In India, everything is fair game for a rename. From your local street to your city and even the country itself. Madras became Chennai, Trivandrum turned into Thiruvananthapuram.
As Narendra Modi is getting ready for the elections in 2019, an image has been doing the rounds. It lists out all the government schemes that were renamed in Modi’s tenure – 23 so far. One could read this as an example in rebranding the old as the new, but it’s also an exercise of symbolic power.
The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu studied power, in all its forms. One of the many aspects of how groups wield power is the creation and accumulation of “symbolic capital.” It implies that there is an ownership of a name; a specific identity that comes with it.
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