What's in a Name? Musing on given, acquired, and adopted names
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
by Nighat Na-koja
What’s in a name?
Quite a lot, it seems.
When I was a child we lived in Bangladesh. This was the 60’s, when it was still called East Pakistan. My name in my school was Nighat Sultana, the name I had been given by my Dadajaan. The school did not require me to list my father’s name as my surname.
When we moved to West Pakistan (now the only Pakistan) in 1972, after Bangladesh gained independence, my new school required my father’s name as my surname. So I became Nighat Sultana Majid.
When I got married, we were living in the United States. My husband was fine with me not taking on his name, his father’s surname actually, as my last name. This was the 80’s. We were in the United States and most married women were still taking on their husbands’ surnames upon marriage!
When my husband and I moved to Uttar Pradesh, India, in the mid-90s, in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition and subsequent Hindu-Muslim riots, my husband thought my Muslim-sounding name was unsafe, and he wanted to downplay our Hindu-Muslim marriage. You can’t reason with fanatics of any religious group, he said. I became N. Gandhi to deflect the attention of potential fanatics. For all practical purposes, like train travel and when introducing myself to people at his workplace, I became Mrs. Gandhi. My first name, if used at all, was reduced to the initial N.
Was I safer as N. Gandhi? Who’s to say? We imagined it would be a safer choice. It wasn’t much of a choice. The matter of my safety as a woman didn’t change—I wasn’t less prone to sexual harassment and the malevolent male gaze just because I was now Mrs. N. Gandhi.
When we visited my husband’s family in Gujarat, they said it was customary for a daughter-in-law to be given a different first name upon marriage. So they re-named me Nisha Gandhi, a safe-sounding Gujarati name, ostensibly for the purpose of saving face and deflecting unsavoury questions from the overly-inquisitive neighbours and relatives about my background.
There was nothing attention-grabbing about Nisha Gandhi, the wife of a Dr. Raj Gandhi and daughter-in-law of Dr and Mrs Gandhi. In my in-laws’ house everybody was good enough to still call me by my real first name. But in the presence of outsiders, I turned into Nisha. Since Nisha was just a temporary arrangement, as long as I was visiting my in-laws, I conceded to this change.
What’s in a name? my husband said. It’s just to make things easier. Just to ward off inquisitive busybodies.
Nevertheless, rumors persisted: Dr. Gandhi's son had married a Muslim woman? Was she Indian or not? What was she?
My mother-in-law, a traditionalist, wished I would legally take on my husband's name, as she had done. "I'm not changing my name," I declared. My passport and academic certificates remained resolutely Nighat Sultana Majid. Some small victory.
To be fair, my parents had insisted my husband take a Muslim name for the nikah ceremony. He became Abdul Rehman for the nikah but didn't change his name officially.
The tradition of a wife taking her husband's name is a legacy of our colonial past, not a native custom of the subcontinent, nor a strictly Muslim or Hindu practice. Many South Asian women keep their maiden names. It's often a matter of social class; the higher the class, the tighter the patriarchal grip, and the more likely the married woman is to adopt her husband's family name.
Of course, taking on the name of one's beloved out of love is an entirely different matter. But such egoless, love-driven name changes are rare in our self-obsessed century. Miraji, the Indian Urdu poet, whose birth name was Mohammad Sanaullah Dar, took on the name of his Hindu beloved, Mira, in the early 20th century. And in the 15th century, Shah Hussain, the Sufi poet of Punjab, changed his name to Madho Lal Hussain, to honor his Hindu lover.
However, droves of women, lacking any emotional connection to their husbands, still cling to their husband's name. "Mrs. So and So" grants a married woman her identity, social respectability, a stamp of approval from the patriarchy.
Reading Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies:Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, I finally understood the origins of this name-changing fixation. Coverture[1] laws, prevalent in 18th and 19th century Britain and the US, legally erased a woman's independent identity. It wasn't just her name; her entire person was fused with her husband's. She had no separate existence, no financial resources, nothing. Gender-role apartheid, culturally and religiously sanctioned. And when the English colonized India, coverture laws were conveniently extended to Indian women, too.
Rebecca explains what coverture did legally to women’s independent existence:
“Coverture meant that a woman's legal, economic, and social identity was “covered” by the legal, economic, and social identity of the man she married. A married woman was a feme covert and a single woman was a feme sole: meaning that the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs everything. “A man cannot grant anything to his wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant would suppose her separate existence; and to covenant with her, would be only to covenant with himself.” Wrote a famous 19th century lawmaker in a judgment passed to prevent a married woman lawyer had no legal right to practice her profession. Her primary profession was wifehood and motherhood."
Unlike the married woman who was a feme covert, he feme sole was the independent, single woman, used to dealing with her own life-crap. She was under nobody’s coverture, and belonged to nobody but herself.
In the late 1860s, Myra Bradwell (in the United States) petitioned
for a law license and argued that the 14th Amendment protected her
right to practice. The Illinois Supreme Court rejected her petition, ruling
that because she was married she had no legal right to operate on her own. When
she challenged the ruling, Justice Joseph Bradley wrote in his decision, “It
certainly cannot be affirmed, as a historical fact, that [the right to choose
one’s profession] has ever been established as one of the fundamental
privileges and immunities of the sex.” Rather, Bradley argued, “The paramount
destiny and mission of women are to fulfil the noble and benign offices of wife
and mother."
"Noble and benign offices of wife and mother." Indeed! One of the meanings of "benign" is non-threatening, and a lawyer, and a woman lawyer at that, could not be benign or non-threatening if she wanted to succeed in a male-dominated profession in the 1860s. Justice Bradley was right to feel unsettled by the prospect of benign wives and mothers giving up their benign and feminine domestic offices.
A 21st-century lawyer, Stephani Reid, wonders why only “an estimated 20 percent of American women opt to retain their birth name after marriage – actually a lower percentage than in the 1970s and 1980s.” Eight out of ten American women still prefer to legally take on their husband’s name, even though this name-changing process is full of time-wasting red tape. What makes 80% of married American women change their names upon marriage? It’s understandable why married women had to change their names in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Coverture, Stephanie explains, began upon the birth of a female baby – who was given her father’s surname – and could only change upon the marriage of that female, at which point her name was automatically changed to that of her new husband. But coverture laws also prevented women from entering into contracts, engaging in litigation, participating in business, or exercising ownership over real estate or personal property.[2]
Father’s name dropped, husband’s taken—a seemingly minor loss. What’s the big deal? Many women, myself included, are guilty of trivializing and passivity. I have trivialized and remained passive during my name changes. Glossed over, justified, or remained in denial over the changes in order to maintain the benign offices of wifehood and motherhood! How much longer must we enact our noble and benign offices?
***
Jo dikhta hai, wo bikta hai!
What is seen, is sold!
Sometimes my name changes came about for very prosaic reasons. With the publication of my first short story collection, Ghalib at Dusk, my editor thought that if I changed my name to Nighat Gandhi, it would create an intrigue factor. The book might sell better. I was an unknown writer, and for a short story collection by an unknown writer to grab the potential book buyer’s attention, it had to have something unique about it. Hence the name change.
As a shaky first-time published author, I was anxious to tick all the right boxes. If my first book sold well, I could imagine having my second book published. This was before the advent of self-publishing. I had faced multiple rejections from publishers. I was tired of leaving printed writing samples with receptionists at publishing houses. This was before it became customary to email writing samples. I was like Hagar running in the desert in search of water. God took pity on her after her seventh run and made a spring erupt from the mountainside to quench her son’s thirst. Publishing houses were much less benevolent. No Indian publishing house wanted to take a risk with a short story collection by an unknown author.
Short story collections don’t sell unless you’ve established your reputation as a novelist first. “Why don’t you write a novel first? they suggested. Or a novella?
But I am not a novel-writing kind of writer. If I’d said that, it wouldn’t have helped matters.
But somehow, despite the persistence of an inimical literary marketplace for short story collections, Ghalib at Dusk and Other Stories, was published by Westland Books, mostly because my editor, Renuka Chatterjee seemed to believe in me as a writer.
As an act of self-assertion, I told her, I wanted "M" inserted as my middle initial. M for Majid. The best-selling author, J.K. Rowling, didn’t reveal her first names on the advice of her publisher, so she would be thought of as a male author! I felt a little less guilty then.
Becoming Nighat M. Gandhi didn’t boost my literary success. I wonder if N. M. Gandhi would’ve fared better? Even though my publisher transported me to the celebrated Jaipur Literature Festival at their expense, it didn’t do much for Ghalib at Dusk. I met a writer, at the literature festival who said he left copies of his books at airport bookshops. He also paid for his own book launches in several cities. And revisited city bookshops to chat with the managers and make sure his book was prominently displayed.
Jo dikhta hai, wo bikta hai, he summarized the capitalist-literary marketplace. (What is seen, is sold)
I had done no such thing. I had organized and paid for no book launches in any city. Not promoted my book on social media. Nor left copies of it at airport bookshops. Not surprisingly, no second edition of Ghalib at Dusk came out. Surprisingly, it did garner some decent reviews in respectable newspapers, and one blurb even called me the Chekhov of Allahabad. The book at least sold enough copies to allay my own and the publisher’s doubts about short story collections by unknown authors being unsellable.
I was offered a second book contract by Westland. The second book, though, was non-fiction, a travelogue-memoir. The title was Alternative Realities: Love in the Lives of Muslim Women.
I signed the contract for Alternative Realities as Nighat M
Gandhi. Since the first book also had that name, no name change was possible now. My self-confidence as a writer was shaky. I
was relieved I didn’t have to pay them for unsold copies of Ghalib at Dusk. I
received an advance for the second book, but it was barely enough to cover my
travels in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India by train and bus. They were taking a
calculated risk with my second book. The calculation was perhaps this: in the post-9/11 world, everybody was dying to know more about Muslims. What are they really like? So an insider's view, assuming I was a Muslim, would be marketable.
But my anxious, jittery self-talk went thus:
At least they think my book is worth publishing. At least, they even gave me an advance. They are willing to take a risk with me. I must work hard. Must write the best book I can.
When a Polish translation of Alternative Realities was published, the Polish publisher insisted on putting a veiled woman’s photograph on the cover, despite my objections. I had to give in to their marketing logic:
Oh! what the hell! If the book gets read by some Polish people and they un-learn some stereotypes about Muslim women in general, isn’t that what matters? And I might even get a third book contract.
Name changes and veiled Muslim women on the Polish edition
of Alternative Realities notwithstanding, I didn’t land a third
book contract with Westland. A few years after Alternative Realities was published, Westland closed shop, acquired by Amazon. And
that was the end of my publishing career with Westland Books.
***
From Nighat M. Gandhi to.....
Finally, the reason for the above digression is: what do I wish to name myself? What should my literary name be? Here are some ideas I’m toying with:
- I shall drop husband’s and father’s name (No Gandhi. No Majid).
- I shall only keep my given first and middle names. (Nighat Sultana).
- I shall adopt a new surname (Na-koja).
Henceforth, I will be Nighat Sultana Na-koja.
Na-koja is a Farsi word, meaning nowhere. The 17th-century sabk-e-hindi poet Bedil used nakoja in one of his couplets:
Taba-e-sarkash nakoja taqleed-e-hamwari kunad
(Rebellious natures nowhere follow conventional paths)
I too am wont to not follow very conventional paths. I’m a nowhere kind of person. I’m neither here nor there, neither this nor that. I tend to be difficult to put in a box. Nowhereness suits me because it is a position of rebellious insubordination. Nowhereness also speaks to my geographical, political, religious, and nationalistic queerness and non-belongingness.
Therefore, dear readers, Nighat Sultana Na-koja shall be my literary name from now on.
***
[1] Catherine Allgor: Coverture—The Word You Probably Don’t Know But Should
https://www.womenshistory.org/articles/coverture-word-you-probably-dont-know-should#:~:text=Because%20they%20did%20not%20legally,own%20or%20work%20in%20businesses.
[2] Stephanie Reid https://washingtonweddingday.com/history-behind-maiden-vs-married-names
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