Oh, Kolkata!

CALCUTTA SEARS the senses. You can almost taste the poverty, the spices in the air, the breathless heat and the swirl of humanity. I once watched bodies being cremated on pyres along the banks of the Hughli River. Then I retired to the Grand Hotel for a splendid lunch. Wondrous, uninviting, unforgettable -- the former capital of British India is all those things.

"There is only one city in India," Rudyard Kipling wrote in 1888 in "City of Dreadful Night." "Bombay is too green, too pretty, and too strugglesome; and Madras died ever so long ago. Let us take off our hats to Calcutta, the many-sided, the smoky, the magnificent, as we drive in over the Hughli Bridge in the dawn of a still February morning."

Kipling no doubt would be saddened to learn that Calcutta no longer exists. Nor does Madras or Bombay. The cities are now named, respectively, Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai, reflecting India's nationalistic move over the last several years to toss out names bestowed by foreigners in favor of original names that predate colonialism. With Western newspapers now starting to use the official names for datelines, Calcutta, Madras and Bombay are headed, in name at least, for the historical scrap pile. The old names have been banished from The Times effective Monday.

Of course, the souls of the cities haven't changed, only the names. And after all, what's in a name? Actually, everything. A country's or a city's name is part of its people's culture and literature. To change the name is somehow to diminish the past, as though implying, "Forget what was. We are starting fresh." That was Pol Pot's intent in 1975 when he renamed Cambodia as Democratic Kampuchea, using a purer, less Westernized transliteration, and his murderous Khmer Rouge began a four-year reign of terror to wipe out all signs of modernity.

Changing place names has been relatively common in the post-colonial era, particularly in Africa; and, unlike in Cambodia, it has generally occurred without incident. Peking (a name originating with French missionaries 400 years ago, based on an older Mandarin pronunciation) became Beijing (which means "northern capital"). Rhodesia, named for the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, became Zimbabwe. Dahomey turned into Benin. The Democratic Republic of the Congo became Zaire. Then, in 1997, to purge the legacy of dictactor Mobutu Sese Seko, new dictator Laurent Desire Kabila changed it back to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.