West Bengal may be renamed Bengal

State cabinet clears name change; in Bengali, state will be known as Bangla or Banga

There have been many name changes in Bengal; Park Street was renamed Mother Teresa Sarani; Mayfair Road became Bhagat Singh Sarani, and more recently Lee Road was renamed Satyajt Ray Dharani.
 
But among all the renames, the one that makes sense is dropping 'West' from West Bengal. The Cabinet has cleared changing the name of West Bengal to Bengal in English, and Bangla or Banga in Bengali.

"The cabinet has cleared the name change of West Bengal to either Bangla or Banga. In English, it will be Bengal," Parliamentary Affairs and Education Minister, Partha Chatterjee, announced.

An all-party meet will be called to build a consensus on this matter and finally a special session of the assembly will be held to ratify the change of name after which it will be forwarded to the Centre.

By proposing to drop 'West' from the name, West Bengal Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee, has not just fixed a historical issue but undone what she did five years back.

In 2011, the state government had undertaken a similar exercise, adopting 'Paschimbanga' as the name of the state. The idea was to move up the alphabetical order.

Chatterjee had then said that because of the name 'West Bengal' it used to get the last opportunity to speak on a subject. With the name 'Paschimbanga' the state managed to move ahead of Tamil Nadu, Tripura, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand.

The exercise had divided the state in 2011 as most intellectuals felt it was a lost opportunity to set a wrong 'right'.

From 1905, the British government had wanted to carve Bengal. Finally, the partition happened along religious lines in 1947. East Bengal, became a province of Pakistan and later an independent country Bangladesh after the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971.

With no East Bengal, the West in West Bengal wasn't making much sense. But not so for Congress' Pradip Bhattacharya who said, he was not in favour of changing the name. There are still others like film director, Buddhadeb Dasgupta, who want to see changes that run deeper than just a name.