Our Names And What They Mean

Indian names have meanings, though we don’t expect people to live up to their name. Jammu and Kashmir’s new chief minister, Sheikh Abdullah’s 38-year-old grandson Omar, is named for the second caliph of Islam.

His father Farooq Abdullah is also named for Caliph Omar, who was called al Farooq for his ability to distinguish (farq) good from bad. Omar Abdullah’s primary rival in Kashmir will be the Jama Masjid’s Mirwaiz, who is his schoolmate from Srinagar’s Burn Hall School.

The Mirwaiz, 35-year-old Omar Farooq, is also named for the second caliph. In his superb biography of Nehru, written after he spent six years in Delhi as Australia’s ambassador, Walter Crocker refers to Nehru’s name Jawaharlal, as meaning Red Jewel. But in this case lal does not stand for the colour but indicates masculine, youthful. Nehru’s father, Motilal, was also named for a jewel.

His daughter’s full name was Indira Priyadarshini. Indira means magnificent, beautiful. The unusual name Priyadarshini also means that, but is taken from Priyadarsi, the epithet used for India’s greatest ruler Ashok (died 232 BC), the first sovereign of the entire subcontinent from Afghanistan to deep South India.

Ashok means he who does not mourn, but Emperor Ashok was actually famous for an act of mourning. After his savage conquest of Kalinga, modern-day Orissa, he rejected all war in repentance and became Buddhist.

Sonia Gandhi’s son Rahul (moon) is named after the Buddha’s son.

The Khilafat movement’s leader Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar (died 1931) shared Nehru’s name. The jewel theme is also to be found in the name of Surat-born Parsi industrialist Ratan Tata.

Gujarati, which is a merchant’s language, has a rich Arab and Persian vocabulary. A common surname in Gujarat for those working with jewellery is Jhaveri or Zaveri, derived from zevar or jauhar.

In the famous Gujarati novel, Bhadrambhadra, a man called Daulat Shankar decides to rebel against Arab and English words in the Gujarati lexicon and invents words in pure Gujarati. Upset that his name Daulat is actually Arabic, he changes it to Bhadrambhadra. The novel is a satire and Gujaratis who use highly Sankritised language are laughed at as using Bhadrambhadra language.

The mercantile nature of Gujaratis means many names are professional.

Wala (belonging to, or related to) is a common Gujarati suffix. Hindus, Muslims and Parsis all have surnames that end with Wala. Bollywood’s singer Kunal Ganjawala’s family name is derived from trade in cannabis.

Jinnah was actually the Quaid’s father’s name, and he was called Jhinabhai Poonja. Jhinu means small in Gujarati (poonji means capital).

In the Gujarati magazine Visami Sadi (20th century) Jinnah is interviewed and he signs his name in Gujarati as Jhina, with the stressed ‘jh’ and the rolled ‘N’ (not used in Urdu), which indicates how it was actually said.

Jinnah spoke Gujarati well, and would have to use it daily in South Bombay. But why was his father called small?

Sickly infants are sometimes given names that are off-putting (I have heard of a man called Kachra - garbage) so that death would not want him. The cruelty actually comes from a parent’s love.

One such Bengali name is Maran (death). It is the opposite of another famous Bengali name, Amartya (undying, eternal). In Hindi and Gujarati, this name is Amar or Amrit.

Jinnah’s Khoja community were converts from the Luhana caste of merchants. And many Khojas still have Hindu names like Vishram, especially Ithna Ashari Khojas (non-Aga Khani). Their dress was also Hindu in the village.

The recent Islamising of Sunnis through tableegh has also touched the Shia and now their names are more likely to be religious than not.

One of India’s software billionaires is Azim Premji, a Khoja.

Indians cannot separate Sunni from Shia by name, and other than in Gujarat and Bombay, where the sevener Shia is recognised as a trader, and doesn’t have a ‘hard’ Muslim identity, Shias are not seen as having a separate identity.

Shia names often have a quality of sadness and may even be haunting, like Muntazar he who is awaited.

The ecumenical nature of Indian Islam is seen in qawwali which has many traditional songs in praise of Ali but none on the first three caliphs.

Punjabi names are chosen by opening the Sikh text, the Guru Granth. The name must begin with the first letter of the first word on the opened page.

Punjabi men and women may have the same name, but an honorific separates men (Singh) from women (Kaur). Singh means lion. Manmohan means he who can charm the mind, but we find our prime minister unemotional and tepid. Manmohan Singh was appointed finance minister by Narasimha Rao.

Narasimha is an avtar (incarnation) of one of Hinduism’s three primary gods, Vishnu. In appearance, Narasimha is half man and half lion. Nar means man and Simha is the same as Singh. Gandhi’s favourite poet Narsinh Mehta (died 1480) also had the same name. In Gujarati lion is sinh.

Hinduism folded Buddhism into it by making Buddha the tenth avtar of Vishnu. Though their hearts beat for Lord Ram, who is also one of the ten avtars of Vishnu, the names of many BJP leaders are actually associated with another avtar of Vishnu: Krishna.

Atal Behari is a synonym for Krishna through Behari which means to roam (Krishna was raised a cowherd). Atal means steadfast, but Vajpayee surrendered to Jaish-e-Muhammad at Kandahar. Lal Krishna Advani is obviously named for Krishna, but so also is Murli Manohar Joshi.

Murli is flute, the instrument of Krishna.

While Vajpayee is Brahmin, his middle-caste opponents from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar both have links to Krishna.

The cowherd caste of Yadavs raised the boy Krishna, and both Mulayam and Laloo are from that caste.

Gandhi’s name, Mohan, is also a synonym for Krishna and the famous Urdu journalist and poet Hasrat Mohani’s hometown also has the same root.

The boy Krishna is one of India’s most popular gods and is also called Bal Keshav, the real name of Thackeray. Thackeray is actually Thakre from the Chandrasenia Kayastha Prabhu caste. But in his vanity, when he was a cartoonist at the Free Press Journal, he used the name as spelled by English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray.

A famous Bombay disc jockey calls himself Whosane? which is clever. Not as clever is another Hussein, the artist Maqbool Fida, who for a while became Macbull.

Artists have always had an interest in how they were seen. Ghalib means conqueror, and is in the very moving emblem of the Moorish kings of Alhambra: Wa la Ghalib il Allah there is no conqueror but god.

Patras Bokhari took on the name of St Peter, which comes from rock.

Amitabh Bachchan’s name comes from his father, poet Harivanshrai’s takhallus: ‘Bachchan’ or vachan, speech. Very appropriate for this magnificent voice.

Of late India’s entertainers have begun to follow numerology, in which they change the spelling of their names, adding vowels and consonants. The serial Kasauti Zindagi Ki was spelled Kasautii Zindagii Kay. The young Ekta Kapoor, only 33 but already having dominated television for a decade, is a big believer in numerology, in which spellings are changed but only in the Roman script, showing its recent origins.

Ekta’s name is secular and means unity.

Names have become more secular in India and fewer names are religious. Mine means form, or shape.

At the billionaire Vijay Mallya’s birthday party Salman Khan said he did not know what his own name meant. Salman is derived from peace. But Vijay of course means victory. It can also be a woman’s name, as in Jaya, Amitabh’s wife.

The other famous Indian Salman is Rushdie, whose name comes from ibn Rushd, the great Aristotelian, who also got into trouble with Muslims for what he wrote.

Dilip Kumar, Yusuf Khan, changed his name because he feared his Muslim identity would have made him less acceptable as an actor in India, though now we know that this is not true.

Haribhai Jariwala of Surat (jari is zari, spun gold) became Sanjeev Kumar, Bollywood’s finest actor ever.

India is of course named for the Indus river and the RSS says Hindu should be used to refer to all inhabitants of the country, not just those of a particular religion.