Nominal matters: Issue 1
“Grand”fathers making a name for
themselves (and family)
Vanakkam. What’s happening to
Tamil names, in particular, surnames / “last names”? In the melee of Indian
surnames which acknowledged profession/caste/place of origin, and placed
themselves before/during/after the first/given name, Tamil nomenclature
stood out as fresh and only need-to-know informative. Your first name followed/preceded by your father’s first name, altered for most women by matrimony to your first
name followed by your husband’s. Caste/ place/ profession, thank you, no
mention.
Celebrities often added the
place, vide Umayalpuram Kasiviswanatha
Sivaraman or Elamanur Madhavan Bhargava. Others replaced the father’s name with
the caste, e.g. Kalpana Iyer, Venkatesh
Iyengar. Some introduced the place and caste, and dispensed with the father’s
name, e.g., Madurai Mani Iyer. Some, free from constraining character-limits,
piled the place and caste to the father’s name and their own, vide Ariyakkudi Tiruvengadam Ramanuja Iyengar.
Some name layouts are a little confusing at first. Take Viswanathan Anand,
whose wife is Aruna Anand, and son Akhil Anand. It would seem that he is
distributing his father’s name all over his nuclear family, but no –
Viswanathan is his father’s name. He merely places it before his given name
Anand, which placement is the tradition that is getting somewhat disturbed now,
with the insistence on “last names” following “first names”. Had it been
strapped up as “V. Anand”, nobody would have batted an eyelid, realising
clearly that V was his father’s name.
In the past few decades, Tamil first names they are a-changing: first, the doors
have been thrown wide open to Sanskrit-via-Hindi names. The Elangovans,
Ezhilarasis and Maragadams are bound for the history books. “-an” has been and
is declining rapidly: Yesterday’s Raghavan is today’s Raghav, and he will pick
Rohit over Senthil for his son’s name. The Divyas and Ramyas of today are
ceding ground to the Diyas and Rias of tomorrow. And slowly (and small-ly) at
the moment, surnames are changing too – in the direction of constancy. The Tamil
grandfather of today’s Tamil baby is bequeathing his name to all posterity,
literally. He getting his name etched in indelible ink/laser print, on
passports, certificates and forms, as the surname of everyone in the family who
follows him – his sons, (perhaps) their wives, and their kids, (perhaps) wives
of said kids, and grandkids… All these perhapses because Tamil women, with all
their non-Tamil sisters, are increasingly not as gung-ho about adopting their
husbands’ names as sticking to their birth names (in this case their fathers’).
So we have a Govindarajan Kothandaraman marrying an Apsara Gopalarathnam, not
catalysing a name change despite the acknowledged chemistry ;), and going on to
name two little ones Vibha Govindarajan and Srinath Govindarajan.
I wonder what pressure forms (and form-generators) put on parents who pick
a grandfather’s name, and share and share alike: Perhaps surnames within the
family have GOT to coincide, or else. If your name is AB and your child’s not
–B, it’s not your child!! So we may find that a Mahesh Ramanathan’s wife calls
herself Kamakshi Ramanathan, and their child is a Rahul Ramanathan, whose kids
are Aryan Ramanathan and Akanksha Ramanathan.
