I was on the phone with an old friend from India last week. One comment from him spawned a reflection on naming, parenting, and being a stranger in a strange land.
“Have you picked a name for your daughter yet ?”, he asked.
“Yes, I have picked one as has Shanthala and we’re fighting over it”, I replied.
“Are you choosing only Indian names or are you looking at American ones too ?”
“Of course, only Indian”, I said, recoiling with horror, “Why would I want to reject that part of India ?”
“Well, I didn’t see it as a rejection of India as much as I saw it as an acceptance of names from other cultures”, he said.
“No, no, no. We’re only picking Indian names”.
Why had I reacted so vehemently, I wondered later on. One aspect was that he specifically selected American as the culture to pick a name from. Of course, we live in the US of A for crying out loud, not in France or Germany. But American, being synonymous with white, is also synonymous with power for me. Among Indians, there are a group of people who strive desperately to be like Americans. They change their names to suit American tastes even if they’re simple names such as Ramesh or Santosh, they decorate their homes in a distinctly American style, they celebrate Christmas but not Indian festivals, they attempt a different accent, one that they hope is more American, but only sounds artificial. Having desperately aspired to leave India for a foreign shore, why not leave behind the Indian culture along with the dust and the crowds, I guess is their thinking. Even living in India, many imitate America, be it in the music, the brands, the food and the drinks, or the movies and the TV shows. Some are able to absorb both cultures and come up with a nice amalgam, a Creole gumbo, that is as tasty as it is fresh, but most just copy. I grew up in a household where the west was the best. Anything Indian was second class, whether it be an Indian manufactured tape recorder or yoga. I recoiled from being considered such a person by an old friend, recoiling from the legacy of my family.
Now and then, I had pondered about the ways in which my sense of self was tied up with where I was from. A glance in the mirror was sufficient to indicate my Indianness. And if I scratched beneath the surface, food preferences, languages I speak and the way I speak them, religions whose mythologies I’m comfortable in, stories I know, aromas and stinks that smell of home all revealed themselves to be strongly influenced by where I’m from. I hadn’t realized name was one such artifact.
What’s in a name ? Why do we spend so much time agonizing over it ? A name in a few short sounds symbolises everything about an individual. Her history, her genesis, her genealogy, her neuroses, her philosophy, her likes, her dislikes. In the movie, Last Tango in Paris, the character played by Marlon Brando refuses to give his name or ask the name of the character played by Maria Schneider. When she asks why he doesn’t want to know her name or anything else about her, he says: “We’re gonna forget…everything that we knew. Every… All the people,… all that we do,… wherever we live. We’re going to forget that. everything, everything”. A name can be a burden. I’ve wondered if I leave everything and everyone I know, go live in Chile and give myself a new name, will I change who I am ?
Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: “Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith.” Many people we’ve come across aspire to give Fate an easier time, to pick a name that speaks of greatness to come, to jumpstart the race that many parents consider life to be. In the bestseller, Freakonomics, the authors narrate the story of a parent in New York in 1958 who named one of his sons, Winner and one of them Loser. If names were to have any influence on the future, Loser must’ve had a disastrous life and Winner must have had an enviable one. Instead, it turned out to be the exact opposite. Loser ended up being a police sergeant while Winner has had a career of crime with more than 30 arrests. Among Indians, this attitude manifests in the extraordinary lengths parents go to pick a unique name, a name that raises eyebrows and causes people to squint due to the unfamiliarity of the name, of the name that even sounds non-Indian. In the US, the name game is played a little differently. There are distinctly black names and distinctly white names. In Freakonomics, the authors narrate the story of how black names have become increasingly uncommon among whites and vice-versa. In 1970, a black girl in California was given a name that was twice as common among blacks as it was among whites in California. Today, 40% of girls born in a black family in California are given names that are not given to any girl born in a white family. The book concludes that while names are an indicator of the future, they are not the cause, because: “… the kind of parents who name their son Jake don’t tend to live in the same neighborhoods or share economic circumstances with the kind of parents who name their son DeShawn.”
Indians are well regarded in the US and there is little reason for an Indian to either reject an Indian name or hide behind it. Our rejection of things Indian comes from our colonial past and our racial prejudice, I think. In India, dark skin is not favorably looked upon while white or fair skin is revered. A friend narrated a story that illustrated this double prejudice rather well. A friend of his was visiting India for the first time after his daughter was born. One of his aunts took one look at the child and said despondently, “She is as dark as you both are. All this time in America hasn’t helped”.
Children born to immigrants have a confused sense of identity. Among Indians, they’re called ABCD, American Born Confused Desi. Is the attempt to give a Christian name an attempt to prevent this confusion ? But naming your child with a Christian name is not without its share of headaches. Another friend mentioned about a classmate of hers, a Christian from Kerala called Anna, who had to explain each time she introduced herself that Anna was her real name as she was a Christian from India, that it wasn’t short for anything. If we ever return to India, a non-Indian sounding name will only attract the kinds of problems Anna had here. Even over here, if we really liked a non-Indian name and named our child that, I fear we’ll be judged by the likes of myself as striving to be a lily white American. Looked at another way, we rejected many names because they’re so hard for non-Indians to pronounce correctly. For example, we rejected Raakhee because it’s pronounced Rocky by Americans. Sigh. No wonder Marshall McLuhan said: “The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers”.
Shanthala has picked Aditi and I have picked Maya. Aditi or Maya, Raakhee or Rocky, beautiful child, you’ll rock our world.
