Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras

What actually happened

The renamings replaced anglicized colonial spellings with forms closer to local languages, generally reflecting names already in everyday local use. Mumbai comes from the goddess Mumbadevi, Chennai from Chennapatnam, and Kolkata is closer to the Bengali pronunciation the city always had.

The changes are politically loaded rather than purely linguistic; several were driven by regional parties as assertions of local identity, and adoption within India is uneven, with plenty of residents and institutions still using the old names casually. The list is longer than most people outside India realize: Poona became Pune, Baroda became Vadodara, Trivandrum became Thiruvananthapuram, Cochin became Kochi, Mysore became Mysuru, and Orissa became Odisha in 2011. If you memorized Indian cities for a geography exam before the mid-1990s, most of your answers are now the historical names.