Name, Surname and Nickname : Identity Issues

Name, Surname and Nickname : Identity Issues

Dr. S.S. Rana

When Shakespeare declared ‘what is in a name ! a Rose is a Rose by any other name’ he was not minimising the importance of name but was underlining the intrinsic value of things. The Indian version of the saying paradox in terms – aankh ke andhe naam nayansuka underscores the need to name things and persons not in contradiction of the qualities they happen to carry. A name according to our tradition reflects any of the four elements, namely category, quality, matter and functionality. We may recall how the creator god Prajapati, when himself born first as a child, pressed forward the need for getting a name for himself and how he felt satisfied only after receiving as many as eight names- all expressing various functions attributed to him and a ninth one i.e. Kumara for his young appearance of a babe. It is a different matter that the Puranas later transferred all these names to Shiva, the last (Kumara), going to one of his sons Skanda-Karttikeya, the famous Subrahmanya or Murugan of the Tamil Tract. Richness and multiplicity has marked the names of our gods and goddesses. Who has not heard of the thousand names of Vishnu (Vishnu-sahasranma)?
Coming to the mundane plain we find our socio- religious books commending how we should be going about giving names to our new borns. The Ashvalayana Grihyasutra, as also the Paraskara Grihyasutra recommend that on the tenth day of the birth a child should be given a name comprising two or four syllables, in case of a male and three or five, in case of a female, thus maintaining the number even and odd respectively. Further both insisted that the syllables contained only sonant letters ga, gha, , da, dha etc. and that a semi vowel ya or va be at the end if required. Another aspect of personal name was that it should carry primary suffix (krit) at the end rather than a secondary (taddhita) one and also that it should be one compound word, though having several component words. Apart from linguistic moorings names reflect the religious and social beliefs and influences. Thus names also carry an imprint of the social, personal predilections and cultural identity of a person. A person’s name is the most frequently used term in his/her life and thereby the most likable one.
Since personal names from the very ancient times have tended to be constituted of more than one parts put into one compounded form it was natural that names continued to be meaningful and it may be interesting to note the nature and range of the different components. Vishva continues to be a component of names right from the vedic age (Vishwamitra) to the modern days (Vshwa Mohan). Similar is the journey of the second component Sena as seen in Vishwasena, Nagasen, Harisena and Mitrasena crossing millenniums.
The practice of abridging names can be traced to hoary past. Paninini noted such tendency and provided a rule for the same. For economy (or need) of effort the second member of a compound name like Vyaghra- Ajina or Deva- Datta could be dropped in order to obtain the desired number of vowels (between two to four or five) as mentioned above. However, in part compensation, ka, iya or ila could be added to the abridged name. For example Deva- Datta would be turned into Devaka, Deviya or Devila. Generally such a course was adopted when expressing love or, especially for the young children. This could be said to be the precursor of the modern day practice of having pet names like Bittoo, Vicky, Pappu etc. This shortening of names was a common practice in all cases till the not so remote past. We had Harke for Hari Krishna, Rame for Rama Chandra,Ome for Om Prakash and so on.
The elements of nature like the sun, the moon, the air and the earth along with their various synonyms have richly contributed to the corpus of names used through out India. Similar is the case of gods and their spouses.
The practice of persons being named and known as the scions of their father starting form very early times continues to this day. The Sanskrit grammarian fixes accent on the first syllable of the father’s name followed by the second part of the name as in Damaka- putra. It underlines the importance of some one being the son of a man named Damaka. We find this happening in almost all cases of stating the identity of a person whether present or in absentia. Perhaps this has something to do with the law (in its old form) of inheritance tilting in favour of the male. In Maharashtra and in most cases in Gujarat the name of a person contains the name of his father as the second component. The gotra system also works in the domain of the male. A female gets her gotra from her male ancestor till she marries. After marriage she gets the gotra name of her husband. There is a wide spread misconception about this feature being a sign of male chauvinism. This in fact again has something to do with share in property and succession issues. When a woman after marriage dons the gotra name of her husband it indicates the merger of her identity with that of her husband. And that is the meaning, given to marriage by all cultures. Some time back cine star Sanjay Dutt, in the context of his being heir to the gotra of his father, made an innocent and matter of fact advisory remark about the propriety of her sister Priya ( who retains her father’s gotra even after her marriage), adopting her husband’s gotra name only to invite sharp reaction, not only from Priya herself but several others, including some women groups. Mercifully the spat involving the two siblings did not last long. Perhaps there was equal merit in the arguments advanced by the two opposing sides. We know of Prabhavati Gupta, the daughter of Chandragupta-II retaining her father’s gotra name viz. Daharana even after her joining the Vakataka family through marriage. Today there is no dearth of women adopting the name of their marital family without dropping the gotra name of their father. But interestingly this double surname/ gotra name is not seen to be percolating to the next generation for the simple logic of proliferation into unmanageable proportions.
But a child whose father’s name could not be ascertained would be known by the name his mother, thought not without inviting derogatory frowns from society. In colloquial parlance such a child is known as gellad (the illegitimate one), not withstanding some modern day safeguards given by law. But the case of a child identified from among many siblings from several mothers married in a polygamous system (in the past) by the name of his/her mother falls in a altogether different category. We have several such Satavahana princes of the second century A.D. But interestingly the identity of a child (or adult for that matter) at his/ her mothers parents’ home is determined by her maiden name, there being no issues of inheritance involved and there being no percolation of the identity of the child’s father in the community there except as a bride taker.
Then we have a wide gamut of nicknames current at the informal plain of communication. Nicknames arise due to several factors operating in the life of persons and include both positive and derogatory. The positive ones have their origin in some good deed (sadhu), appearance (suthra, mota, patla), colour of the skin (bhura),height (lamba, chhota) etc. Some nicknames, which are derogatory, can be attributed to the associating of certain physical deformities, deficiencies or habits (real or imagined) with their subjects. For example we have kana (one eyed), ganja (bald), langda (lame) toonda (stump handed), landa (with small tail), surda(untidy) etc. In both the categories they initially get currency for quick determination of identity. But when they get passed on to be applied to the members of the next generations they are taken as byonk of the family and in most cases to the members of the extended family taking a plural form. We have the famous story how a family struggling to shed off their byonk, surde of several generations spent a fortune in organizing a lavish community feast with the request and hope that the family would no more be called by the byonk only to hear to their amazement and dismay the rich tributes laced with a rich dose of the byok, surde for their demonstration of community feeling.
Again there are good number of cases where, qualification (Shastri), title (Rai), post (Kulpati), profession (Vakil), Vocation (Purohit) etc turn into byok for the succeeding generations. However, in case of the byok being quite pleasing and flattering, it did not take long for it to graduate to the degree of gotra and ultimately supersede the same. Using gotra as a surname is a common practice in modern times but the ancient practice of using Sharma for Brahmanas, Verma for Kshatriyas and Gupta for Vaishyas (of the later date) can be noticed as an equally preferred option at all times.
Names of strong and well-built animals have been contributing a member of the personal names over a long period. Thus we have had names like Naravyaghra, Nararshabha be the favourite as a component of names dislodging many a time-honoured and popular components. Its popularity was so remarkable that it came to be added as the third and last component if either of the prevailing two components was indispensable. Singh appearing as the second and final component in most names became the norm in Punjab, Rajasthan and Haryana during the Mughal period. In case of the adherents of Sikh religion it formed an integral and compulsory part of names mostly coming at the end. It traveled to Uttara Pradesh as the third component without dislodging the time honoured conventional components. In most parts of the country all those who prefer to identify themselves as kshatriya groups, invariably add this component to their names. Hitherto vast sections of dalits in the north and the north-west see this as a means of demonstrating their awareness about social equality. Thus we notice Simha replacing Das as a part of the process of social engineering currently happening at a fast pace. A kind of social churning in search of identity is currently taking and we hope to see many a gem coming out as a result.


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