Go ahead, try to say my name

The world has a long history of anglicising the names of ethnic or racial communities for their own convenience. Representation pic

CYG. Those are my initials. C stands for Chitoor. G stands for Gopinath. But there is really no simple way in English to spell out what the Y stands for. The closest you can get is Yegnanarayan. If you pronounced that, you'd say my middle name all wrong.
I can spell it in Tamil, easy - .

I can spell it in Hindi, easy - .

But in English, I'd have to use phonetic spelling and place a tilde above the 'n' to signal a certain nasality when you say Yagna, and write it as Yagñanārāyan·.

However, even that wouldn't get it right. N with a tilde is pronounced like a ‘ny', as in mañana (manyana), the Spanish word for tomorrow. But in my middle name, the 'n' sound is to be heard while you're saying the ‘gy' sound. It's ‘gya' said through the nose.

In all three languages, however you spell it, that was my father's last name. He must have faced similar problems and shouldered them equally sportingly. His friends, though, just called him Yeggu, which I'm not sure is an improvement.

Everyone stumbles over my middle name, even Indian immigration officials who could probably say it right if it was spelt in an Indian script. When abroad, I take a certain diabolical pleasure in watching people wrestle with my name. The most comical of them was surely two tipsy Welsh policemen who spent five minutes twisting their tongues into knots before deciding that I could not be up to any good with a name like that.

My name creates other problems. Since my Aadhaar and PAN cards require me to spell it out in its entirety in the western format, many assume (incorrectly) that my first name is my given name and summon me as ‘Mr Chitoor', an aggravation I bear stoically.

They're wrong, of course. Chitoor is a small town, in Kerala or in Andhra Pradesh, to which some ancestor of mine was connected. I was born in Kottayam and my father in Srivaikuntam. Neither of us has ever been to Chitoor though it's in our names.

I am always patient when explaining to the less fortunate that Tamilians follow the Coordinate System of Nomenclature. My name, parsed, tells my story - behold Gopinath, son of Yegnanarayan and somehow linked with the village of Chitoor.

There must have been a time when that would have spoken volumes about me.

Why am I getting so knotted up about names? Because colonisation. The world has a long and discreditable history of anglicising the names of ethnic or racial communities for their own convenience - and incidentally erasing their ‘otherness', uniqueness and cultural histories.

To make matters worse, we seem to prefer Anglicised nicknames even 75 years after the Brits left us to our own devices. Siddharth still becomes Sid, Bharat is Bertie and Krishnamurthy feels anointed as Chris just as Anjali is Angie, Samjukta is Sammie and Kirtana is Kitty.

Until India was colonised, Indian communities were served well enough by their diverse and distinct naming conventions. With the British came their need for names they could pronounce in formats they could record. This required all Indians to somehow decide on a first or given name and a family name, in that order. North Indian names fit in easily, since they already followed that format.

But what about other communities? Telugu names start with the ‘house' or family name, usually derived from a place or occupation, with the given name second, and sometimes a third name indicating caste - like Neelam Sanjiva Reddy.

Goans use the village name as a surname after adding ‘kar' to it, like Bijapurkar or Savarkar.

Other nations have refused to conform. The Hindus of Bali automatically get their first names based on their order of birth - first-borns are Wayan, second-borns are Made, third-borns are Nyoman and fourth-borns are Ketut. The second name is the given name. Guess what? There's no family name. It's awfully hard to trace family histories in Bali.

Icelanders don't have surnames either. They have instead a National Register of Persons, listing all names that may be used. You have to apply with a fee to use a brand new name.

Tamilian names, such as mine, also don't have surnames. Instead, like Thais and Poles, we have long, unpronounceable monickers that refuse to be standardised and fit into acceptable westernised naming conventions.

Under pressure to simplify, simplify, simplify, all my siblings did, becoming simply Narayans - easy to read and say, but meaningless culturally. My brother was Chitoor Yegnanarayan Ramaswamy before he caved and became Ramu Narayan.

I decided to take the road less travelled. My name reminds me that I am not alone, that I have an origin and ancestors, a place where it all started and a culture that nurtured me. It should surely take more than a British viceroy to change that.

Besides, only a handful of human beings have the initials CY.

Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com

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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper