The hilsa fish of West Bengal's Hooghly River was a poor cousin of the great hilsa cruising down the mighty Padma in the east. The mango never tasted as good as the mango in the orchards in the east. In West Bengal, there was still great nostalgia and yearning for the lands left behind. For many, the "West" in West Bengal was an emotive reminder that this state had once been partitioned by the British, that thousands had lost everything as they fled from one side to the other, as the eastern wing of Bengal became East Pakistan and eventually Bangladesh in 1971. This time, however, there was more resistance. To add to the geographical confusion of hapless tourists, we were a West Bengal located in the eastern part of India. That's long been the independent country of Bangladesh. 4 by simply dropping the "West." It actually made sense in practical terms. The state's chief minister decided to leapfrog to No. West Bengal came alphabetically dead last in the long list of Indian states. Just this August the entire state of West Bengal decided to rechristen itself. Now an even more dramatic name change is underway. It was a sort of pick-and-choose Anglicism. The Mitras who had become Mitters stayed Mitter. The Thakurs still called themselves Tagore. And if anyone revives that famous Broadway production it will never be "Oh! Kolkata!"Īlso, many Kolkatans whose names had been Anglicized retained those surnames. The elite partied at Calcutta Club in a city served by the Kolkata Municipal Corp. To make matters even more confusing, some institutions stayed Calcutta for reasons best known to them. Of course, more politically correct visitors tripped all the time, trying to carefully enunciate Kolkata and putting the stress in all the wrong places. And for many of its residents it remained both, just as it had always been. It became an ideological statement to use one name over the other, a sort of linguistic version of planting your flag in the sand.īut Calcutta became Kolkata with minimal fuss. The rejection of the British styling and the return to Indian roots was seen as erasing some of the cosmopolitan pasts of those cities, of favoring one linguistic group over another, of a rising tide of parochialism where some names tried to mark the true sons of the soil from names preferred by those who came from outside, even if that outside was just another state in India. Other name changes were far more loaded - Bombay to Mumbai, Madras to Chennai, for example. We were used to calling it Kolkata in Bengali and Calcutta in English, and we switched between both names with as much fluency as we switched between those two languages. In 2001 the government of West Bengal decided to officially change its capital city's name to Kolkata to reflect its original Bengali pronunciation. The woman was questioned for hours and was held under detention at the airport lounge in the upper arrival area for two nights before she was sent back on a Biman Bangladesh flight to Dhaka.Goats and Soda Kolkata Isn't Just The City Of Mother Teresa It is also under investigation if she had planned to make a fake Indian passport while applying for a visa from India,” said an airport official. Moreover, it was also unclear why she was applying for a Shengen Visa to Austria from India and not from her own country. “But the immigration rules do not allow one to undertake any official work while travelling on a tourist visa. Airport officials said the woman’s husband worked in Austria and the woman wanted to settle with him and so she was even slated for a visa interview at the Austrian Embassy in Delhi. They had a flight booked for Delhi, but Rahman was stopped by immigration officers after her statements regarding the purpose of visit were inconsistent. Travelling on a tourist visa, Tabassum Rahman came to Kolkata on a Biman Bangladesh flight on Tuesday, where her husband was waiting. Kolkata: A Bangladeshi woman spent two nights at the Kolkata airport terminal under detention over visa-related issues before being deported back to Bangladesh on Thursday morning.