What is your name? Like all people in India, you have your given name and your father’s name as your surname.
And occasionally some add a maiden name- either their mother’s name or her side of the family members’ names. But this maiden name has n little to no value in our Indian patriarchal society.
A bit hypocritical when you consider that mothers are more hands-on in taking care of the children rather than the father.
A girl had posted on Facebook her life struggles in the Indian society, all because she had her mother’s name. The Facebook post was shared by ‘Humans of Bombay’
READ the Facebook post here
“I’ve grown up in a family without gender roles. When my mother worked night shifts, my father would do the cooking. They would take turns to attend our school PTAs and if mom cooked dinner, dad would do the dishes. Even our names are balanced –while my sister and I took our father’s last name, we took our mother’s name as the middle. The logic was simple–both parents have an equal part in bringing up children, so why should only the father’s name be used in their identity?
When we moved to India when I was 11, this became a problem. From the very first day, I was made to believe that I was odd. Teachers refused to acknowledge that my middle name was ‘Lata’ and they kept putting my father’s name on every document. When I took state examinations, my forms would get rejected because of the discrepancy between my middle name and what was my father’s first name. Dad even had to come to school to request a change in records. We were questioned by everyone– somehow they believed they deserved an explanation. It really pissed my parents off. I spent the rest of my school days being labelled as the ‘strange girl with her mother’s name’.
At first, I was angry with my parents. I didn’t understand why they were making it so hard for me…why couldn’t I just be ‘normal?’ But as I grew up, I realised that they were the normal ones — that even with just my name they presented a powerful idea. They showed the world that women are in fact equal to men. They exposed how deeply patriarchy is embedded in our daily lives, and how difficult it is to break that cycle. But they stood up for what’s right and at 17 I can say that no matter how hard it gets to stand up for basic equality…I won’t give up. I’m proud to carry both of them with me in my name and I’ll relentlessly take their values forward into the world.”
The Facebook post has been wildly accepted by the netizens. Read their comments
READ ALSO: Bride’s Unique Name Goes Viral And Invites Trolls in Kerala
HOW DID THIS PRACTISE COME IN INDIA?
Blame it on the British. When India names its children, the mother’s side of the family is all but forgotten. The children are given the father’s surname. It seems like an antiquated practice today, when inter-caste, inter-regional and inter-religious marriages are on the rise and women sometimes find themselves cast as single mothers, raising children all by themselves.
But why blame the British? Till their advent, most people did not find their surname in their caste. When the British colonial administration began documenting land ownership and birth records, it followed the British custom of giving children their father’s surname. This remains common practice in much of the English-speaking world.
In the US, notably, only a few traditional families use the mother’s maiden name as the child’s middle name. That’s how Franklin Delano Roosevelt, America’s 32nd president, got his middle name.
In Europe and the Americas, few women change their names after they marry, so it makes profound legal sense for children to have two surnames. In India, motherhood may be celebrated but appears to have little value when it comes to legal and government records. Isn’t it time we changed? Yes, M Varaprasad, Andhra Pradesh’s education minister indicated this week when he denounced “our old system (of insisting the) father’s name be included in the certificates. Why not the mother? This is very unfortunate. This is very discriminatory”. His comments are significant in the very week that the southern state started to offer the option of mentioning either parent’s name on the child’s school admission form.
Aarti, a single mother, backs the minister’s point of view. “Why cannot it be the mother’s name? She’s the one taking the child to school, mostly. When it comes to government stuff like passport or visa they harass you. Why can’t they simply take the mother’s word for it? The child is with the mother and the mother is giving a passport copy,” she said to the media.
As campaigners for women’s rights pick a fight with India’s naming system, it might be useful to look at Europe and America. In Spain and Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas, children have two surnames — the first from the father, the second from the mother. Painter Pablo Ruiz Picasso used his maternal surname, Picasso, as his signature.
Isn’t it time we stopped the practice of using the surname of just one parent? How about hyphenated surnames, consisting of the last names of both mother and father, in whatever order? It would ‘legalize’ Indian motherhood.
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