Kamal Ghorui
Adults ditch their names for many reasons, rooted in commerce, rebellion, and many things in between
Firoz Anwar Banisrael, whose name appeared in yesterday’s TOI, had obviously taken some liberties with the name his family had given him.
Such acts of self-authorship are a nice balm to all the handwringing over the zeitgeist of individualism being under threat today. Birth names are given long before a person really arrives into their personhood.
When you edit these as an adult, legally or just socially, you announce an autonomous self-definition, sort of super loudly from a lectern.
Commonly, we think of this choice within entertainment industry terms. Mahjabeen Bano became Meena Kumari, Jamie Foxx used to be Eric Marlon Bishop. A celebrity name is a key piece of their audiovisual branding.
It’s a market calculation about what will look good on posters, or sell more movie/concert tickets. And the next top-of-mind notion is numerology. Thanks to that dubious ‘science’, we have Sureesh and Raajjeev, Priyaa and Ppoonam.
But often, things are less cosmetic, and more earnestly political. Leon Trotsky took the name of his Odessa prison guard, marking both a break from his past, and commitment to revolutionary activities. For Ngugi wa Thiong’o, this was a decolonisation of his Christian self. Muhammad Ali rejected his “slave name”.
Such renames can act as a psychological boundary between the person one was raised to be, and the person one has chosen to become.
Women revert to maiden names loudly, after bad marriages. Dalits shed surnames that encode caste, often choosing ‘Gautam’, after the Buddha.
Among Jews, Moishe became Morris, Rivka became Ruth, in negotiations between survival and memory. Non-binary individuals become River or Sage to say: ‘I do not fit your categories.’
The deepest idea running through all these choices is, whoever controls your name, controls your story.
Where imposed names feel violent, chosen ones can offer a tenderness, which may be strange to others, but is precious to the self.
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