This book is the first of its kind to chart the terrain of contemporary India’s many place names. It explores different ‘place connections’, investigates how places are named and renamed, and looks at the forces that are remaking the future place name map of India.
Lucid and accessible, this book explores the bonds between names, places and people through a unique amalgamation of toponomy, history, mythology and political studies within a geographical expression. This volume addresses questions on the status and value of place names, their interpretation and classification. It brings to the fore the connections between place names and the cultural, geographical and historical significations they are associated with.
This will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of geography, law, politics, history and sociology, and will also be of interest to policy-makers, administrators and the reader interested in India.
Foreword
1. Place names
2. Nations names
3. Names of the subnational units: States
and union territories
4. Sanskritization of place names
5. Persianization of
place names
6. Englishization and Anglicization of place names
7. Nationalism
and place names
8. Democratization of place names: Parliament debates the
names of the states and union territories of India
9. Placenism and future
place names
Bibliography. Index.
Anu Kapur is Professor of Geography at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, India. She is Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, India, and Senior Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. In 2012 she received the Amartya Sen Award for distinguished social scientists from the Indian Council of Social Science Research, New Delhi.
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