Aban Raza's race to paint India's renamed cities before the signboards change again

On a humid afternoon in late June, the artist Aban Raza set up an easel on the banks of the Ganges in a city that, depending on which sign you read, is still Benaras to the older cab drivers and Varanasi to the district magistrate. She is not painting the temple spires or the evening aarti that the postcards prefer. She is painting the name itself: the Devanagari and the Roman transliteration, layered on a faded wall, half-covered by a newer board that the municipal corporation put up in 2018. The painting, when she finishes it, will be a record of the moment a city stopped being one thing and became another — and of the cheap, ordinary wall on which that transition is most legible.

Raza's project, reported on 4 July 2026 by The Indian Express, treats India's long-running programme of municipal and state-level renaming as a phenomenon worth documenting in paint before the physical traces are painted over. The country has renamed Allahabad to Prayagraj, Trichy to Tiruchirappalli, Bangalore to Bengaluru, and dozens of smaller towns. The official reasons vary — linguistic purification, claims of historical continuity, political signalling. The unofficial reason, in most cases, is that names age, and that cities need to be re-narrated to their own residents. Raza's wager is that the renaming leaves a residue on the built environment, and that the residue is disappearing faster than the politics that produced it.

The itinerary

Raza is working through a list of around two dozen cities — the exact count shifts as new announcements arrive — and the project is structured around a simple rule: she must reach a city before the old signage is fully replaced and before the municipal records are updated to remove the colonial-era or Anglicised spelling. In Allahabad, now Prayagraj, the station boards at the junction are still a patchwork of three eras of metalwork, and she has been working from photographs of the older boards because the originals have already been removed. In Trichy, the Tamil Nadu government's decision to expand the city's official name to Tiruchirappalli left a generation of hotel receipts and lorry manifests out of date, and she paints those, too — the bureaucratic ghost in the ledger.

The Indian Express piece frames the work as urgent precisely because the urgency is artificial. There is no deadline written into law. There is only the slow replacement of enamel boards, the repainting of station entrances, the reprinting of letterheads. A city can be renamed overnight by cabinet order and can take a decade to finish absorbing the new name into the everyday surface of its streets.

What the project is actually arguing

Raza is not making a political argument, in the sense of taking a side on whether any particular renaming is right or wrong. She is making an art-historical one: that the moment a city is renamed, there is a brief period in which both names are simultaneously true, and that this period has a visual grammar. Her canvases are dominated by signage — the painted shopfront, the weathered enamel of a railway platform, the municipal lamp-post sticker — rather than by monuments. The argument is that the city's identity is not really carried by its temples and ghats and forts, but by the cheap typography the municipal corporation can afford.

This puts the work in an awkward position relative to the standard narratives of Indian urbanism. The dominant cultural coverage of Indian cities tends to treat renaming as either a triumph of decolonisation — the reclaiming of names that the British had shortened or Sanskritised — or as a Hindu-nationalist project of asserting a particular kind of historical continuity. Raza's framing is quieter. She treats the renaming as a civic event in the literal sense: the city, as a corporate body, decides to call itself something else, and then has to live with the consequences on its walls. The question her paintings pose is what gets lost in that transition, and whether the loss is recoverable.

The structural context

The renaming programme is part of a larger pattern of Indian public life in which the symbolic and the administrative are treated as the same currency. A state government that wants to signal its ideological commitments can do so with a gazette notification and a budget line for new signage. The renaming is cheap; the cost is borne by anyone who has to update maps, school textbooks, court filings, and the small businesses that print letterhead by the hundred. There is no evidence that the renaming wave has been matched by any sustained attempt to update the underlying records of land titles or electoral rolls, which means that the surface change is real while the underlying file system is still operating on the old name.

This is the gap Raza is trying to document. Her paintings are most pointed when they show the moment of administrative drift — a tax receipt with one spelling, a hoarding with another, a hand-painted wedding banner with a third. The series is, in effect, an atlas of the friction between the renaming order and the world it is trying to rename. The pictures will become harder to make each year, because the older boards are being scraped off the walls and the cheaper replacements are printed to the new standard. There is no archive of the older signs at this granularity; the municipal corporation does not photograph its own enamel work, and the local newspaper photographers in these towns have moved on to other subjects. Raza is, in practice, the only person recording the visual record at the scale that matters.

What remains uncertain

The Indian Express coverage does not specify how many cities Raza has already completed, nor how she is financing the travel. It is also unclear whether any of the canvases will be exhibited publicly or whether the project is intended, as some Indian art criticism has speculated, as a private archive rather than a touring show. The piece presents the work as ongoing and at risk of running ahead of the signage it depends on, but it does not say what happens to the canvases when the project reaches its natural endpoint. There is also the question of which renamings the project covers; the article mentions the major state-led changes but does not enumerate the smaller municipal-level cases, which are the ones most likely to be reversed within a working lifetime.

The deeper uncertainty is whether the project is documenting a moment of genuine transition or simply a long-running oscillation. Several of the cities on Raza's list have been renamed more than once in the past century — Mughal-era names overlaid by British spellings, then reclaimed, then partially restored, then re-claimed again. The pattern suggests that the current wave may itself be reversible, and that Raza's canvases, if they survive, will need to be re-read each time the cycle turns. The project implicitly assumes that the signage is moving in one direction. The history of Indian municipal names suggests the direction is not guaranteed.

Stakes

For Indian cultural memory, the stakes are modest but real. The renaming programme is a fait accompli at the level of the railway timetable and the school textbook, but at the level of the shopfront and the bus stand it is still contested, still in progress, and still reversible. Raza's paintings are a record of that in-between state, made by someone who treats the in-between as the actual subject rather than as a transitional inconvenience. Whether the work finds a permanent audience will depend on institutions that have, so far, paid more attention to the renamed cities than to the renaming itself. The Indian Express piece is the most sustained press attention the project has received, and it has framed Raza not as a polemicist but as a kind of unofficial municipal chronicler — a useful, if uncomfortable, position for an artist to occupy.

This publication framed the story as a documentary art project, not as a contribution to the partisan debate over whether Indian city names should be changed. The renaming politics is the weather the project works in; the visual record is what the canvases actually hold.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_renamed_places_in_India
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varanasi