What’s in a surname?

It’s at the third box where the person collecting the form stops, looks up at me as if I were an alien, and barks: “Surname madam! Write surname!”

It’s always the same—always. Every application form is the same. It has three boxes—one for my name, one for my father’s name and the other for my surname.


A surname is that thing that is tagged after your name. It is sometimes short, sometimes long, sometimes a little weird and sometimes outright funny, too.

And it’s also something that I and many others are deprived of.

Jyoti Krishnan, Shruti Manoharan, Shubhashree Mohan, and, of course, the writer of this piece, have no choice but to use our father’s first name as their surname. We all have something in common apart from being born and brought up in Mumbai. We all are surname-less souls.

None of us have surnames by which our friends could hail us. Even though I could greet my friend Rohit Walekar with the salutation “Oye, Walekar!” he couldn’t very well hail me with a “Hey, Niranjankumar!”

Having been born in the non-South Indian city of Mumbai, nobody really understood the reason why I didn’t have a surname. My name is Nivedita Niranjankumar, the latter part being my father’s name. His name has been subjected to many dissections and doubts. Government officials have gone to the extreme of taking the “kumar” part and writing it into the surname part and showing it to me proudly.

When I insist that I don’t have a surname, they refuse to believe it. “It’s not possible—how can a person exist without having a surname?” is the argument they throw at me, and they get angry if I advance any counterargument. As if theirs is the last word on the matter.

One of my surname-less friends, once told me how her university application form was not accepted. “Get an affidavit stating that you don’t have surname!” the lady at the counter yelled at her. She added that it didn’t help that the college principal had his surname as potdukhe, which, ironically, when translated to English, means “stomachache.” But he had a surname and she didn’t.
 

In addition to weird and shocked faces, I also get sympathy. Yes, sympathy for not having a surname, from old aunties in government offices to kids in my apartment buildings. They look at me and with a sad face and say: “It happens. Poor girl.” 

I am not the only person troubled by this question. There are a million others who are part of communities on the near extinct Orkut and also pages on Facebook created by and filled by other surname-less beings. (No, it wasn’t joblessness that made me search for them. It was my wounded soul that prompted me to do so!)

But we are only a fragment in the surname-oriented Indian society. Surnames in India are an integral part of a person—sometimes even denoting his or her position in the village or community. They are based upon the family occupation, caste or clan name and sometimes titles bestowed upon family ancestors.

But all this gyaan available on the Internet doesn’t explain why many people can’t live a perfectly happy life without having a surname!
 

P.S - This post was originally written for my college IIJNM's online publication and published last year. The original link is here.