Rajnath Singh, wearing his semiotician’s pagdi at an election rally at Namsai in Arunachal Pradesh on Tuesday, made an excellent suggestion, without actually suggesting it – changing names of Chinese provinces. The defmin was actually making a point about how Beijing continuously referring to Arunachal Pradesh as ‘Zangnan’ makes the Indian state as much a Chinese territory as giving Indian names to Chinese provinces will make them ‘Indian’. But to sidestep Singh’s version of the Bard’s ‘What’s in a name?’ reasoning, we think it’s a great idea to Indianise those proper nouns ‘up there’. The exercise can jolly well start with Tibet – or, as the Chinese call it, ‘Xijang Autonomous Region’ – being named Dalailabad. Guangdong would, in the spirit of Gurgaon, be Guangram. Shanghai can be shanghaied into Bheemtalaiya, for no reason other than it sounds robust. Instead of calling Beijing ‘Peking’ again, the Chinese capital can sound rather piquant if renamed Jijingapatnam.
If the nomenklatura from the Muddle Kingdom are outraged, they can be calmly told that this isn’t about challenging Chinese territory by aggressive proper nouning, but it’s just how the world’s most populous country’s citizens will call these places. After all, the French calling Deutschland ‘Allemagne‘ and English-speakers calling it ‘Germany’ don’t threaten the Deutsche.
