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Hitesh was twenty years old when he received a thick envelope at his door in a western Indian city. It was not like the official kinds from the bank but looked like a long letter from an old friend. He checked the address, the postcode, the house number. All his. But something was unfamiliar on the cover—the name to which it was addressed. “Madhavi.” Who was Madhavi? Hitesh tried to return the envelope to the postman but the right address was all that mattered to the official—the name on the cover did not share as much space in the postman’s attention as the pin code did. He left for his next delivery. Hitesh stood there staring at the name, finally putting it on the kitchen table to sort it out later with his neighbors once the scorching sun set that evening.
Hitesh’s mother, Prabha, saw the envelope and immediately tore it open devouring every word in the letter. Hitesh, rushed to save his mother from prying open someone else’s letter. Seeing her delightfully reading it, he asked a bit surprised, “Do we know who Madhavi is?” Prabha smiles and for the very first time in Hitesh’s twenty years tells him, “Madhavi was my name before I married your father. They changed my name at the wedding.” Prabha was referring to the Marathi Brahmin wedding ritual called the “Lakshmi Poojan.” In this ritual the first name of the bride is changed to a new name by her groom after their wedding. The new wife is then usually referred to by her “new” name in her marital home and by all the new kinship that comes in marriage for her for the rest of her married life. Her “old” or “natal” name is supposed to remain in her natal home and with her natal kin as she transitions into a life in marriage.
When I met Hitesh during my fieldwork, he was seventy, and had retired as a teacher. The moment of knowing his mother’s “natal” name for the very first time was so etched in his memory that he recalled this to me with an extraordinary vividness almost fifty years after it had happened. Her new name had made him feel like a stranger to his own mother, even if just for that moment. “Madhavi” on the envelope was alien to him an hour ago, and now the word was to be in the grammar of his most intimate world. The suddenness of this revelation slowly brewed a question in him over the years, “My mother was someone else before she was my mother! Who was she?” Prabha had long passed—her picture across the wall from where I was sitting in Hitesh’s living room along with her husband’s, Suryakant. In a cultural context where being married is non-negotiable for women, Hitesh’s questions confront this reality with a profound simplicity. His question broaches the concern of what histories of women are lost in a context where women cannot be seen beyond marriage. It raises attention to a “lack” in articulating women, especially in the South Asian context, away from the language of heteronormative marriage.
Within India and especially in the community I worked with, the language of heteronormative marriage is also the language of Brahmanical ideology. As anti-caste scholars like Dr B.R. Ambedkar, Uma Chakravarti have shown, in this framework women are essentialized as reproducing bodies within a Brahmanical society, and thus controlling their sexuality through arranged marriage becomes one of the strongest means to maintain the ideological as well as material supremacy of caste hierarchies in a casteist society. Returning to Prabha’s story, she had fallen in love with Suryakant and had expressed her wish to marry him to her father. Choosing your own partner was and is in many cases seen as outrageous in a caste society. Although Suryakant and Prabha came from the same Brahmin caste, they belonged to different subcastes. Prabha then was on the “wrong side” of the line twice: for choosing her partner and for crossing the caste line. This enraged her father and he threatened to cut all ties with her if she went ahead with her choice. She did. Thus, Prabha never had any ties with her natal kin from the moment she moved in her marital home. This meant that there was no one to call her “Madhavi.” This also meant that she had never spoken of herself as “Madhavi” in all the years in her marital home. Had the unexpected letter not arrived in her home, she would perhaps have lived her life without her son knowing the name she grew up with.
The Marathi Brahmin ritual Lakshmi Poojan, or the worship of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, replaces the name of the new wife given to her by her father (or a natal kin) with a new name given to her by her husband. It replaces thenamer in her life from that moment onwards—a shift in the authorial center in her life. In this ritual, then, we are able to see, in a very visceral way, what the Brahmanical ideology expects of women.
The ritual celebrates the Hindu goddess Lakshmi and welcomes the new wife in her marital home as the Lakshmi of the marital home. Lakshmi within the Hindu worldview is the embodiment of beauty, the bringer of good luck, wealth, and prosperity; the wife is interpellated as Lakshmi within this ritual. The new wife and husband sit on the ground across an image of Lakshmi where the pandit, or the ritual master, initiates the naming ceremony. For most women, this moment is one of utter exhaustion and nervousness—both physical and emotional. They enter the house after an intense wedding ceremony and more importantly after bidding farewell to their families and friends. It is in this context that the Lakshmi Poojan is performed—away from the comfort of familiar relations, faces, and space. Further, “the house” itself becomes the metaphor for the husband’s kin network, clan, caste line, and also the husband himself. Like Lakshmi, the wife must work towards the perpetuation (through an heir) and prosperity of all these elements that welcome her.
The pandit hands a plate of raw rice to the groom. The names of some of the other gods from the Hindu fold are written with vermillion on the raw rice or akshat as it is ritually referred to. He writes another sentence on the rice in Sanskrit: “ I am establishing my wife’s name as…” The groom takes the plate and with a gold ring forms the letters of the new name for the bride and returns the plate to the pandit. The groom declares the new name of the bride to his family. The wife, no longer a bride, is from now on to be referred to as her new name, at least by her marital family. From Madhavi to Prabha. The new name is intended to loosen her ties with her natal kin and relations, if not cut them completely.
Sweets and congratulations are exchanged as the ritual nears its end. “The new name is written in gold” as a Pandit once jokingly told me alluding to the finality of that name. The ritual is visceral in the sense that it calls attention of the bride through her (old) name and changes it to a new one passing on to her this finality of being transferred from her father to her husband, the new author of her name. However, this ritual never ends, for it lives on in every utterance of the new name for women in her life and after.
However, names are unruly. They do not obey the intended meaning of name-change within the ritual. Names are not bound to work according to what the Brahmanical ideology expects of names for women; even if names, in many other instances in South Asia, do become markers of caste and other forms of oppression. Like the unexpected letter from a long lost friend that arrived to find “Madhavi,” names resurface despite the change. For an anthropologist keen to understand how we relate, names and naming are potential methods to explore how we relate to others. Thinking of names as an anthropological subject of relations raises a crucial question of what is it in names that makes us relate to someone in a certain way. Prabha’s excitement to read the letter then was nothing short of diving in the pool of long withheld emotions. The name on the letter was hope. Names then give a certain texture to a relation suffused with intimacy and the history ever-floating in the mundane. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote about her emotions when she heard her mother’s name at her funeral, “Emotions seized me by the throat… ‘François de Beauvoir’: the words brought her to life; they summed up her history, from birth to marriage to widowhood to her grave. Françoise de Beauvoir—that retiring woman, so rarely named, became an important person.”
“Madhavi” then always lived, perhaps subdued, in a married Prabha. Her relations with herself before she married, with her kin and her own name were locked away in the promise of marriage. The Brahmanical ritual of name-change intended to design her everyday in such a manner that her marital state was prioritized over everything—even her first name. Madhavi, like de Beauvoir’s mother, François, was “rarely named” and yet she resurfaced like a long-lost relation pointing to the ever-present pasts in our presents.
Angie Heo is the section contributing editor for the Society for the Anthropology of Religion.