Did you know about Odisha?

In Manufacturing Consent, Naom Chomsky writes of the link between power and information: the closer you are to the Bosses, basically, the more you talk about them. If you’re not up there you aren’t in the news. Reality continuously drives home to us the truth of Chomsky’s assertion. It is ironic, it is sad, it is unjust, but if you don’t belong to a set of people you don’t deserve a voice.

Today’s Times of India reports that Orissa shall henceforth be called Odisha:

The state crafted on April 1, 1936, and spelled “Orissa” in the Indian Constitution adopted in 1950, wasn’t the correct spelling of the state’s name which, in its language, ought to be spelled as it is pronounced – “Odisha”.

The BJD government, taking exception to the manner in which state’s name is spelled in Schedule I of the Constitution, advised the Centre to make the correction and the Union government has in principle agreed to do so, officials said.

and later,

a section within the state government had even suggested that Orissa’s name be changed to Kalinga or Utkala by which it was known historically. But the government rejected the proposal, saying it could trigger a controversy.

Rest in peace, Orissa.

What I want you to notice is how little publicity the change of name has gathered as compared to, say, the shift from Bangalore to Bengaluru or (need I mention) Bombay to Mumbai. In both of the latter situations an anglicisation was sought to be remedied, and a section of (anglophile?) people protested against the move, calling it unnecessary, politically guided and costly. Changing ‘Orissa’ to ‘Odisha’ has run along basically the same lines.

The Hindu, a paper I knew for its commitment to the fair representation of marginalised voices, gave it less space than it did to an article about how Jagmohan Reddy conducts five daily havans. Of course the change doesn’t really affect the poor or steal away any rights – but what is troubling is the assumption that nobody will have a problem with it, that the news of the change doesn’t warrant sufficient importance to place it, to say the very least, on the front page. Aren’t we allowing our newspapers too much leeway to guide our attention? Aren’t we letting them assume too much about Orissa’s importance – or, even more troubling, letting it reinforce our assumptions about ‘those’ people?

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