By IANS
Bangalore : The venerable Oxford University Press (OUP) has apologised for the blunders it had committed on the origin and name of Bangalore and Bengalis in its 2005 edition dictionary and has frozen the sale of the copies.
"OUP is deeply sorry about the errors that have been brought to our attention…We have frozen the stock of the book and stopped selling the same from our warehouses and will be pulping the remaining copies," OUP said in a statement Saturday.
The apology came hours after the Karnataka government sent a letter to OUP pointing out the serious errors in the publication.
In the wake of apology protests planned against OUP here on Monday have been called off.
The Oxford Concise Dictionary of World Place Names, 2005, has turned the history of both Bangalore and Bengalis upside down. According to it, Bangalore is "a city which takes its name from the fact that it was founded as a mud fort in 1537 by Kempe Gowda, a local chief of Hoysala Kingdom, in an area where the population spoke mainly Bengali. Bengalis took their name from a local chief called Benga."
First, Kempe Gowda, the local chieftain who built Bangalore, was born some 200 years after the Hoysala dynasty had ended.
There are several versions on how the name Bangalore came into existence. The most popular is that it is derived from 'Benda Kalu Ooru" (boiled beans city). Legend has it that an elderly woman offered boiled beans to a tired king who was passing through the area and he named the place 'Benda Kalu Ooru'. It has been anglicised to make it Bangalore.
Apart from the 200-odd year gap between the rule of Kempe Gowda and the Hoysala dynasty, it is surprising how the editor of the dictionary John Everett-Heath found it convincing that Bengali was spoken in this area and the Bengalis got their name from a chief called Benga, say historians.