Why Scotland has a Patna and why royals choose to intermarry

Express Research

EXPRESS RESEARCH

Dear reader,   Did you know that the name ‘Madras’ has Portuguese roots? Mumbai has a Baroda street and Scotland has a Patna village of its own. Place names are wonderful repositories of historical and political processes. They also provide interesting testimonies to the movement of people and their communities, the lives they built in a new place and the cultural contributions made to it.    Our story this week looks at the many place names in India that are a product of migration of people from near and far, and those that Indians have carried elsewhere. As people migrate, they carry with themselves names of the places they left behind, or cultural motifs, historical figures and much more. Then there are colonisers who migrated for the sake of exploration,  exploitation and establishing supremacy in a new region. Place names served as important means to exert their authority.    Royal alliances   Recently, Japanese princess Mako formally relinquished her titles to marry a ‘commoner’. Her decision was subject to severe criticism given that royals very rarely marry ‘regular’ people. Our other story this week by Mira Patel closely scrutinises why royals chose to marry among themselves for centuries and continue to do so even at a time when the age of monarchy has clearly faded. This, despite the fact that inter-marriages among royals have also produced physical infirmities among their offsprings.    Read the stories:   Baroda in Mumbai and Patna in Scotland: What place names can tell us about migration, assertion of power   How royal alliances sustained diplomacy, gave birth to sickly successors    Sincerely,   Adrija Roychowdhury

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How royal alliances sustained diplomacy, gave birth to sickly successors   Baroda in Mumbai and Patna in Scotland: What place names can tell us about migration, assertion of power   'More Bengali than any Bengali': Marwaris, the 'outsiders' who built Kolkata   Why India is special to Armenians: Their land of prosperity

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