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“What is your good name?”
It’s a question that most people living in India have heard at least a couple of times. Most people think of the phrase ‘good name’ as just another one of the quirks of Indian English — an Indianism, if you will. It is also not typically associated with good “English,” either, and people who say it are usually clowned on by the better-educated upper classes that still strive to fit the molds set by their colonizers. But, its history is actually steeped in Indian naming traditions.
Most people who are Bengali (whether that’s Indian Bengali or Bangladeshi, because fuck partition) are quite familiar with the concept of having multiple names. There’s the “bhalo naam” (literally: “good name”), which is on official documents and used for most introductions to strangers. The other name is their “daak naam” — their “call name,” or the “name one is called by.” This is a sweeter name, more intimate, usually reserved for family members or very close friends.
While the daak naam appears to function essentially as a nickname, it has embedded itself uniquely into the very fabric of Bengali kinship. Most people tend to separate their public and personal lives to some degree, adjusting to accommodate these individual social spheres. Your personality molds to fit the dynamic of the group you’re with. You have different inside jokes, different postures. For Bengali people, giving these separate versions of yourself separate names makes this difference more tangible. It is not just a matter of having two names — who you are when someone refers to you by your bhalo naam, and who you are when someone refers to you by your daak naam, are essentially different people. Being called by your daak naam can be instantly disarming, a signal that someone really knows you, and allows for an almost immediate switch to a more familiar form of interaction.
My own relationship with my name is a bit more complex than the usual story. My mother is Bengali. She is the parent I have lived with for most of my life, and her family and food and language are what I feel most connected to, despite it being a precarious connection. But I don’t have her name — I have my father’s.
I think my mom knew this too. She never wanted my name to be Vidushi, she says. That’s my ‘good name’, by the way. “Vidushi Amaresh Mohan.” It feels weird to admit that here. But yes, Ihaa is “just” my daak naam. She wanted to name me something that sounded more Bengali, and also something that was more clearly connected to her. In fact, she still asks me sometimes to change my name. Nonetheless, Vidushi was what was decided upon, a Hindi-origin name. Vidushi meaning scholar; Amaresh, my dad’s name, a more enduring paternal marker than a maiden name. She came up with Ihaa as my daak naam to compensate, I think. She says she was inspired by the Spanish word hija, meaning daughter. My dad says it’s from the Sanskrit word iha, meaning desire. I’ve come to accept that it’s probably a combination of both.
I have always been acutely aware of the fact that in India, names say a lot about a person. My good name only tells half of my story. The half that is left out is my mother.
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I understood pretty early on in life that I was a different person to different people. Whenever my parents took me to meet new people, they would prompt me to introduce myself. Sometimes I had to say I was Ihaa. Sometimes I had to say I was Vidushi. The problem was, even though I knew conceptually that Vidushi and Ihaa were different people, I was always confused about when and where I had to be each of these people. I would slip up, and say Vidushi when my parents expected me to say Ihaa, and vice versa. They would jump in immediately to correct me of course, but I felt very stupid each time. What kind of person doesn’t know who they are? I think that’s when my love-hate relationship with my names started.
When I came here for college as an international student, I realized I had an opportunity to start fresh. The start of all relationships I would forge would be an introduction, and without my parents to prompt me, I was in control. So I started telling everyone my name was Ihaa. At first I justified it to myself as a culture thing, a way of strengthening my roots in my Bengali heritage.
But the more I thought about it, I realized that that wasn’t my sole motivation, or even my strongest motivation. Like I said before, your daak naam is the name used by the ones closest to you. It’s a name that is defined by its associated comfort and warmth. In my case, I was most used to being called that name by my mother. When I hear my daak naam, I inevitably think of the childhood that I spent with her. My mother was a terrifying symbol of authority when I was little, but she was also affectionate, often indulgent, and proud. As a kid, we used to move around a lot, so I found myself often surrounded by her and her friends, who created a supportive environment where I was free to pursue my interests. My mother named me Ihaa. She also made me Ihaa. That’s who Ihaa was, a loved and adored child.
All of that changed at some point. Maybe it happened while I wasn’t really paying attention to our relationship, in the years I was away at boarding school. For a long time, it was just our own two-person family. But then we drifted. She remarried, our family expanded. And I didn’t really have to deal with that at boarding school until the pandemic, when I came home and realized everything had set into place without me. It was like being a small child again and not knowing what my name was supposed to be when someone asked. I felt like I’d lost my only family. The memories connected to my daak naam turned sour.
I craved the affection and gentleness of childhood. I wanted to be looked after, asked after, cared for. In an attempt to replicate the fleeting warmth of my years with my mother, I started asking people to call me Ihaa as a sort of compensation, and waited patiently for the comfort to come.
It was a futile effort. There is a gaping flaw in that logic there. The name “Ihaa” was not what was bringing me comfort. It was my mother. Being called by my childhood name by people who have only known me for a couple of months just felt … empty, honestly. I had gone ahead and assigned all those meanings to my name, forgetting that at the end of the day, my name by itself was just a sound, not some kind of magic spell. I felt stupid, then, for having trespassed upon the sanctity of what is supposed to be such an intimate name by opening it up to the world, and with no real reward. Upon further introspection, I realized this effort to cling to my childhood was not a contained one. It had seeped into my manner of dressing, speaking — even the way I braided my hair, a facsimile of my schoolgirl days. I had begun to unconsciously reject the idea of romance, and became uncomfortable with the idea of people perceiving me as a sexual being in any way, because the implications of maturity that came with it was something I wasn’t ready to deal with. In some ways, I regressed into more of a child than I was even back in middle school, which is when I first went to boarding school.
I only became aware of this subconscious suppression of sorts when I visited my maternal uncle in Austin, Texas over my winter break of freshman year. I was taken aback by how caring my uncle and aunt were. They worried that I was eating too little at school (which I was), and they made all my favorite foods. I had so much fun with my cousins and their dog too, a kind of fun I hadn’t experienced in years. One day, sitting at the dining room table, it struck me that it was here in Austin of all places that I felt most at home. Not with my mother or father, but with my mama-mami. It was a sudden, overwhelming rush of both grief and joy, as I finally understood what I had been deprived of for so long, and also realized that I had now gained it back.
Over the course of the next year or so, as I began to truly contend with the loss of my family as I had known it, this feeling of home that I got from my mama-mami anchored me and kept me afloat for a long time. I began to slowly rid myself of the knot of anxiety I had developed about things changing too fast, and stopped being scared of growing up. It no longer felt like the love and light of my childhood was slipping away out of reach. Growing up did not have to mean growing away, and more importantly, I saw that change itself was not the problem.
I want to keep being Ihaa to everyone who now knows me by that name. At the same time, I won’t shirk away from being known as Vidushi. Names have a lot of power, you know. They’re weighty, sometimes suffocating, and can often conflict with your identity (and I’ve dealt with that throughout my queer journey too). But ultimately, the meaning you assign to them is your own. I am choosing to take back control of what my names mean to me, though it is admittedly an ongoing process. What is my ‘good name’? I’m not so sure anymore, now that the lines have been blurred by numerous changes in context. What I do know is that whether it is my daak naam, my bhalo naam, or another name entirely, it all ties back to the same source. I think I’ve been focusing too much on what makes all these identities different, and forgotten what connects them together. They’re all names for me. Maybe slightly different versions of me, but I don’t think it really matters all that much in the grand scale of things. I can live without the anxiety of second-guessing myself every time I have to do an introduction. The next time someone asks for my name, I’ll just tell them whatever I feel like. It’s my name anyway, right?
MiC Columnist Ihaa Mohan can be reached at ihaa@umich.edu
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