Historians seek to give Dehli back its name

Telegraph | News: "The Indian capital should be renamed Dehli to correct a 150-year-old mistake, according to historians in India. They have launched a campaign to correct the "mis-spelling", which they say happened during British rule because the colonialists could not pronounce Hindi names. K M L Misra, a former head of history at Agra College, said: "For 800 years Delhi was called Dehli but the British couldn't manage the breathy sound of Hindi and the spelling of the city later came to reflect this."

Mr Misra and several members of the Agra Archaeological Society have written to the Indian president, the secretary of cultural affairs for Delhi and the Hindustan Times demanding change. "I don't want to injure the feelings of the British, indeed I hold them in high regard, but our government is mistaken to cling doggedly to this British mis-spelling of our capital," Mr Misra said.

In support of his argument he points to a host of other Indian place names that were altered by the British but quickly changed back after Independence. What the British knew as Cawnpore is now Kanpur, the northern city of Muttra is Mathura, and the Ganges is known once more as Ganga. Mr Misra said that even Dehli was a corrupted word. The pre-Mughal name was Dilli, which was derived from Dhillika, a Rajput name for the area which dates back to the 8th century.

Plans to rename Dehli might seem slightly far-fetched, not to mention expensive, but precedents abound. India has renamed three major cities in the past decade. In 1995, Bombay became Mumbai after pressure from Hindu-nationalists to reinstate the original Marathi name.

Contrary to popular belief, this was not a corruption of the British name but almost certainly derives from the Portuguese Bom Bahia, meaning Good Bay. A year later, the southern city of Madras - possibly a corruption of the Portuguese Madre di Dios - reverted to Chennai, the name that had been used by Tamils throughout the British period.

Then, in 2000, the spelling of Calcutta was officially changed to Kolkata after pressure from the Communist state government to revert to a spelling that more closely reflected the Bangla pronunciation. "It is time that Delhi ditched this ludicrous spelling and followed Kolkata's lead," Mr Misra said."