The Padma Bridge will be inaugurated soon. And already, discussions have commenced on whether it should be given a formal name. Obaidul Quader, the road transport and bridges minister, has made it known that the people of the country would like the bridge to be named after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. We will wait to see if the prime minister agrees with the idea.
Meanwhile, there is before us an entire tale of the naming of places and installations in Bangladesh and beyond it. There have been very legitimate reasons behind such naming. And there are the stories of how some people in authority have arbitrarily gone for a change of name at places, a move which did not sit well with people.
Take Chandrima Udyan, a beautiful term for the park beside the lake at Sher-e-Bangla Nagar in the nation’s capital. In BNP times, simply because the remains of General Ziaur Rahman were interred in the park (a rash decision taken by his loyalists after his assassination), the park was renamed Zia Udyan.
The good bit here is that Chandrima Udyan was restored when the Awami League returned to power in early 2009. And one of the earlier instances of renaming places in Bangladesh came through supplanting the Race Course at Ramna with Suhrawardy Udyan. In more ways than one, the renaming was a mark of the abiding devotion in which Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman held Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, his mentor in politics.
One other refreshing change came through renaming the Second Capital (a holdover from erstwhile Pakistan’s Ayub Khan regime) as Sher-e-Bangla Nagar. And nearby is Asad Gate, so named by the people once the young student activist had been shot by security forces in the course of the Mass Upsurge of 1969. Interestingly, Ayub loyalists had earlier named the spot Ayub Gate when Mohammadpur was beginning to be developed in the 1960s.
Tinkering with names has been happening in India, owing largely to the perception that the British colonial power often got the spellings and pronunciation of names and terms wrong. It is thus that Calcutta is now Kolkata and Bombay is Mumbai. But one is rather bemused when Allahabad, a name which is integral to history, is reduced to being Prayagraj.
The lesson should be obvious: That there are names which need not be trifled with -- because they have become indelibly associated with historical memory. In the United States, Cape Canaveral was renamed Cape Kennedy in 1963 following the assassination of the 35th president of the United States. In 1973, Cape Kennedy was changed back to Cape Canaveral.
Which reminds us here in Bangladesh of the chaos around the naming of airports in the country. Zia International Airport became Dhaka International Airport before going back to being ZIA. In Chittagong, the name of MA Hannan, the reputed Liberation War organizer, was removed from the airport structure by the BNP-Jamaat administration.
Subsequently a new Awami League government went for the very shrewd move of renaming Dhaka airport as Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport and Chittagong airport as Shah Amanat Airport. One can be sure these names, linked as they are to spiritual legacies, will not be tampered with.
Speaking of airports, there used to be Chaklala airport in Pakistan. Then came Benazir Bhutto International Airport, which soon was made defunct. Pakistan’s main airport is today Islamabad International Airport. In Delhi, memories of Palam airport have faded with the rise of Indira Gandhi International Airport. In Kolkata, we have Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Airport.
In Washington, Dulles Airport (after John Foster Dulles) and Reagan National Airport are destinations people travel to. Paris has its airport named after Charles de Gaulle. In Jakarta, the airport is called Soekarno-Hatta, after the country’s first president and first vice president.
There have been innumerable instances of countries being named and renamed. Gamal Abdel Nasser once went for a union of Egypt and Syria under the name United Arab Republic (UAR). It did not outlast Nasser and the two countries soon went back to their old forms. The Khmer Rouge renamed their country Kampuchea, but when Hun Sen, aided by Vietnam, took charge, the old Cambodia was restored.
We remember Czechoslovakia for the trauma it went through in modern times -- in the Second World War, in 1968 when Warsaw Pact nations invaded it to put down Alexander Dubcek’s Prague Spring. Vaclav Havel’s Velvet Revolution in 1989 brought democratic change to the country. And then the country broke into two -- the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
The African country once known as Upper Volta is now Burkina Faso. Dahomey is today Benin. Ceylon became Sri Lanka. Burma turned into Myanmar. Josip Broz Tito unified the Balkans into Yugoslavia, which was to splinter not many years after his death in 1980. Our very own Bangladesh replaced East Pakistan through a War of Liberation.
The Burj Khalifa is a testament to the leadership of the recently deceased president of the United Arab Emirates. In Lahore, grateful for Libyan support for Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had the Gaddafi Stadium become the centerpiece of the city in 1974. In Delhi, the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), the prestigious think tank, went for a slight amendment to its name, becoming the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in honour of the man who once served as union defense minister.
The Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, a universally respected institution, is a tribute to John F Kennedy. One recalls the Brandt Commission, so named after Willy Brandt, a pre-eminent political leader in what used to be West Germany. In the United States, the Carter Centre and the Clinton Foundation remain active in global affairs in the names of former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
In Britain, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has been at work for quite some years. There is the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington. In London, the cultural wing of the Indian High Commission is known as the Nehru Centre after India’s first prime minister.
In Bangladesh, Bangabandhu has been honoured through a good number of institutions being named after him. An early instance was the renaming of Jinnah Avenue in Dhaka to Bangabandhu Avenue soon after the War of Liberation. Today we have the Bangabandhu Satellites lifting off into space.
We will wait to see if the Padma Bridge is given a new name or remains the way it is, linked to the mighty river. Meanwhile, we might consider the setting up of a Tajuddin Ahmad Institute of Socialism Studies, a Syed Nazrul Islam Centre of Governance Politics, and a Dev-Karim Foundation of Philosophical Studies, after GC Dev and Sardar Fazlul Karim.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.
