How common are the following activities historically?
score:4
This happened in Turkey, as part of a deliberate attempt to replace old names:
Approximately 12,000 village names that are non-Turkish, understood to originate from non-Turkish roots, and identified as causing confusion have been examined and replaced with Turkish names, and put into effect by the Substitution Committee for Foreign Names functioning at the Directorate General for Provincial Governments in our Ministry.[27]
Note that this is after a period where many older names had already been changed by the Ottomans from the Greek. (Constantinople -> Istanbul), though in a less organized why. And of course some of these cities were also renamed when the Romans acquired them in the first place.
"Mass" renaming usually happens in the context of military conquest, as in what the Ottomans, the Romans, or the exchange of German names for Polish names as @luiz mentions, but as the Turkish example shows, the Indian changes for political reasons are not unique. Usually when this happens, it's the result of an indigenous population taking over from a "foreign" minority, for instance, as in South Africa. This may be exhibited in the names becoming more aligned with the ethnic majority, or they may just be the removal of names seen as representing foreign oppressors.
Note that the the change of individual names for political reasons is incredibly common, from Constantine renaming a city after himself, through the shoguns rebranding Edo as Tokyo, to the revolving door name of what is now St. Petersburg. At the lower level, this sort of thing happens endlessly. In the US, there's currently a debate about the names of schools, and a couple decades before that the US saw a wave of streets renamed for Martin Luther King Jr..
So yes, renaming things for political reasons is as old as politics.
Upvote:2
When German territory was given to Poland at the end of WWII, many names changed.
http://polandpoland.com/names_german_polish.html
I had a German colleague whose grandma was born in these lands (Silesia), and she was expelled to Germany after the war. After the iron curtain fell, she went back there to visit her old farm... Buildings, roads, and all names were gone - small rivers, cities, no place mark or road sign had any sense to her. The only things she could recognize were some landscapes and trees - she even found a tree nearby where her brother had a tire swing as a child.
The Polish people were cooperative and she could tour her old farm, even if no building from her time is left standing.
Similar issues in the Russian Kaliningrad Oblast, wiki lists german, russian and polish names:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inhabited_localities_in_Kaliningrad_Oblast
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