I am very excited to share this project I have been putting together over the last few months! A little different from the kind of travel content I usually create, what began as a portfolio piece for a university submission has turned into a passion project, book review, interview, and research feature. Below is a long feature I have written on the depth of meaning behind our names. It begins with a brief book review as well as an interview with the fantastic author Sheela Banerjee, before I delve into some personal research into my and my close friends' own names. A heartfelt thank you to Sheela, Leah, Ari, and Suzanne, who let me interview them and without whom this project would not have come to life!
“What’s your name?” is probably one of life’s most asked questions. And yet, we rarely unpack the stories contained in these clusters of letters.
“Our names: they’re so mundane, we barely notice them. We walk around with them all day, every day. They are an invisible layer of our being that surrounds us, like a lexical second skin.”
These are the opening words to writer and academic Sheela Banerjee’s newly released book, What’s In A Name?, a little over 300 pages of exquisite storytelling and in-depth research into the hidden stories we can uncover through our names. “Once prised open, our names reveal a multitude of stories, reveal feelings, states of consciousness and lost histories that embody who we really are and where we come from,” the introduction reads.
I picked a signed copy up at a recent Q&A event, where I had the joy of chatting to Sheela and finding out more about this etymological investigation into “Friendship, Identity and History in Modern Multicultural Britain.” Readers are transported across centuries and continents as the author uncovers the complex history behind her own name, and those of her closest friends.
A chat with Sheela Banerjee
As I caught up with Sheela recently, she expands: “It's about it's the stories of my name and those of my closest friends and through our names, the story of our ancestors, stories of race, immigration, of colonialism, of slavery and partition. It opens up so many global currents of history through just an exploration of our names.”
I devoured the book in little over three days (which says a lot considering I have been reading the same book since June 2023), and was especially struck by Sheela’s research method. What’s In A Name? is structured by chapter, each investigating the name history of one of her closest friends. Readers are transported across centuries and continents with Sheela herself, Marcella Gatsky, Liz Husain, Maria Timotheou, Vicki Denise Marie Seneviratne and Hugh St Paul Whyte.
Sheela explains the idea for the book came about when she was lecturing at Queen Mary University and she would ask students about their names as an icebreaker. She uncovered so many stories beneath students’ names, as well as her own, and following an article she published in The Guardian about the topic, an agent contacted her regarding developing a book. With a PhD in English Literature and a background in documentary television, Sheela had always been interested in the “power of words” and “telling the stories of people’s lives.”
She explains it was important for her book to stay personal: “ There are millions of directions in which you could go. I didn't want to stray too far away into a kind of very neutral historical account of a name. I wanted some history in there but it's got to stay with the person that I'm talking about.”
When I ask Sheela, who is of Bengali heritage and grew up in the suburbs of London, about the challenges she encountered while writing What’s In A Name?, she recalls: “I found it easy to write my own chapters, because I feel comfortable about that historical territory. For example, with the caste system, I know how I feel about it and I'm not worried about offending. I'm prepared to say that I find it abhorrent. Whereas when you're writing about friends, you're slightly tiptoeing around things that are difficult because you're not sure which part of the story might be tricky for them with their friends and family, if they read them… you're always aware that it's a really big responsibility.”
Indeed, the stories in Sheela’s book are deeply intertwined with topics of migration, colonisation, racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia. As a reader however, I was deeply impressed by how Sheela addresses such issues in each of her chapters with sensitivity, understanding and compassion.
Sheela delves into her unexpected findings, and the deeper understanding of her closest friends’ lives she gained while researching for the book. She reveals a fascinating insight was the family story of one of her closest friends Liz Husain. They went to school in Harrow together in the 80s, and Sheela explains that the story behind her friend’s Muslim surname remained absent and nebulous. In her chapter, Sheela delves into Liz’s confusion growing up with the mixed heritage of a white-British mother and father of Indian, Pakistani, Muslim origin. Liz was born and raised in England, with neither herself or her father identifying as Muslim- and yet she was assumed to be Muslim because of her Islamic-origin name.
Sheela explains, “This name that is so very obviously tied to your identity immediately puts you in a particular category, in a particular box and I understand now how she felt really uncomfortable about that because she was never brought up as either Indian or Pakistani or Muslim…As somebody from an uncomplicatedly sort of Bengali Indian family, I didn't realise how difficult it was for somebody with a mixed heritage growing up. So yes, we had a lot of racism because of our heritage, that's a separate problem. But what I didn't have was any sort of instability in my identity with my parents. I knew they were from Bengal, India. We lived there, we kept going backwards and forwards. I was very much a British Bengali and my name very accurately reflected who I was.”
Despite this stability, Sheela reflects upon the tensions she felt growing up in Hayes in the 1980s, and the racism she, and her peers such as Liz, faced as teenagers. “She was in Harrow and I was in Hayes. They both had undercurrents of nasty racism. Hayes was particularly bad because it was next door to Southall. A lot of far-right activity was happening in Southall. There were major uprisings, racial tensions in Southall, throughout the years there were attacks and violence. Particularly in 1979, there was a big anti-fascist demonstration and an anti-racist campaigner, Blair Peach, got killed. It was a horrible atmosphere at the time. I lived in the town next door to Southall, and there were barely any Indians there. It was very white and very racist. It was teeming with skinheads, full of violence, full of abuse, full of graffiti. My mum got attacked there. We were constantly abused…This was the kind of environment that I was growing up in.”
Understandably, growing up Sheela and her peers had difficulty carrying names which marked them as ‘foreigners’, or ‘outsiders’.
Sheela also had mixed feelings about the caste connotations her Brahmin surname carried in an Indian societal context. “It linked me to my Bengali and Hindu heritage. Alongside really disliking castes, there's lots of things about Hinduism that I really like and part of it is about my family. It ties me to my ancestors. It ties me to a country. It ties me to a whole way of life. Part of that was lovely. Part of that was terrible because I didn't like the caste aspect of it. But it's my history whether it's good or bad. Over here I'm not leading a life that's in any way connected with caste. But (in West Bengal) as soon as you utter your name, you have begun without even saying anything more, a centuries-old conversation, and you're immediately placed in a social and historical kind of hierarchy of privilege.”
However, over the years, Sheela has come to proudly embrace her name and the British Bengali story it represents: “I think I had reconciled with my name when I first wrote the article because I feel like it accurately reflects my history. It is a bastardised form of my original surname (The Bengali, Hindu Brahmin surname Bandyopadhyay). It was changed by the British and that in itself is a sign of that colonial subjugation. But it is what's happened and that's why I'm over here in London. I wouldn't be here without that. It tells that story. I had to kind of made peace with it in that sense.”
Independent Research
Reading What’s In A Name? got me thinking about my own five-letter title, Cerys (pronounced Keh-ris), a traditional Welsh name, meaning “love”, derived from the Welsh verb “caru” (to love). Despite frequent mispronunciations, including “Kharis”, “Seris”, “Ser-ees” and “Craze”, I love my name and feel comfortable wearing it every day. Perhaps, the only exception to this is hearing it butchered when a Starbucks barista calls out my drink.
My surname, Jones, also typically Welsh, it is a contraption of the words ‘John’ and ‘son’, or ‘son of John’. Of course, we can then trace the origins of the name ‘John’ to the Hebrew ‘Yochanan’. I often joke that my name could not be more stereotypically Celtic, and yet I speak no Welsh, and my family lineage is a little more complicated than that. Names can also hide histories, whether intentionally or not. A branch of my father’s family were indeed sheep farmers from central Wales, but he also has Irish, Scottish and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage.
My mother, on the other hand, is French. I was born in France and French is my mother tongue. And yet, my name bears no allusion to this.
Inspired by Sheela’s qualitative research, I decided to try my hand at digging into the untapped histories sitting in my closest friends’ names. Sheela’s book is a personal journey about deep friendships, and in this style, I purposely went out to speak to those closest to me, to find the stories that, like Sheela writes, are “right under our noses.”
Leah Buffalino
Summer of 2022. I first met Leah in Kolkata, India, where we both volunteered at Mother Teresa’s care homes and orphanages. Coincidentally, Mother Teresa’s Kolkata homes is also where Leah’s Sicilian mother and Italian- American father met as volunteers about 30 years ago.
Leah was retracing there steps in a way, and I hope to retrace a bit further into this family history by closely looking at the name. Although spelt differently, she specifies, laughing, that her name is pronounced like the Star Wars heroine’s name, Leia.
Leah explains the meaning of her Hebrew first name: “Weary or weak, because Leah in the Bible had weak eyes.” Thankfully, this is balanced by her surname Buffalino, which means in Italian, “to laugh a lot, like a really hearty laugh.”
Like me, she doesn’t have a middle name. Whereas my mother insisted on this to break her parents’ strict French Catholic tradition of multiple middle names, Leah explained her parents kept within tradition and didn’t give her a middle name because it is uncommon to have one in Italy.
Leah was born in Kentucky, USA. She recalls the origin of middle names in the states. “In Ellis Island, when everybody was immigrating, they could pick new names. But there were so many names that were similar and so they were like ‘you can’t all be John Smith, so you have to pick a middle name’. So that’s where it came from, like John Thomas Smith, that’s how the middle name came about in the US.”
Leah jokes that her surname is often used as an adjective in her family. “We would say, ‘oh that’s very Buffalino of you, when we overdo anything… we just overdo it. We over-engineer everything and we just have no chill.”
Her father’s grandparents emigrated from Italy about 90 years ago, settling in New York. I ask her if she is aware of any links between her family and the infamous Italian American Mafia godfather Russell Bufalino, head of the Bufalino crime family. She laughs, “I think it’s with one f, and my last name is two f’s. My family is relying on the fact that we have two f’s in our name, so we’re not technically linked to any mafia group. But I mean, there’s no doubt that my family was, I mean, they’re from New York City…”
Ari Song (송아리)
Arirang is a famous Korean folk tune. It reminds Ari Song (송아리) of mythical forests, of the steam that rises from mountain ponds, and of course, of her first name.
But there’s a bit more to these two syllables. At birth, my friend was named Yewon Song (송예원). She explains to me that commonly, Korean newborns will be named with three syllables (two Korean letters for the first name and one for the last), in special “naming studios” which use traditional astrology to compile a list of “good” names for a child, according to their specific time and date of birth. ‘Ye’ and ‘Won’ mean “wise, and the best”, based on ancient Chinese script. Amused, she explains to me that even though her parents named her, with guidance from an astrologer, her grandmother insists that she in fact named her: “She’s always like, ‘Look at me, I named you’…since she has gotten older, I think the memories are mixed up.”
In her book, Sheela Banerjee describes the sensation of not liking your name as like wearing an ill-fitting coat. Ari agrees. “It was three years ago now and I was thinking that I should change my name. I woke up and I thought ‘I am not Yewon’, and my whole life I didn’t feel like Yewon. And when people called me, it was awkward.”
Luckily, it is “quite common” for one to change their name in Korea. Ari explains this change perhaps doesn’t carry the same weight as in the West. In fact, growing up in Seoul, some of her classmates would have their names changed, often by their parents, if they believed their child’s name had altered their fortune. Ari says, “when I was ten, eleven, there were so many people changing their names, and they said stuff like ‘oh, my grandma said something (bad) happened last year because of my name, so we’re changing my name’.”
Names in Korean tradition are so tightly associated with fate and fortune that naming one’s child, or re-naming oneself, as Ari did, is no simple feat. With her parents’ approval, she was given a list to choose from, from a local naming studio, again based on her time and date of birth. The name Ari stood out to her on one of these lists. Unlike Yewon, Ari is a purely Korean name, and not derived from medieval Chinese.
The name Song, inherited from her father, is not an allusion to any folk tune, but has deeply geographical and historical roots.
It can be traced back to the Song Dynasty, an era of imperial China lasting from 960 to 1279 AD. Ari explains it is unclear whether the linguistic influence dripped into the Korean peninsula from Northern China and the name was just borrowed from medieval Chinese by Koreans, who did not have a written alphabet until 1443, or whether her family are indeed descended from this imperial lineage.
Ari’s Korean name has also survived a rocky, colonial history. My friend explains that during Japan’s colonial occupation of the Korean peninsula, from 1910 to 1945, the occupying forces attempted to forcefully change the population’s traditionally Korean names into Japanese names, in an effort to assert cultural dominance. “They changed all the kids’ names in schools, so they needed to be called in a Japanese way, they learnt in Japanese and it was all like the Japanese system. People had their own Korean names, which could not be used in public” she expands. “When we got independence, everyone started using their Korean names. That felt amazing because they could finally, authentically be themselves.”
Suzanne Tuhasha Karandagoda Mudalige
I met Suzanne, or Suzie, at my university’s Christian Union. The Christian faith is fundamental to her, and her family’s naming choices.
The name Suzanne has Biblical roots, derived from the Hebrew “shoshan” meaning “lily” or “lily of the valley”. My friend explains, “they (my parents) wanted me to have a Christian name, and Suzanne is supposed to be a friend of Jesus in the Bible.”
Faith plays a big part in her father’s name too. On his birth certificate, Suzanne’s Sri Lankan Sinhalese father is Haresh, derived from Hare Krishna. It was given to him by his grandmother, who was interested in Hinduism and influenced by the popularity of Bollywood films exported from India at the time. Suzanne’s father however goes by Patrick- he feels no connection to Hindu mythology, and feels this name, Patrick, which was given to him as a second name by his Christian mother, more fully expresses who he is and what he believes. The Christian faith is paramount to this family; indeed, Patrick’s own mother became a born-again Christian after she was miraculously healed from an incurable cancer, following the intercessory prayers of her Christian neighbours.
Tuhasha, Suzanne’s second name, is a contraption of her parents’ names, Haresh and ‘Tutu’, her mother Indunica’s pet name. She explains she loves how unique it is.
The surname Karandagoda, from her father, is a typical Sinhalese name, indicating her family’s traditional caste and geographical origin, namely, the coastal region of Galle. Mudalige, also indicating a traditionally ‘pure’ Sinhalese bloodline, translates to “house of money.”
But Suzanne’s story isn’t quite that simple. Her surnames are very traditionally Sinhalese. She laughs, “if you were only to read my name as a Sri Lankan person, you would never have guessed that I’ve got Tamil (heritage), right?” Indeed, names can also conceal, as much as they reveal. Her mother, Indunica Philips, is mostly Tamil, Sri Lanka’s northern ethnic minority. Her parents’ union as Tamil and Sinhalese Sri Lankans is all the more significant considering the country’s recent civil war between the Tamil and Sinhalese warring factions. In this sense, my friend’s name also tells a story of reconciliation, of love crossing bitter ethnic divides.
Her mother’s maiden name, Philips, is also telling of the island’s colonial past. It is reminiscent of the British occupation of Ceylon. Suzanne notes that unlike its British counterpart, her mother’s name Philips is spelt with only one ‘l’. She jokes that the family are unsure how they came to adopt this name, or why this spelling is used- perhaps because it was passed down orally, or misspelt on a birth certificate, being translated from English into Sinhalese.
Suzanne admits, “for the longest time in my life, I actually hated my name.” She recalls the racism she experienced as a child, growing up in a white-majority school in Rome. She faced humiliation from classmates for having a name “longer than the alphabet”, that most couldn’t, or didn’t want to learn how to correctly pronounce. The school register was excruciating. For many years she remained apologetic for her name, even when the school racism became more subtle as a teenager and her name was exoticized into a “tongue-twister.”
She explains she has come to embrace her name and appreciate its cultural significance, partly aided by her move to London: “I have been put in a melting pot of cultures where I have never felt more at ease with my surname, in the sense that there’s so many people like me…with long surnames and multiple names…I never felt that anybody had an issue with it.” She says whereas she felt ashamed as a child, she now feels “unapologetic for being South Asian, for being brown, for having a long name, unapologetic about my culture.”
Concluding thoughts
My friend Suzanne lives not far from where Sheela grew up, and faced horrific racism herself as a South Asian teenager in 70s and 80s Britain. From what Suzanne tells me, perhaps things are improving? Her experience of school in Britain seems more positive than Sheela’s.
Towards the end of our conversation, I ask Sheela how optimistic she feels about the future.
Looking at the way Southall or Hayes were when she was younger, she does feel we have progressed as a society. But for all the progress of a more diverse and tolerant Britain, Sheela remains concerned on the political front.: If you look at what the politicians are doing, they seem no different…The way they talk about migrants…this is exactly the kind of headlines that I saw while I was researching the whole issue of Ugandan Asians coming here in the 70s. And this is the way that we were talked about. Every new set of arrivals is the same. Horrible racism is invoked by politicians in order to foster division and to win votes, and that doesn't seem to change…There have been obviously massive advances, but it's really complicated and I sometimes think racism has just taken on a different form.”
I agree with Sheela that whilst celebrating society’s diversity and recognising its achievements, we have a long way to go. We have a long way to go until every child feels confident and comfortable with their name, regardless of how complex or ‘foreign’ it sounds.
Names, and our relationships to them, are complicated. Interviewing Sheela, as well as some of my closest friends has allowed me to just scratch the surface into how much a few letters can reveal. It has been sobering for me to realise the extent of the racism, discrimination and injustice some face, simply because of their names. Reading Sheela’s book has also inspired me with hope: our names carry incredible stories worth digging into and sharing. Stories which can help us understand the fabric of our society, and how we can begin to heal it.
What is your name? How do you feel about it? What is your neighbour’s, your best friend’s, your mother’s name?
I encourage you to mull it over today, it may be carrying much more history than you realise. I’ll leave you with some food for thought from Sheela: “The words we use, through their histories and associations, shape our realities, they give meaning to our experience of the world. And a name-something so intimate to us, so connected to us- is one of the most powerful expressions of this process.”
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