An old mosaic adorns the facade of the big Apple store on London’s Regent Street. It harks back to the time long ago when the building housing the store was a London Branch of a big insurance company. The mosaic was assembled and installed long before the great Russian Revolution of 1917. Various cities are named on the mosaic. One of these is St Petersburg. After the revolution , St Petersburg was renamed ‘Petrograd’ and then ‘Leningrad’, which remaine dits name until the 1990s when the city reverted to being ‘St Petersburg’. During my childhood and early adulthood, St Petersburg was ‘Leningrad’. Whenever I passed that mosaic, I used to marvel that the city’s old name remained unchanged on the facade of the building. It was a memory of historic times. Now, by chance, it is up to date.

Many of the readers of this blog will have realised that I visit India regularly. Most people know that Bombay is now known as ‘Mumbai’. Actually, speakers of Marathi and Gujarati have always called it that, but often still call it Bombay when speaking in English.

Madras has become Chennai. So what should one ask for when ordering Chicken Madras, which appears on many menus in Britain’s Indian restaurants?

In Karnataka, Bangalore has become Bengaluru, Mysore is now Mysuru, and Halebid is Halebidu. When I bought a bus ticket to Gulbarga in northern Karnataka, I was puzzled to see I had been issued with a ticket to Kalaburgi. This turns out to be the new name for Gulbarga.

Allahabad is now Prayagraj, a name that removes the Islamic flavour of its former name. There are moves afoot to de-islmamicise the name of Ahmedabad in Gujarat. The proposed name for the city founded by Ahmed is ‘Karnavati’, but the change has not yet been enforced.

Whether these changes of Indian place names will stick remains to be seen. Who can say whether they will revert like Leningrad that became St Petersburg again?