In 30 Seconds
States usually inherit their names from a people, a language, or an old kingdom. Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Punjab. Uttar Pradesh inherited its name from a compromise, and the story of how the colossus of the Gangetic plain came to be called, simply, the Northern Province, is a small window into everything the state is.
The territory itself was assembled by the British in pieces. The East India Company took the lower doab and Banaras from the wreckage of the eighteenth century, annexed further tracts after the Anglo Maratha wars, and folded them into the Bengal Presidency as the Ceded and Conquered Provinces. In 1836 these became the North Western Provinces, a name that confuses modern readers until they remember it was coined when Punjab and Sindh were still beyond British India, and the Gangetic plain genuinely sat at the empire’s northwestern edge.
Awadh came separately and traumatically. Annexed in 1856 in the move that helped light the fuse of 1857, it was governed for decades as a distinct Chief Commissionership. Only in 1877 were the two administrations yoked together, and in 1902 the arrangement received the name it would carry into the freedom struggle, the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh. The title was honest in its way. This was not a nation or a homeland but a union of conquests, Agra’s plains and Awadh’s former kingdom, held together by administrative convenience. In 1937, as provincial autonomy arrived, the name was trimmed to simply the United Provinces, and its initials, UP, entered the Indian vocabulary so thoroughly that they would outlive the name itself.
Independence made the old name untenable. United Provinces of what, united by whom? The Constituent Assembly years brought a search for something Indian, and the debate that followed was surprisingly revealing. Proposals included Aryavarta, the ancient name for the land of the north, and Hindustan itself, since the region was the historic core of the term. Both were rejected, in part because claiming so grand a title for one state seemed to appropriate the whole country’s inheritance. Other suggestions drew on the rivers, Ganga Pradesh among them. The eventual choice, attributed to the government of Govind Ballabh Pant, was elegant chiefly in its restraint. Uttar Pradesh, the northern province, preserved the initials UP that two generations already used, and committed the state to no single community, kingdom, or claim.
The renaming took formal effect on January 24, 1950, two days before the Constitution itself. The choice of continuity over grandeur had a quiet logic. A state so vast and so diverse, containing Braj and Awadh and Bhojpuri country, Hindu and Muslim, mountain and plain as it then did, could carry a neutral name more safely than a charged one. Aryavarta would have been an argument. Uttar Pradesh was an address.
Names, however, kept mattering. When the hill districts departed in 2000, the new state’s own name became a battlefield, Uttaranchal versus the movement’s preferred Uttarakhand, and the movement eventually won in 2007. Within UP, the politics of renaming has flourished ever since, from districts and towns through to the most famous case, Allahabad’s return to Prayagraj in 2018, a change this series will examine on its own terms later. Each renaming is an argument about which past the present wishes to claim.
The abbreviation deserves its own paragraph, because it did work no official name could do. UP became a word in every Indian language, portable across scripts and borders, carried by soldiers, students, and migrants into every city where the state’s people settled. In Mumbai and in the Gulf, in Suriname and Mauritius and Fiji where indentured labourers from the plain were shipped a century and a half ago, the two letters became shorthand for an origin and a manner. Governments have occasionally floated grander renamings for the state, and each time the proposals have collided with the same immovable fact. You cannot rename what a quarter of a billion people already call themselves.
There is a final irony worth recording. The neutral, administrative, deliberately unromantic name has become one of the most evocative words in India. UP now carries connotations no committee planned, of scale and struggle, of politics at its rawest, of piety and poverty side by side, of a certain unmistakable swagger in speech and manner that the state’s diaspora carries around the world. The United Provinces were named by their rulers. Uttar Pradesh, in the end, was named by its people, who took two letters of colonial shorthand and made them an identity.
UP Files - Batch 1
Part 5 of 10 in this chapter.
