Why name roads after all sorts of people, complete with their titles?

Titles are often befuddling, and when appended to road names, they can also be unnecessarily wordy, except, of course, when they are in lieu of first names, as in the case of Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Patel. So, the allegedly post-facto attachment of defunct Indian royal titles Shrimant and Rajmata to Madhavrao Scindia Road and Vijayaraje Scindia Road in New Delhi — as brought to light by a recent RTI query — does appear curious. Particularly since boulevards in the Capital are replete with names bereft of grander prefixes. However, the British builders of New Delhi probably had an ulterior motive in pointedly retaining the royal prefixes of George V and his family on roads but stripping Ashoka, Akbar, Shahjahan and Aurangzeb of their imperial titles. After all, that then put the latter neatly on par with similarly divested British noblemen such as Wellesley, Cornwallis, Dalhousie, Curzon, Irwin, Minto and others.

But dropping cognomens obviously cannot be made a universal rule even in democratic India, given the resonance and sensitivity of certain specific honorifics like Chhatrapati and Netaji. More importantly, if titles and monikers are outlawed, several personages may become quite unidentifiable —such as the much-misspelt Greek Cypriot leader Archbishop Makarios — or, indeed, disappear altogether.