It is now a done deal after the Union Cabinet accepted the name changes for the state of Kerala to “Keralam”, what it is called in Malayalam. There has been a decades old campaign for the same to change the name “Kerala”, a name inscribed in the First Schedule of the Constitution of India since 1956. The Union Cabinet has cleared the proposal for name change in February 2026, the President referred the draft Bill to the state legislature under Article 3, and in July the Kerala Assembly had unanimously approved every clause. The Bill now awaits its final passage through Parliament and presidential assent.

Considering this news, I can make a prediction (for which I hope I am proved wrong) that out of an institutional habit, the bill will cover under its ambit a name change for the State. Whenever the ink dries, the Kerala High Court will still be called as it is and not High Court of Keralam or Keralam High Court.

This odd prediction is noticeable in the historic name change of states which has occurred in India since Independence. The city of Bombay was renamed as Mumbai in 1995, but the High Court is still High Court of Bombay. The city of Chennai stopped being Madras in 1996, but it is still Madras High Court. Kolkata replaced Calcutta in 2001, but it is still Calcutta High Court. Even in one of the recent changes in 2011, i.e., Odisha's High Court is still, for all official purposes, Orissa High Court.

The above phenomenon is not just an interesting question of why the names of High Court's names remain unchanged, but it represents something real about how the Indian Constitution divides power over subject matter. And it is precisely this division of power that produces the quirk at the centre of this piece, one that unfolded not in Bombay or Cuttack, but in the Himalayan hill state of Uttarakhand (a fact which was told to me one of the guest lectures in my undergraduate course), and which offers an early, cautionary preview of the question Kerala will soon face.

The Union's Court, not the State's

The Seventh Schedule of the Constitution of India provides for division of power between the State and the Union. Under the Seventh Schedule, the power to constitute and organise High Courts sits in the Union List, i.e., Entry 78, and not with the states. A state legislature has wide powers to rename its own capital, rename cities, highways, but it cannot touch the identity of the Constitutional Court which belongs to the Parliament. This is the underlying logic that has kept Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta's High Courts frozen in time long after their host cities moved on, and it is why Odisha's Orissa High Court has stayed "Orissa" for a decade and a half despite zero ambiguity about the state's own new name. Parliament did, in fact, try to fix this in 2016, introducing the High Courts (Alteration of Names) Bill to formally rename all three colonial-era courts, but the Bill lapsed, and the anomaly persists to this day.

And it is precisely the above point which makes the situation of Uttarakhand unique.

Unique Case of High Court of Uttarakhand and its Validity

The State of Uttar Pradesh was reorganised into two states in 2000, i.e., the State of Uttar Pradesh and State of Uttaranchal. The Parliament did the same vide Uttar Pradesh Reorganization Act, 2000, and Section 26 of the Act of 2000 constituted the High Court of Uttaranchal. Further along the line, due to public demand, the state name was change from Uttarakhand to Uttaranchal vide the Uttaranchal (Alteration of Names) Act, 2006.

The Act of 2006 which renamed the law the state did not went back in time and amended the Section 26 of the Act of 2000, the provision which created the High Court. Strictly read, the founding statute of that institution still refers to the “High Court of Uttaranchal” and yet, almost without friction, the Honourable High Court restyled itself the High Court of Uttarakhand and nobody seriously disputes that this is now its name.

The larger question is, can an institution change its own name without the constitutionally empowered body, i.e., Parliament do so directly? Perhaps the answer lies in two modest looking and general-purpose clauses which exist in the 2006 Act. One instructs courts to read pre-existing laws in whatever way keeps their substance intact after the state's renaming. The other simply substitutes “Uttarakhand” for “Uttaranchal” in proceedings that were already pending when the Act came into force. Neither clauses were drafted with the High Court's own founding statute in mind nor have these two been used in earlier alteration of names by states like Odisha. But justification of an administrative name change by High Court can lie in a stretched interpretation of these two modest looking and often ignored clauses of the Act of 2006.

Why this is more than Semantics

Now, the above phenomenon can easily be shrugged off, but there are three genuine concern which needs to be examined:

1. The question of competence: If a High Court's name can be changes as a side effect of a State's Name change, as in case of High Court of Uttarakhand (Uttaranchal), then the Union List's careful separation between "who can rename a state" and "who can rename its High Court" starts to blur. Two ends of this can be seen in Odisha and Uttarakhand. Odisha's example is one of a disciplined version of the process, i.e., unless Parliament make changes it is Orissa High Court, and Uttarakhand's example is one of undisciplined versions, i.e., generalist interpretive clause interpreted (informally) in a manner as to what a specific amendment was supposed to do.

2. The integrity of the founding instrument: Every citation to a High Court, every notification, change in bench strength, territorial jurisdiction traces its power back to the founding statute. When no amendment take place in the founding statute, the court's “real” legal name and everyday operation name diverges. For now, the courts can bridge the gap between the two with doctrine of harmonious construction by reading old and new law together so that neither seems absurd, but the doctrine evolved to answers questions of ambiguity in unclear drafting and not as a substitute for an amendment which Parliament never performed. Leaning on it this way sets a precedent for treating a specific, Union List-anchored naming clause as though it were just another piece of text swept up in a general renaming.

3. The question of associated risk of this bee notice late: Nobody as of now (in my research) has build a serious legal challenge between the gap in names of the Uttarakhand's High Court, but being a lawyer I can say that question the technical validity of any order notification issued in the wrong name is quite an attractive proposition. It is exactly the kind of drafting gap that litigants exploit when a case turns on jurisdiction or procedural nicety. A rule that only holds because nobody has tested it is not the same as a rule that is settled.

A Lesson for “Keralam”

As the Alteration of Name statute for the State of Kerala be moved through the Parliament, drafters will have a genuine choice in front of them, a choice which Uttarakhand's drafters probably didn't confronted carefully enough. They can either follow the path followed by Bombay-Madras-Calcutta-Orissa, i.e., rename the State but leave the High Court for amendment by any future dedicated legislation or they can quietly repeat the Uttarakhand's pattern, i.e., pass a general renaming Act, say nothing specific about the High Court, and trust that interpretive clauses and administrative convenience will paper over the gap if the court ever decides to call itself the “High Court of Keralam”.

Further given that the state's own resolution was focused on the First Schedule, the name of High Court will most probably not be touched. The case of Uttarakhand is a reminder that “at least for now” and “as a settled matter of law” are not the same thing. A state may change its name but the question of the name of High Court also needs to be examined in such proposals as there is a distinction. Whether the Indian drafters honour this distinction or let it slide is not a footnote. It is a live question of distribution of powers, one which the Kerala (Alternation of Name) Bill, whenever it passes the Parliament, will be a real-world test of.

Author is a practicing advocate from Gorakhpur. Views are personal.