Kamala and I: the Struggle of Ethnic Names

If you’ve just picked up this copy of The Saint, as it was no doubt thrust in your face by one of us overeager student journalists, then, by nature of this town, your name is probably Emma or George. Or Tom or Olivia. I say this with absolutely no intention of targeting or attacking the 80% of this student body. It is the UK, after all; an abundance of people with British names is to be expected.

The UK has become a melting pot of cultures, whether due to its current status as a global metropolis or its colonial past. However, this isn’t reflected in the culture here, and many of the social interactions I’ve had in this town — most notably, experiencing a genuine and visceral fear at the thought of having to introduce myself to new people — reflect this.

On move-in day in my first year, I made an impulsive decision driven by panic: to rely on the shortened form of my name to save myself and others from the inevitable butchering of ‘Gayatri Chatterji’. It was my first time being in a predominantly white environment, and I hadn’t anticipated how deeply I would feel it. What used to be the occasional mispronunciation from an American teacher who called me "Gitari" in class (my school friends still laugh) was about to become my everyday reality. My anxieties hyper-fixated on such episodes from school, as I felt the same dread I experienced when a new teacher who wasn’t Indian tried to say my name.

I grew up resenting my name, wishing my parents had chosen something more palatable to the Western vernacular. I remember feeling a deep-seated mix of rage and envy when I learned my cousins had deliberately been given ‘easier’ names to pronounce because they too were born and raised abroad.

Relief would wash over me — and continues to do so — when I meet a fellow South Asian for the first time. I know I can tell them my name without wincing beforehand or afterward and hear it said back to me with the nonchalance of it being a known and common name. It’s the kind of interaction and feeling I continue to chase even now.

Gaya, as I am called here, was, before university, ‘coined’ by close friends who shortened my name affectionately. I was known by that name — but out of closeness, not avoidance. With time, I’ve come to appreciate that it has become a way for me to present myself more easily, helping me integrate with the people I meet in this town. 

This was made all the more unfortunate when people would exclaim, “Is it like the Greek goddess?!” and I would have to deliver my well-rehearsed but dreaded spiel. I suppose being proud of a name I constantly find myself having to explain can feel impossible, and it certainly did as I attempted to adjust to this university environment.

I regret not being more comfortable with the fact that I have an ethnic name, one which is millennia old, one that holds such weight, and, over time, one that I’ve come to know is beautiful. It represents my culture and heritage, something unavoidably loaded here in the UK. Indeed, my surname, which was anglicised during British rule in India due to administrative ‘difficulties’ with writing and pronunciation, eventually stuck and became a normalised part of the cultural landscape in independent India. That legacy is not in my control, but I no longer have any desire to further perpetuate it by shortening my first name. Especially not when I share it with some of the most influential scholars of postcolonialism (IR students: check your reading lists, the name is Spivak).

I like to think I’ve decided that this is a hill I’m happy to fight and die on: my name is my name. That being said, I can’t promise that dread and panic won’t strike the next time I find myself making introductions.

But for now, it’s Gayatri. Not Gertrude (no, I’m not joking). Ga-yuh-three. Soft ‘t’. Not as difficult as you think to pronounce. And no, it’s not ‘unusual’. It’s just ethnic.