates renaming within a global history of memory control and demonstrates how, in the Indian context, it increasingly operates as a majoritarian project of cultural homogenisation. Through a comparative analysis of India, Europe, and Africa, the essay shows that renaming alone neither alters development trajectories nor resolves structural inequalities. Instead, it risks substituting spectacle for substance, erasure for understanding, and identity performance for social justice.
1. Introduction: The Seduction of the Symbol
There is something deeply unsettling about the ease with which nations claim to have healed themselves through acts of renaming. A city, a road, a railway station, a public scheme—once rechristened—becomes evidence of moral progress. As observed recently in The Tribune, the past does not loosen its grip because a signboard changes. History persists not in names alone, but in institutions, hierarchies, social relations, and everyday practices of power.
This essay interrogates the assumption that renaming constitutes decolonization or development. It asks three interrelated questions:
1. What historical and political purposes does renaming serve?
2. Does renaming alter the material conditions of people’s lives?
3. Why has renaming increasingly replaced substantive policy reform?
2. Renaming as a Political Technology
Scholars of memory studies have long argued that naming is never neutral. Urbanonyms—the names of streets, cities, and public spaces—function as tools of orientation and as symbolic inscriptions of power (Azaryahu 1990). They encode official history into everyday life, turning movement through the city into a repeated act of remembrance.
Eric Hobsbawm famously described such practices as part of the “invention of tradition”—rituals designed to establish continuity with a selectively constructed past rather than to engage critically with history.1 Renaming, in this sense, is less about truth than about authority over memory.
In India, post-Independence renaming initially targeted colonial symbols—Kingsway became Rajpath, Queen’s Way became Janpath. This phase was tied to a genuine rupture with imperial rule. However, the contemporary wave differs fundamentally: it targets internal histories, especially those associated with Muslim rulers, Persian-Arabic linguistic traces, or syncretic cultural formations. Since Independence, successive Indian governments have utilized "symbolic power" to forge a post-colonial identity—most notably when recently the bust of Edwin Lutyens in Rashtrapati Bhavan was replaced with that of C. Rajagopalachari. While such acts signal a break from imperial aesthetics, they often function as a placeholder for material redistribution.
3. From Historical Correction to Cultural Policing
The renaming of Aurangzeb Road after A.P.J. Abdul Kalam is often defended as a moral act—replacing a “tyrant” with a “national icon.” Yet, as Romila Thapar cautions, historical judgment must distinguish between critical evaluation of policies and wholesale vilification of historical personhood.2 Moral simplification collapses history into caricature.
Urban historian Tapati Guha-Thakurta demonstrates how monuments and names are repeatedly re-signified to serve contemporary nationalist projects, often masking political intent as cultural revival.3 In this process, renaming becomes an act of symbolic purification, premised on the idea that certain histories contaminate the nation’s present.
As Milan Kundera observed, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Selective forgetting, however, is not healing—it is discipline.
4. Comparative Perspective: India, Europe, Africa
Table 1: Renaming and Its Outcomes – A Comparative View
Region | Historical Context | Nature of Renaming | Accompanying Reforms | Outcomes |
India | Post-colonial, multi- religious society | Erasure of Muslim/ colonial names; renaming of schemes | Largely absent or cosmetic | Symbolic polarization; no clear development gains |
Europe (post-1945) | Post-fascist/ post- communist transitions | Removal of totalitarian symbols | Institutional reform, welfare expansion | Democratic consolidation (Judt 2005) |
Africa (post-colonial) | Anti-colonial nation- building | Renaming cities and streets | Often limited redistribution | Persistent inequality despite symbolic change (Mbembe 2001) |
In post-war Europe, renaming was accompanied by constitutionalism, welfare states, and accountability. As Tony Judt notes, symbols mattered only because they were embedded in deep institutional reform.4
In contrast, many African states renamed cities but retained colonial economic structures. Achille Mbembe argues that without material redistribution, symbolic decolonisation merely rebranded elite power.5
India increasingly resembles the latter trajectory.
5. Renaming Schemes: When Language Replaces Policy
A significant escalation in India is the renaming of existing welfare schemes rather than designing new ones. This marks a shift from governance to performative politics. Programmes addressing poverty, nutrition, or health are rebranded, while structural determinants—informal employment, agrarian distress, underfunded public health—remain unresolved.
George Orwell warned that political language often “makes lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” Renaming schemes creates the illusion of innovation without the burden of outcomes.
Economist Amartya Sen reminds us that development is the expansion of substantive freedoms—not symbolic ownership of the past.6 A renamed programme that fails to reduce hunger is not progress; it is administrative theatre.
6. Assimilation Versus Amputation
Civilizations endure by absorbing contradictions, not amputating them. India’s historical strength lay in its layered identities—linguistic, religious, cultural. The attempt to impose a purified past disregards how cultures actually evolve.
As Hannah Arendt argued, regimes obsessed with spectacle often replace political responsibility with symbolic acts, producing motion without movement.7 Renaming becomes a substitute for reform.
7. Does Renaming Change Development Trajectories?
There is no empirical evidence that renaming improves employment, healthcare, education, or living conditions. What it reliably produces is political mobilization through grievance. Cultural resentment becomes a resource to mask policy failure.
The energy invested in renaming is energy not invested in institution-building. The obsession with the past often signals discomfort with the present.
8. Conclusion: Change the Rules, Not the Name
Nations do not progress by repainting signboards. They progress by dismantling inequality, expanding rights, and strengthening institutions. Renaming, when divorced from these goals, is not decolonization—it is cosmetic nationalism.
History cannot be healed by erasure. It can only be understood, debated, and learned from. Until governance moves from symbolic conquest to material justice, renaming will remain what it largely is today: noise in place of reform, memory politics in place of development, and spectacle in place of substance.
Footnotes
1. Hobsbawm, E. and Ranger, T. (1983): The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University Press. ↩
2. Thapar, R. (2000): Cultural Pasts, Oxford University Press. ↩
3. Guha-Thakurta, T. (2004): Monuments, Objects, Histories, Permanent Black. ↩
4. Judt, T. (2005): Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, Penguin. ↩
5. Mbembe, A. (2001): On the Postcolony, University of California Press. ↩
6. Sen, A. (1999): Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press. ↩
7. Arendt, H. (1958): The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press. ↩
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