Caste surnames have been grabbing headlines in the most shameful manner in the past couple of days (not that they have ever been too far from the headlines in our country!)
Lakshmi Nair, principal of a reputed institution - a Law College of all places! - is reported to nurture a caste bias so enormous she has Dalit students pulled out from their classrooms to report to work at her restaurant. A forward on Whatsapp said: After Saritha Nair, Reshmi Nair and now Lakshmi Nair, people may want to drop that Nair surname.
Sanjay Leela Bhansali gets beaten up by Rajput goons over a supposed distortion of history (or rather the version of history which has their seal of approval). And actor Sushanth Singh Rajput dropped the Rajput surname on Twitter in a show of solidarity with the director.
My family has an interesting relationship with surnames. My father Venugopalan Nayar had the spelling of his traditional caste surname Nair officially corrected to Nayar because he felt that was more phonetically accurate. My father was the eldest of eight siblings. The remaining seven did not have to bother with the spelling correction because they were not named Nair at all! The seven of them have the surname Bose. Reason? My grandfather apparently was an admirer of Subhash Chandra Bose and decided to show his admiration by adopting his surname for his children. My father at that time was old enough to voice his opinion and politely declined the patriotic fervour but the rest of the brood did not get a chance to voice theirs (if any). So I have a set of Uncles, Aunts and cousins with the surname Bose. I had a tough time during my school days convincing my friends that Anand Bose (a prominent IAS officer who was often in the news in those days) was really my Uncle! And he, in turn, used to laugh about how people he met often found it difficult to reconcile his very South Indian complexion with his very Bengali name!
I had decided way before I got married that I would retain my own name until the end of my days. I have never understood the concept of a 'maiden name' and a 'married name'. To my mind, a person's identity has a lot of elements that you don't get to choose. By the time you reach the age of legal maturity you have already lived with your name, sex, religion and usually, nationality for quite a while, built relationships on that basis and established your identity in a variety of documents as required by the laws of the land. Of course, people get to change aspects of their identity and many do so for a variety of reasons. But I have never wanted to do that. I hated the name Anjana as a child and really really wanted to get it changed to something more whimsical - like an Anjali! I mean, there are songs in movies dedicated to heroines named Anjali! Couldn't my parents have spared just a moment considering options that were so close by before they settled on the prosaic, plain, unromantic Anjana? I considered it highly unfair on their part! The caste proclamation in my surname was not something that bothered me at that point. By the time I was grown up I realised I had to make my unhappy peace with the name everyone knew me by and that was that. Marriage did not seem to me to be a starting point in life quite as dramatic as birth that it would require me to start life over with a whole new identity. So Anjana Nayar I stayed. By this time I was aware of the caste overtones to my surname - but just as I could not start over with a whimsical first name I also did not think I could pull off a pretty surname. The Nayar in my name is the one remaining link to my father that I cannot and will not part with.
My husband's name on his official documents is Sanjay Cherian. Mostly everyone knows him as just Sanjay. Except where required for official purposes, he prefers to go without a surname as he does not believe in declaring his religious background (which is unambiguously revealed by his surname) in unwarranted situations. Since I did not believe in changing my surname despite its caste overtones and he did not believe in flaunting his, we had a difficult time finding a suitable appendage to our children's names. At the outset we decided that we did not want them to carry the collective burden of their mixed lineage with awkward hyphenated appellations like Nayar-Cherian or Anjana-Sanjay or worse, Chittezham-Kunnel (!!!) We considered giving them just first names but then we read about complications arising from leaving the surname column blank on passports. So we came up with a new name altogether that would be their own unique identity - Jayna. Our children are called Antara Jayna and Akshara Jayna. The Jay is part of Sanjay's name and the Na is part of mine. If anything, it denotes who their parents are - minus burdens of religion, caste or even geographical location. Jayna, we felt was a name, that if it sounds at all like anything familiar, sounds like an Indian name but without any further reveals. So our children are free to go about the business of life hopefully without anyone forming any impressions about them from their name.
I lived at least twenty-five years of my life without ever thinking about the import of carrying a caste tag around as part of my identity. I never gave any thought to the fact that I was declaring my caste credentials every time I introduced myself to anyone. In the wake of Rohith Vemula's eye opening letter preceding his tragic suicide, there was a lot of commentary on caste and how it permeates our society in ways that none other than the victims are even aware of. But the most arresting of those, to me, was one which said 'don't claim to empathise with something you have no idea about.' It was like a slap in the face. Yes, I have lived my life as an upper caste Hindu with a name that proclaimed me as such. I don't know if my surname - a decidedly, openly, unabashedly casteist one - has opened or shut any doors to me. I am thankful for the fact that I never had to find out. Unfortunately, that did not mean I was unaware of such a phenomenon as caste based discrimination.
My mother and my grandmothers before her had a distaste for people whose caste identities could not be assuaged from their names. They belonged squarely to the generations that judged people based on their family background. My Christian and Muslim friends found more favour with my mother than the so-called 'lower castes'. I could not fathom how that made a difference in a bunch of teenage girls: all equally prone to fits of giggling, all dressed equally gaudily in what was considered the fashionable style of the time, all with the same fears and insecurities and all with the same urge to bunk tuition and gather at the ice cream parlour next to the college after class. I remember my brother, sister and me all waging battles with my mother over unwarranted assumptions about some of our friends and to her credit, she did start rethinking the conventional wisdom of judging people by their backgrounds when all three of her children started questioning it. I have seen her take the effort to hold back her 'considered' opinion about people since I was clear I did not want my children to be exposed to such notions - such as Caste X being untrustworthy or Caste Y being low on hygiene. Truly, "the value of a man reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility!" But when my cousins and I were children, we thought it was quite normal for people to be addressed by their caste names - depending on the chore they performed. The respectful 'Uncle' and 'Aunty' tags were only for people above a certain station in life and it was considered perfectly alright for an 8-year-old child to address the 75-year-old lady who used to sweep the courtyard by her name and her caste tag. I am so grateful such 'traditions' have almost died a deserved and inevitable death! Almost.
While the bogey of caste within a traditional Nair household like ours was visible and unapologetic - lending itself to being identified and snuffed out with greater ease, the less obvious formations are all around us and less susceptible to quick annihilation. During my time at National Law School where I got myself a Masters Degree in Law, I was once asked by one of my teachers - 'are Nairs the Brahmins of Kerala?' I answered in the negative, wondering if that answer had any bearing on how he would treat me in future (or how he had treated me till then, which was very favourable). I did not have further occasion to think it had any bearing on anything but I wish that question had not been asked and that that question did not form part of my memories of that institution which redefined education and thinking for me. I remember that at the graduation ceremony at that institution a whole array of medals are awarded to students. The reasons for each being awarded are read out as they are given away. Among them was one - the Director's Prize - which was awarded without any criteria being announced. I found out after attending two of those ceremonies that this was for the candidate who scored the highest marks from among students in the reserved categories. The reason I found out about this the year I graduated was that the student who was to be awarded that prize refused to accept it as (if I remember right) she was already eligible for some other awards in the merit categories and she did not feel that this one was of any particular relevance to her list of accomplishments. As far as I understand, the said prize was thereafter discontinued. And this was within the highest citadel of legal learning in the country - an institution that prides itself on teaching its students to pick apart the constitution and equips them to fight against all forms of discrimination.
I cannot imagine the humiliation of students forced out of classrooms to wait on tables at the Principal's restaurant. I cannot bring myself to think that there are Rohit Vemulas silently enduring insufferable, soul-searing insults within our classrooms. I cannot understand the world of caste privilege - or any other kind of privilege - that allows that to happen. We live in a world where parents are forced to think about the likelihood of their children being detained as adults at airports when they pick a name. So we have more and more cosmopolitan, implications-free names abounding in kindergartens now. And that is as it should be. Let another wall fall as newer ones are being built. I kept my 'Nayar' tag but I have ensured the caste tag is not propagated through me. That is the least I can do.
Lakshmi Nair, principal of a reputed institution - a Law College of all places! - is reported to nurture a caste bias so enormous she has Dalit students pulled out from their classrooms to report to work at her restaurant. A forward on Whatsapp said: After Saritha Nair, Reshmi Nair and now Lakshmi Nair, people may want to drop that Nair surname.
Sanjay Leela Bhansali gets beaten up by Rajput goons over a supposed distortion of history (or rather the version of history which has their seal of approval). And actor Sushanth Singh Rajput dropped the Rajput surname on Twitter in a show of solidarity with the director.
My family has an interesting relationship with surnames. My father Venugopalan Nayar had the spelling of his traditional caste surname Nair officially corrected to Nayar because he felt that was more phonetically accurate. My father was the eldest of eight siblings. The remaining seven did not have to bother with the spelling correction because they were not named Nair at all! The seven of them have the surname Bose. Reason? My grandfather apparently was an admirer of Subhash Chandra Bose and decided to show his admiration by adopting his surname for his children. My father at that time was old enough to voice his opinion and politely declined the patriotic fervour but the rest of the brood did not get a chance to voice theirs (if any). So I have a set of Uncles, Aunts and cousins with the surname Bose. I had a tough time during my school days convincing my friends that Anand Bose (a prominent IAS officer who was often in the news in those days) was really my Uncle! And he, in turn, used to laugh about how people he met often found it difficult to reconcile his very South Indian complexion with his very Bengali name!
I had decided way before I got married that I would retain my own name until the end of my days. I have never understood the concept of a 'maiden name' and a 'married name'. To my mind, a person's identity has a lot of elements that you don't get to choose. By the time you reach the age of legal maturity you have already lived with your name, sex, religion and usually, nationality for quite a while, built relationships on that basis and established your identity in a variety of documents as required by the laws of the land. Of course, people get to change aspects of their identity and many do so for a variety of reasons. But I have never wanted to do that. I hated the name Anjana as a child and really really wanted to get it changed to something more whimsical - like an Anjali! I mean, there are songs in movies dedicated to heroines named Anjali! Couldn't my parents have spared just a moment considering options that were so close by before they settled on the prosaic, plain, unromantic Anjana? I considered it highly unfair on their part! The caste proclamation in my surname was not something that bothered me at that point. By the time I was grown up I realised I had to make my unhappy peace with the name everyone knew me by and that was that. Marriage did not seem to me to be a starting point in life quite as dramatic as birth that it would require me to start life over with a whole new identity. So Anjana Nayar I stayed. By this time I was aware of the caste overtones to my surname - but just as I could not start over with a whimsical first name I also did not think I could pull off a pretty surname. The Nayar in my name is the one remaining link to my father that I cannot and will not part with.
My husband's name on his official documents is Sanjay Cherian. Mostly everyone knows him as just Sanjay. Except where required for official purposes, he prefers to go without a surname as he does not believe in declaring his religious background (which is unambiguously revealed by his surname) in unwarranted situations. Since I did not believe in changing my surname despite its caste overtones and he did not believe in flaunting his, we had a difficult time finding a suitable appendage to our children's names. At the outset we decided that we did not want them to carry the collective burden of their mixed lineage with awkward hyphenated appellations like Nayar-Cherian or Anjana-Sanjay or worse, Chittezham-Kunnel (!!!) We considered giving them just first names but then we read about complications arising from leaving the surname column blank on passports. So we came up with a new name altogether that would be their own unique identity - Jayna. Our children are called Antara Jayna and Akshara Jayna. The Jay is part of Sanjay's name and the Na is part of mine. If anything, it denotes who their parents are - minus burdens of religion, caste or even geographical location. Jayna, we felt was a name, that if it sounds at all like anything familiar, sounds like an Indian name but without any further reveals. So our children are free to go about the business of life hopefully without anyone forming any impressions about them from their name.
I lived at least twenty-five years of my life without ever thinking about the import of carrying a caste tag around as part of my identity. I never gave any thought to the fact that I was declaring my caste credentials every time I introduced myself to anyone. In the wake of Rohith Vemula's eye opening letter preceding his tragic suicide, there was a lot of commentary on caste and how it permeates our society in ways that none other than the victims are even aware of. But the most arresting of those, to me, was one which said 'don't claim to empathise with something you have no idea about.' It was like a slap in the face. Yes, I have lived my life as an upper caste Hindu with a name that proclaimed me as such. I don't know if my surname - a decidedly, openly, unabashedly casteist one - has opened or shut any doors to me. I am thankful for the fact that I never had to find out. Unfortunately, that did not mean I was unaware of such a phenomenon as caste based discrimination.
My mother and my grandmothers before her had a distaste for people whose caste identities could not be assuaged from their names. They belonged squarely to the generations that judged people based on their family background. My Christian and Muslim friends found more favour with my mother than the so-called 'lower castes'. I could not fathom how that made a difference in a bunch of teenage girls: all equally prone to fits of giggling, all dressed equally gaudily in what was considered the fashionable style of the time, all with the same fears and insecurities and all with the same urge to bunk tuition and gather at the ice cream parlour next to the college after class. I remember my brother, sister and me all waging battles with my mother over unwarranted assumptions about some of our friends and to her credit, she did start rethinking the conventional wisdom of judging people by their backgrounds when all three of her children started questioning it. I have seen her take the effort to hold back her 'considered' opinion about people since I was clear I did not want my children to be exposed to such notions - such as Caste X being untrustworthy or Caste Y being low on hygiene. Truly, "the value of a man reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility!" But when my cousins and I were children, we thought it was quite normal for people to be addressed by their caste names - depending on the chore they performed. The respectful 'Uncle' and 'Aunty' tags were only for people above a certain station in life and it was considered perfectly alright for an 8-year-old child to address the 75-year-old lady who used to sweep the courtyard by her name and her caste tag. I am so grateful such 'traditions' have almost died a deserved and inevitable death! Almost.
While the bogey of caste within a traditional Nair household like ours was visible and unapologetic - lending itself to being identified and snuffed out with greater ease, the less obvious formations are all around us and less susceptible to quick annihilation. During my time at National Law School where I got myself a Masters Degree in Law, I was once asked by one of my teachers - 'are Nairs the Brahmins of Kerala?' I answered in the negative, wondering if that answer had any bearing on how he would treat me in future (or how he had treated me till then, which was very favourable). I did not have further occasion to think it had any bearing on anything but I wish that question had not been asked and that that question did not form part of my memories of that institution which redefined education and thinking for me. I remember that at the graduation ceremony at that institution a whole array of medals are awarded to students. The reasons for each being awarded are read out as they are given away. Among them was one - the Director's Prize - which was awarded without any criteria being announced. I found out after attending two of those ceremonies that this was for the candidate who scored the highest marks from among students in the reserved categories. The reason I found out about this the year I graduated was that the student who was to be awarded that prize refused to accept it as (if I remember right) she was already eligible for some other awards in the merit categories and she did not feel that this one was of any particular relevance to her list of accomplishments. As far as I understand, the said prize was thereafter discontinued. And this was within the highest citadel of legal learning in the country - an institution that prides itself on teaching its students to pick apart the constitution and equips them to fight against all forms of discrimination.
I cannot imagine the humiliation of students forced out of classrooms to wait on tables at the Principal's restaurant. I cannot bring myself to think that there are Rohit Vemulas silently enduring insufferable, soul-searing insults within our classrooms. I cannot understand the world of caste privilege - or any other kind of privilege - that allows that to happen. We live in a world where parents are forced to think about the likelihood of their children being detained as adults at airports when they pick a name. So we have more and more cosmopolitan, implications-free names abounding in kindergartens now. And that is as it should be. Let another wall fall as newer ones are being built. I kept my 'Nayar' tag but I have ensured the caste tag is not propagated through me. That is the least I can do.
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