During the 21st anniversary of the Gujarat riots, a diligent reader wrote to ask whether it was mere coincidence that the fictional District Magistrate in my novel, Riot, who deals with a riot stirred up by the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation, is named Lakshman. No, I replied, the choice of name, with its obvious mythological resonance, was quite deliberate, as was the fact that Lakshman’s daughter is called Rekha, since her existence delimits his freedom of choice. And, while we are in the confessional, let us admit as well that it is not just happenstance that the American girl who comes to do good in India bears the surname of Hart.
In Hollywood
The author who chooses a character’s name carelessly — by opening two pages of a telephone book and randomly combining the results, as one writer claimed to do — does himself and his readers a disservice. The movie world has long understood the aura of names. Hollywood stars have been changing their names for decades — the macho cowboy John Wayne was born Marion Michael Morrison, a prissy moniker that would have sat ill on a saddle, and the sultry Marilyn Monroe was legally baptised with the far too homely name of Norma Jean Mortenson. Later, Bernie Schwartz took on the more glamorous screen name Tony Curtis, for reasons well understood by Woody Allen (born Allen Konigsberg), Dean Martin (Dino Crocetti), Fred Astaire (Frederick Austerlitz) and Cary Grant (Archibald Leach). Could Boris Karloff have been half as sinister as William Henry Pratt, the name he was born with? Or Jerry Lewis as amiably silly if he had stayed Joseph Levitch? Or Ava Gardner as glamorously alluring as mere Lucy Johnson?
For people’s names have associations of their own that cannot be wished away, a fact of which film producers are keenly aware. Legendary Hollywood mogul David O. Selznick was born without a middle name but added the middle initial O for effect — “as in GOD”, he said modestly. Ray Kroc, who bought McDonald’s, wisely realised he would sell more Big Macs than Big Krocs, and so adopted the name whose famous golden arches (from the letter M, absent in Ray’s own name) have overseen the world’s best-selling burgers for decades.
Many novelists have been just as aware of the power of the naming process. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for instance, first wrote a story about a keen-eyed detective named Sherrinford Holmes and his doughty friend Dr Ormond Sacker, before realising that the names he had chosen “gave no inkling of character”. It took some experimentation before Conan Doyle settled upon the sharp-edged “Sherlock” to replace the fussy “Sherrinford”, and decided that “elementary, my dear Watson” sounded far more solid and convincing than “elementary, my dear Sacker”.
Shakespeare always had a keen ear for the connotations of the names he gave his characters; he wanted them to convey some of the qualities the actors’ abilities alone might not have done. (Think of “Shylock” and “Malvolio,” “Iago” and “Sir Toby Belch”). Charles Dickens elevated the practice of naming to an art, with characters like the unctuous Uriah Heep, the martinet Gradgrind, the booming rascal Bounderby, the naive Martin Chuzzlewit and the crooked Squeers. His place names were just as cleverly chosen: the horrendous boarding school in “Nicholas Nickleby” is called “Dotheboys Hall” — if you do not get it, say the name aloud, pausing after the second and fifth letters).
And in India
The art is also a science these days, since the study of the significance of proper nouns has grown in importance and respectability in recent years, becoming a subject in itself, known as onomastics. I am all in favour of this new academic endeavour, especially given Yogi Adityanath’s recent efforts in the field. The desire to replace any and all names that reek of association with the Muslim past have converted Allahabad to Prayagraj and Mughalsarai to Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Junction.
The central government, not to be outdone, has renamed the Mughal Gardens Amrit Udyan, though the flowers do not smell any different. If the Bharatiya Janata Party has its way, Ahmedabad might soon have to be rebaptised Karnavati, and Mr. Adityanath says Hyderabad ought to be Bhagyanagar. Prime Minister Narendra Modi even asked why the Gandhis did not use Indiraji’s father’s surname instead. If she and her descendants had remained Nehru instead of Gandhi, might India’s political history have been different?
The question is a frivolous one. But then Indians are often exceptions to all the western assumptions about the impact of names, whether on voters, readers or movie audiences. After all, while conventional wisdom says names should be easy to pronounce and remember, unpronounceability has rarely been a bar to political success in our country, especially since what is a simple enough name in one part of India is a tongue-twister in another: just ask a random selection of U.P.ites to repeat the name of the late Dravidian stalwart Nedunchezhian! Next, pick 10 South Indians and get them to say “Jawaharlal” — at least nine out of 10 will fail to elongate the second of the four “a”s. (And in reverse, most North Indians struggle to pronounce the name of my constituency, Thiruvananthapuram). On the Indian literary firmament, the gifted Arundhati Roy managed to make a bestseller out of characters named Esthappen and Rahel, names few of her readers have encountered before or since, and quite devoid of Dickensian associations in most people’s minds. So much for the painstaking lessons of Conan Doyle or Shakespeare.
And as for the Indian movie world, some actors did adopt new labels of convenience, but it may be best not to read too much into whether Dilip Kumar would have enjoyed a different sort of career as Yusuf Khan, the name he abandoned as he made his way in Bollywood. It is difficult to make the case that a Hindu name was necessary for a romantic hero to appeal to the majority audience. Certainly a series of unrelated Khans — Feroz, Amjad, Shah Rukh, Salman, Saif Ali and Aamir — have not felt the need to reinvent themselves (and one who did, “Sanjay”, added the surname “Khan” later in his career to create one of filmdom’s more secular screen credits). And let us not forget that the highly successful Muslim actresses Waheeda Rehman, Nargis, Saira Banu and Mumtaz, not to mention the more recent Zeenat Aman, Parveen Babi, Shabana Azmi and Tabu, have proved repeatedly that Indian cinegoers look at actors’ faces, not their faiths.
So it will be a while before we start issuing Bharatiya degrees in onomastics. Still, in a land where a Shiv Sena ideologue called himself Thackeray, a DMK Chief Minister is proud to answer to the moniker of Stalin, a rising politician took the name of his profession and called himself Pilot, and a Minister, the late Murasoli Maran, proudly bore a first name that was the title of the magazine he used to edit, any aspiring desi onomast might first need a PhD in Indian politics. And even then he will be unable to explain the foresight of a Gujarati parent named Modi naming his son Narendra, so that the first syllables of each amount to a sacred Hindu invocation. Om Namo Name-aha?!
Shashi Tharoor, a third-term elected Member of Parliament (Congress party) for Thiruvananthapuram, is the prize-winning author of 24 books, including ‘Pride, Prejudice and Punditry: the Essential Shashi Tharoor’
