Between the Lines: On Names – Who Gets Named, Renamed, or Erased

Published every Friday, Between the Lines is a weekly column by Namrata. This week, she writes about names in South Asian Literature.

The first gift most of us receive is a name. It exists before we form any memory, language, or personality. Someone whispers it into existence long before we understand what it means. We grow into it, answer to it, sign it on school notebooks, hear it called across crowded railway platforms, see it printed on certificates, passports, prescriptions and gravestones. A name accompanies us through nearly every public moment of our lives, so faithfully that we rarely stop to consider how much power it carries. Only when a name changes or disappears, do we begin to notice it.

People shorten their names so strangers can pronounce them. Others reclaim spellings that had been flattened by bureaucracy or habit. Women decide whether to keep a surname after marriage, adopt another, or carry both. Writers publish under pen names. Actors reinvent themselves. Migrants discover that some names travel easily while others are repeatedly corrected, misheard or replaced. Families pass names down as inheritance. Institutions reduce people to numbers. Entire generations spend years trying to recover names that history neglected to record.