“india leads the name-changing and respelling campaign. that colorful madras shirt you’re wearing will soon be a chennai shirt, because that’s the new name of the city, drawn from the tamil language. and if you’re a tourist planning a visit to the famed black hole of calcutta, you need to know that the name of india’s former capital city is now spelled kolkata, a closer approximation of the bengali name. “if i had to hazard a guess,” says the man from n. g.-i. a., “i’d say that within a year or so, bangalore will likely change its name to the local bengaluru, from the kannada language. this is all an effort to shed the colonial british names and reassert local, indigenous names.” why is south asia, especially in india, changing the names of its cities?