19-Mar-2014, 08:26 AM
Sometime back, an Annoyed Picard meme was shared in the Nirmukta Facebook group with the text, "How the f*** did Jesus find guys named Peter, John, James, Matthew, Andrew, Philip, Thomas and Simon in the Middle East?" Such a smart alec meme is readily outsmarted. First off, there's a duplication in the list for it was Simon who was later awarded the epithet of Peter. All of the names, as listed, are only latter-day anglicizations of Hebrew-derived and Greek-influenced names (eg. Hebrew Ya'aqov --> Greek Iakobos --->Latin Iacomus --->English James; Greek Andreas ---> English Andew). The fact that Simon (with a Hebrew name) and Andrew (a Greek-derived name) are said to be brothers, has been seen as evidence of some degree of Hellenization and cosmopolitanism in the Jerusalem of the time, given the influences of several empires from the Babylonians to the Romans. As the video This Land is Mine by Nina Paley illustrates, the history of the Middle East is one of immigration, alas, often by fighting rather than floating populations. The smacked-down meme still leaves us with an uneasy reminder, of the proneness of netizens to make assumptions about the ethnic antecedents, personal histories and political leanings of persons just on reading their names off a profile page. Staying with the Middle and Near East, here is an earlier Nirmukta blog-post titled Consciousness-raising and names, cautioning readers against making such assumptions.
Just in time to stave off any smugness that may have resulted from seeing through the naivete in the meme, I happened to remember a mea culpa moment where the sound of a name was enough to unspool a made-up biography in my head. When I first encountered 'K Anthony Appiah' in the notes section of Amartya Sen's 'The Idea of Justice', I had in spite of myself thought, "Appiah! Sounds uncannily Tamil to me! There's even an initial prefix, perhaps standing for a native village. Maybe from Tamil Nadu or Sri Lanka...". Later, even when I saw the full name 'Kwame Anthony Appiah' flashed while watching the documentary The Examined Life, I was thinking, "Kwame? Maybe it adds up...There were many Tamil-speaking immigrants in African colonies since colonial times and perhaps he's of mixed heritage." I had to only watch that documentary a few minutes longer to disabuse myself of my fanciful and baseless out-of-Tamil-Nadu theory regarding someone who's a Ghanaian-American philosopher of Ghanian-English parentage (whose work on ethics and philanthropy is discussed in the forums here.)
Let us now move from the Middle East and Africa to Indian names where stakes are larger and more varied than having one's nationality occasionally wrongly guessed while traveling abroad. Some workplace and marketplace situations arising out of name-related stereotyping, listed here without the intention of making an insensitive comparison but only to illustrate the staggering range of severity from minor annoyance to downright harassment, range from the mild nuisance of lifestyles assumed from names to demonstrable hiring discrimination based on names printed in CVs.
The impact of names in the social milieu of India, characterized as it is by limited social mobilization and constriction to caste-locations, has been discussed threadbare elsewhere in the forums, unfortunately more truculently than trenchantly given the sensitive nature of the issue. Speaking of surnames and social mobility, a strategy besides erasure that has been experimented with in some Indian settings is reshuffling, as in the example in this TOI news item courtesy of the late Marathi poet and translator Dilip Chitre.
There is an additional layer of irony in such controversies when Ashis Nandy or Arundhati Roy are condemned as representing a 'Brahmanical intelligentsia', apparently unaware of the fact that Ashis Nandy was raised in a Christian family and Arundhati Roy, who gets her last name from an absentee father, was raised by Syrian Christian maternal grandparents in Kottayam. So often in comment-trail slugfests, 'Roy and Guha' are panned as 'Bengali leftists' and this is true of neither, since both parents of Ramachandra Guha are Tamil and his last name comes from a Ramayana character.
When I ask "What's in a name?" in the post title, it is not as a rhetorical question or with the intent of dismissing concerns in the divided society of India about vestigeal signifiers of privilege. It is just that those questions are better addressed keeping the discussion systemic rather than letting it be personalized, keeping in mind that names given to people maybe artifacts of where they were raised and what format was conventional in school-enrollment, and not as readily altered as screen-names or display-names, and therefore exactly grounds for imputing personal culpability of some kind. Pico Iyer says he cannot speak a word of Tamil, and it would be ironic indeed if someone is put off by the 'casteist label' in the author's name in a copy of Falling off the map, thus missing out on a read that endearingly humanizes unsung and globally marginalized communities. Anyone who's able to read this page has, at least via the conversations that the Internet enables, an opportunity to put into practice what Kwame Anthony Appiah calls for here, a cosmopolitanism that offers immeasurably more possibilities than that of Jerusalem in the early Roman empire where we began this discussion. These are possibilities of mutually enriching exchange too valuable to squander in name-calling, of names that are ours by accidents of history.
Just in time to stave off any smugness that may have resulted from seeing through the naivete in the meme, I happened to remember a mea culpa moment where the sound of a name was enough to unspool a made-up biography in my head. When I first encountered 'K Anthony Appiah' in the notes section of Amartya Sen's 'The Idea of Justice', I had in spite of myself thought, "Appiah! Sounds uncannily Tamil to me! There's even an initial prefix, perhaps standing for a native village. Maybe from Tamil Nadu or Sri Lanka...". Later, even when I saw the full name 'Kwame Anthony Appiah' flashed while watching the documentary The Examined Life, I was thinking, "Kwame? Maybe it adds up...There were many Tamil-speaking immigrants in African colonies since colonial times and perhaps he's of mixed heritage." I had to only watch that documentary a few minutes longer to disabuse myself of my fanciful and baseless out-of-Tamil-Nadu theory regarding someone who's a Ghanaian-American philosopher of Ghanian-English parentage (whose work on ethics and philanthropy is discussed in the forums here.)
Let us now move from the Middle East and Africa to Indian names where stakes are larger and more varied than having one's nationality occasionally wrongly guessed while traveling abroad. Some workplace and marketplace situations arising out of name-related stereotyping, listed here without the intention of making an insensitive comparison but only to illustrate the staggering range of severity from minor annoyance to downright harassment, range from the mild nuisance of lifestyles assumed from names to demonstrable hiring discrimination based on names printed in CVs.
The impact of names in the social milieu of India, characterized as it is by limited social mobilization and constriction to caste-locations, has been discussed threadbare elsewhere in the forums, unfortunately more truculently than trenchantly given the sensitive nature of the issue. Speaking of surnames and social mobility, a strategy besides erasure that has been experimented with in some Indian settings is reshuffling, as in the example in this TOI news item courtesy of the late Marathi poet and translator Dilip Chitre.
Quote:Since surnames identify, dalits have resorted to the practice of 'upcasting' their names or taking on Brahmin surnames. Like the boy who used to deliver our milk has taken on Chitre as his surname.A case study of how constriction to a caste-location seems to defy even radical lifestyle redesign, going well-beyond truncating or altering names, is available in this autobiographical piece by Navayana founder S Anand (and also in an account by a forum member here that is similar in intent but nowhere as close in fervour). Quoting from the account of S Anand (who, incidentally, acknowledges flipsides and ambiguous outcomes of name-changes):
Quote:Not that a conscious rescripting of the ‘personal’ makes me cease to be a brahmin. For all effective purposes, I shall remain one. I cannot erase the unearned privileges being born in this caste have given me. I believe caste will continue to function for me not as an originary identity but as a social location that I cannot often exit.Fast forward some nine years from that anguished post to the present day to Navayana's publication of Dr. Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste, and the 'no exit' situation Anand laments is on display in the hostile responses to the publication that emerge from and are directed at caste-locations viewed as static, and at their construed occupants, here S Anand and Arundhati Roy.
There is an additional layer of irony in such controversies when Ashis Nandy or Arundhati Roy are condemned as representing a 'Brahmanical intelligentsia', apparently unaware of the fact that Ashis Nandy was raised in a Christian family and Arundhati Roy, who gets her last name from an absentee father, was raised by Syrian Christian maternal grandparents in Kottayam. So often in comment-trail slugfests, 'Roy and Guha' are panned as 'Bengali leftists' and this is true of neither, since both parents of Ramachandra Guha are Tamil and his last name comes from a Ramayana character.
When I ask "What's in a name?" in the post title, it is not as a rhetorical question or with the intent of dismissing concerns in the divided society of India about vestigeal signifiers of privilege. It is just that those questions are better addressed keeping the discussion systemic rather than letting it be personalized, keeping in mind that names given to people maybe artifacts of where they were raised and what format was conventional in school-enrollment, and not as readily altered as screen-names or display-names, and therefore exactly grounds for imputing personal culpability of some kind. Pico Iyer says he cannot speak a word of Tamil, and it would be ironic indeed if someone is put off by the 'casteist label' in the author's name in a copy of Falling off the map, thus missing out on a read that endearingly humanizes unsung and globally marginalized communities. Anyone who's able to read this page has, at least via the conversations that the Internet enables, an opportunity to put into practice what Kwame Anthony Appiah calls for here, a cosmopolitanism that offers immeasurably more possibilities than that of Jerusalem in the early Roman empire where we began this discussion. These are possibilities of mutually enriching exchange too valuable to squander in name-calling, of names that are ours by accidents of history.