Pandemic Parenting Pains: On Baby Names
Shakespeare once wrote: “What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. Or as somebody once put it, shit covered in perfume still smells like shit. I should know — despite loading every diaper with a copious amount of scented baking soda into the diaper pail, a mere whiff from the open pail causes blood to pour out of my eyes and my hair to fall out.
But, I digress.
Shakespeare may have laid down the pithy and progressive Rose Rule about names. But as most of us parents know, children are not roses (no, they are the apples of our eyes) and therefore do not need to follow anybody’s Rose Rules. In fact, for the longest time and across much of the world, children’s naming conventions have followed the far older “Father’s Rule”: The child only smells sweet if they are bestowed a patronymic. Patronymics or names derived from that of a father or male ancestor, are most commonly observed in a person’s family or last name. When you came into this world, your last name was, most likely, derived from your father’s name. In most cultures, it is customary for a woman to change her last name to that of her partner’s (actually, partner’s father’s name) after marriage. Patronymics are so ubiquitous, we notice them only if they fail to be followed.
When Asti was pregnant with our child, we spent a lot of time thinking about baby names. Initially, I was very keen that the baby should have my last name — Vaidyanathan. I said she could choose whatever first name she wanted as long as it went well with a “Vaidyanathan” last name. That proposal was immediately shot down.
“Why yours? Why not mine? Besides, yours is too long anyway — Bhatt is short and simple.”
I said, “Um… because the child would become the Bhatt of all jokes?”
“That’s ok, it will teach them resilience and to laugh at themselves”
I said, “Oh, well how about the fact that you have the privilege of carrying the baby for 9 months, experiencing the miracle of growing a tiny human inside you — an experience that I can never have?”
That did not go over very well, I must admit.
We considered bestowing hyphenated versions of our last names to the child. But I kept imagining the various inevitable truncations that would result from myriad bureaucracies whose outdated IT systems restrict last names to arbitrarily short and varying lengths or would disallow certain “special characters” like hyphens resulting in all sorts of terrible hybrids. I’ve seen this happen more times than I can count with my own ‘full name’ (Pavanapuresan Pushpagiri Vaidyanathan!).
We then decided to eschew both our last names. Practical problems of choice and lengths aside, our last names also carry significant caste baggage. Having been born into enormous caste privileges ourselves (which are frequently signaled through names), we wanted to remove that signal from our child’s name. Admittedly, one’s name is but one of many caste markers but it is a significant one and often the first marker that is encountered when meeting somebody.
So, if not our last names, what then?
Something else obviously, but how to narrow down the seemingly infinite choices to a manageable few? Here, we drew inspiration from 2 main sources. When my postdoc mentor at MIT became pregnant with their child, they chose a last name that was neither the father’s or the mother’s; instead, and seemingly whimsically, they named her Rocket. A few years later, when an AID couple — Anitha and Dhiraj — became parents, they named their child, Akshara Kranti, despite the fact that neither the mother nor the father are named Kranti. We had always been very impressed by these small actions against the prevailing child naming conventions of the day.
In addition, we had yet another reason to absolutely love the name “Akshara Kranti”. Unlike most other Hindu names that are derived from the names of Hindu god/desses or human qualities, the full name, Akshara Kranti, had a beautiful meaning: Undying Revolution. They had in turn, been deeply influenced by another AID couple who, eschewing traditional naming conventions, had named their child, “Akshat Aman” (Unbroken Peace). As Anitha recollects: “I remember it vividly because it is such a beautiful name for a beautiful child!”. We decided that our child also needed to have a name that actually meant something.
We wanted an “Indian” name, grounded in our (the parents’) culture but it also needed to be pronounceable by the average Western tongue. We settled on Azad (of Hindi/Urdu origin, pronounced: Ah-zahd and meaning Free) for a last name. ‘Azadi’ (Freedom) was a frequent chant at many of the protest marches we had attended over the years and in our minds would always be associated with the power of the people.
We needed a first name that would go well with Azad. We also needed the first name to be gender neutral (more on gender neutrality in a future post).
Now, let me tell you something about Asti and me. It routinely takes us weeks of ‘discussion’ to agree on the right color of table cloth to buy. You can imagine how look it took to agree on a name that fit the above criteria. We solicited dozens of potential first names from family and friends. We eventually landed on Zubaan (of Hindi/Urdu origin, pronounced: Zoo-bahn and meaning Voice) as a potential candidate. ‘Zubaan Azad’ seemed to have a nice ring to it and meant “One whose voice is free” — which, given that our child would be an American citizen and thus born into enormous privilege, seemed appropriate. We hope to teach them to use that privilege to amplify the voices of those who may not be as free.
First and last name: done. What about a middle name?
In the Gujarati naming convention, middle names are derived from the first name of the father (hello again, patronymic!). For instance, if we had followed Gujarati tradition, our child would have been named Zubaan Pavanapuresanbhai Azad. *shudder* Obviously not something I would wish on anyone, of course. Asti’s middle name, bucking Gujarati conventions, was instead derived from her mother’s name. Inspired by this, we kept our child’s middle name as Nila to honor our mothers, Nimitta and Lalitha. Not only was it a tiny step forward in smashing the patriarchy but Nila, which in Tamil means moon, also introduced a South Indian touch to an otherwise Hindi/Urdu name.
Zubaan Nila Azad — we finally had a name 2 weeks before the due date! But in some corner of my mind, it still rankled to ‘give up’ the Vaidyanathan last name. And then we went into labor: ~12 hrs waiting for the cervix to dilate, ~5 hrs of increasingly painful contractions followed by 3.5 hrs of intense labor. Watching a woman, especially your life partner, give birth is a traumatic, humbling, inspiring and life-altering experience. It really brings home the insignificant role that a man plays in the whole baby-making process. Men are largely by-standers in a year-long drama in which the woman undergoes body- and mind-altering pregnancy, followed by a physically and mentally exhausting delivery process and then has to adjust to a postpartum phase focused solely on nursing the child.
Anyway, at 2AM that night, when the baby lustily cried its way into the world, it was pretty clear to me that I had no business expecting the baby to carry any part of my name. And that is how our child got to be named the Voice of a Free Moon.
Notes:
South Indian naming conventions: In many South Indian communities, the father’s first name becomes the child’s last name (Vaidyanathan is my dad’s first name). Further, some communities like mine, follow a naming tradition in which the first son and first daughter are given the same first name as the corresponding paternal grandparent, while the second son and daughter are named after the corresponding maternal grandparents. In a small village setting, someone’s full name was usually sufficient to identify the person, their family genealogy and caste in one fell swoop.
