Tear up the maps: India's cities shed colonial names.

Yet some of the other changes take a different tenor. India has slowly found firmer footing as a nation after the tumult of partition with Pakistan and the uncertainty caused by former leader Indira Gandhi's authoritarian rule in the 1970s and '80s. In this collective exhale, new and not always inclusive forms of national and regional politics have found space to expand.

Foremost among them has been more extremist strains of Hindutva: the doctrine that India – with an 80 percent Hindu majority – is a Hindu nation and should start acting like it. Some nationalists argue it's time to strip India's place names down to the studs. "The culture of India is not 200 years old," says Santosh Gangwar, a member of India's lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha. "Our culture and heritage is more than 5,000 years old."

By this measure, he says, Delhi is Indraprasth – harking back its name in the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata. Even "India" is not beyond revision. After all, India's namesake – the Indus River – has been in Pakistan since partition. Mr. Gangwar suggests Hindustan. Others favor Bharat.

The past is not all that stirs would-be name-changers, though. The faceless forces of a more globalized future, turning India into nothing but a long succession of McDonald's and KFCs, also give pause. The switch to Mumbai in 1995 was largely the work of Shiv Sena, an ultraconservative party founded on the idea that within the state of Maharashtra (where Mumbai is the capital), Maharashtrians should have more rights than others.

"In some cases, [the changes] reflect local paranoia that they will be swept away by outsiders," says Mr. Guha.

There are shades of this discontent in Bangalore, even though the change to Bengaluru has been promoted not by right-wing politicians, but by an award-winning local writer. Forgotten amid the tumult of the New India is a different Bangalore, author U.R. Ananthamurthy laments. By some estimates, less than 30 percent of the population speaks Kannada.

"There are actually two towns here: Bangalore and Bengaluru," says Professor Ananthamurthy, noting the split between the Kannada-speaking locals and outsiders drawn by start-ups and call centers.

"The elite classes have to realize that there is also a Bengaluru," he adds, suggesting that the correct spelling should actually be Bengalooru. "The [name change] is a step towards making visitors come to terms with the place."

Occasionally, however, Indians themselves can't agree on which name and whose version of history to use. In 2000, the people of the hill country northeast of Delhi celebrated the creation of their new state – only to discover that the federal government had chosen to name it Uttaranchal.

The women and students who had lined the streets calling for a new state had united under the banner of Uttarakhand. Even the holy texts of the Hindu faith, perhaps written as early as 2,500 B.C., speak of the area as Uttarakhand.

But in a country where every state is a potential breakaway republic, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) worried that the name Uttarakhand might only encourage the state's sense of itself as separate and unique. So it settled on a new creation with no history outside the modern Indian nation, and Uttaranchal was born.

To Sanjay Kothiyal, it was nothing less than domestic colonialism. "It hurt the people as a whole that they changed the name for which people were fighting," he says.

With a different party in power, the name is returning to its ancestral antecedent. Says Mr. Kothiyal: "This is a question of pride."

• Saurabh Joshi contributed to this report.

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