The British came to India in the early 1600s with the aim to do business with the princely states and kingdoms. Instead, they sat on our head and colonised us for a good 200 years, before they left in 1947. And in these years they changed a lot of things about our country. They did some good as well, like help in the abolition of the Sati Pratha. Except they were a little pre-occupied with slavery and the likes of it for most of their time here. Now, speaking of changes, Indian languages rolled off the English tongues and to make work simpler for them, they decided to change our names, the names of our cities and states according to their comfort. You ask why. Because they could.
So here is a list of 25 such incidents when the British changed Indian names for their own convenience.
And the renaming of places and people was not just a British trait. The Portuguese, the French, practically all colonisers changed things according to their convenience and well, while a few of these places were renamed again after independence, a lot of them still go by their colonised names.
Designs by Mir Suhail