Dial M for Kerala
On 9 August, Kerala’s legislative assembly passed a resolution requesting the Central government to amend the name of the state from ‘Kerala’ to ‘Keralam’ and rename it thus under the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution. Chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan, who moved the resolution, said that this move was in keeping with how the state was referred to in its native language Malayalam.
This change would make sense, given that state formation in India has mostly been done on a linguistic basis. While an appended ‘m’ might seem like too much work for too little since the request will go to the ministry of home affairs and various other Union ministries for approval before it can hope for the President’s assent, it matters to residents of Kerala whether the rest of the world pronounces it properly.
Recall that when the then US President Bill Clinton visited India in 2000 and chose this state’s model of development to heap praise upon, the way he said its name left even Indians baffled at first about what he was referring to. An ‘m’ added at the end may not reduce such gross mispronunciations, but it would warm Malayalee hearts.
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