The Politics of Language Renaming Movements in Contemporary South India

This abstract provides a comprehensive overview of the politics of language renaming movements in contemporary South India, probing the multifaceted dynamics that animate campaigns to replace colonial or Sanskritized toponyms and institutional names with indigenous equivalents.Over the last three decades, states such as Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, and Puducherry have witnessed vigorous efforts by grassroots activists, political parties, and cultural organizations to rechristen cities and public landmarks-efforts that intertwine assertions of linguistic pride, historical reclamation, and strategic electoral mobilization.This study employs a mixed-methods design, integrating policy and archival analysis, semistructured interviews with thirty stakeholders, and discourse analysis of two hundred social media posts and opinion pieces, to unravel the motivations, trajectories, and consequences of renaming initiatives.Findings reveal a dialectic tension between bottom-up calls for cultural justice and top-down political co-option; the instrumentalization of renaming during election campaigns; the administrative and economic burdens of implementation; and the emergence of counter-movements contesting the very premise of renaming.By situating these case studies within broader theories of toponymy, language policy, and identity politics, the paper advances a nuanced understanding of how symbolic interventions in nomenclature can both foster communal solidarity and exacerbate social cleavages.Finally, the study discusses implications for multicultural governance and proposes avenues for future research, including longitudinal analyses of socio-economic outcomes and comparative investigations in other multilingual regions of India.