My family's approach to naming
May 7 2004South Indian names can be confusing. My "official" name on my passport is Rangachari Anand. However, my name is "officially" backwards! If you were to meet me on the street, I'd like you to call me "Anand".
So then perhaps you might conclude that we write our
family name first
like the Koreans. But thats not the case either. Its actually a
little more complicated. See the following diagram.
In our tradition, we don't actually have a distinct family name at all. A person has just one name. To distinguish oneself from others with the same name, the general approach is to add the initial corresponding to the father's name. Thus in India, my name was simply "R. Anand". When applied to universities in the US, I was forced to expand my initial to the full name "Rangachari". Rather than confuse things further, I decided to adopt this convention in all application forms and also, eventually, in my passport.
Another point to note is that my (late) grandfather had four names! The first initial in his name, Valangaiman, is the name of his home town which is in the state of Tamil Nadu. This is a small town that was apparently famous for raising horses that could walk backwards! Krishnaswamy was my great-grandfather's name. Iyengar is the name of our sub-caste. Increasingly, people have stopped including any caste references in their names. However, in my case, any one from Chennai would know that the suffix "chari" (in my father's name) is mainly used by Iyengars!
In the old days, both men and women followed this naming convention. However, women do not generally follow this convention any more! In recent years, women have simply started to use their husband's name as their last name. Hence, my mother's name is officially "Lalitha Rangachari".
A slight digression - my grandfather (my father's father) played a key role in the establishment of the Reserve Bank of India in the 1920s and 1930s. Here is a photo from a newspaper clipping of that time.
