Dropping Names

Last names,the acquiring and dropping of them,are pretty crucial to self-fashioning projects. It’s the classic American arc of reinvention and renewal,casting off the heavy stones of family and background to make yourself over. It’s also the showbiz norm — whether it was Norma Jeane or Yusuf Khan,it was utterly conventional to pick a new name and make up a persona.

And certainly,there is something powerful about a single,and singular,name. Mayawati,for instance,is the name of a free agent,unencumbered by patriarchal millstones.

The X in Malcolm X stood for the emptiness of the African name he never knew,which had been stolen by “the white slavemaster name which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal forebears”.

Then there was that lovely recursive loop,“the artist formerly known as Prince”,who rejected his former name because he didn’t want to be a record label’s chattel.

Permanent patronyms are part of the arsenal of modern statecraft,much like standard weights and measures,uniform legal codes,land surveys,etc. — as James C. Scott writes,they are part of the project to impose legibility,make citizens easily readable by the state. At least until the 14th century,before an exhaustive Florentine census,Europe was unfamiliar with the idea — first names were combined with occupation (Miller,Taylor) or location (Edgewood,Bush) or some other marker. Only a few grand families had any real name-recall. Later,as states became more sophisticated,it became essential to have a fixed last name,to simplify administration.

But for all that,there’s still a great profusion of naming systems around the world — Burma,Indonesia,Malaysia have all stubbornly resisted the “my name-my father’s/husband’s-name” template,even though it makes life easier for bureaucracies. We know that in the Middle East,ibn or bin/bint for “son/daughter of” or abu for “father of” is used as a marker; in Ireland “Mc” means “son of”; and “O” means “grandson of”,Iceland follows its own old-Norse system. South Indian names are even more slippery — you essentially have only one name,and an initial that could stand for your father’s name or your family home,or village. In many of these places,last names that gave away caste information have been substituted. (But still,last names in India encode great detail about social antecedents. People still use it to slot and file you).

But the question of last names presents special choices and complications for women. My pink debit card,in fact,doesn’t even have a last name,because my bank also believes in the instability of women’s surnames. In the US,women who held on to their maiden names used to be called Lucy Stoners,after the suffragette who first did it in 1855. It was a radical assertion of autonomy that has now been normalised,to extent that many women now “freely choose” to change their names after marriage,because that battle’s been won. “I just prefer the sound of it,” say some of them.

Fair enough,but a name is not just a convenient label to be stuck on and peeled off at whim. The fact that women’s grip on their own surnames is looser has significant implications — it’s harder to establish your presence in history,in the public record. There’s a great paper by legal scholar Yofi Tirosh,on how naming conventions affect personhood and substantive legal rights,in the European Court of Human Rights. Tirosh explains how editors of Virginia Woolf’s diaries found it hugely difficult to trace the female artists and writers she encountered,because women were only listed as Miss or Mrs.

Of course,many women now hyphenate their father’s and husbands names in a patriarchal twofer,and avoid the question altogether. And then you see little children with double-barrelled surnames,which seems like the only fair thing to do — except when they grow up and get married to other people with long hyphenated names. What’s one to do,really? I know at least two people who have excised their last names altogether,as declarations of independence.

You can take that further,like one of my former classmates who went by the name of a science fiction character,scorning her “mundane name” (subcultural types call boring real-world things mundane,it’s like saying Muggle). Virtual environments are,of course,full of inventive names and descriptors,a shimmering play of possibility.

Advice columnist Cary Tennis suggests imagining different names — a stripper name,a criminal alias — to imagine other ways of living. The logic of pen names is its own fascinating story. But whether you choose a new name as mask and subterfuge,or as a clean start,don’t imagine for an instant that it’s a fully free choice.

amulya.gopalakrishnan@expressindia.com