Names are a fascination. And names in India’s south particularly so. For they incorporate the place of the named one’s origins, anticipating GPS. They bring into play not just names of cities, towns and villages, but also suburbs. But I should say, ‘They used to bring’, for the practice has gone out of active use.
I was reminded of the mode when reading senior advocate Raju Ramachandran’s alluring new book 14 Lawyers: Portraits from the Bar. He tells us that his father’s name was Triplicane Natarajan Ramachandran. Triplicane, the Anglicised form of Thiruvallikeni in Madras, is one of the city’s famous suburbs. It led me to wonder if there are people named after other locations in the city—for instance, the one famed for its orthodoxy, Mylapore.
One of the great advantages of Wiki and Google—which together can be called Woogle of Gooki—is that you can, with just one or two clicks, get answers to such questions. Indeed, there was Mylapore Gowri Ammal (1892-1971), a greatly revered name among Bharatanatyam exponents. Having danced in Mylapore’s Kapaleeswarar temple for decades, her name was as inseparable from Mylapore as Mylapore was from her name.
Then there is the city’s once-sylvan locality of Adyar, so named after the river that flows through that suburb. It has given its name to Adyar K Lakshman (1933-2014) another distinguished Bharatanatyam dancer and choreographer. But suburbs apart, Madras has given its own name to the legendary Madras Lalithangi Vasanthakumari (1928-1990). Hailed as MLV, she was not only a musical celebrity but a warm human loved by one and all for her nature. Sadness imbued her life even as she tried to imbue it with laughter.
The most famous of all Carnatic musicians bearing a place name is, of course, ‘Kokilagana’ Madurai Shanmukhavadivu Subbulakshmi (1916-2004), MS for all time—the Bharat Ratna and Sangita Kalanidhi named after her mother, Madurai Shanmukhavadivu , a vainika of great repute. Place-named musicians in the Carnatic mode are too many to list, but the Tanjore quartet (1804-1864) has to be mentioned. So named after the great temple town where they offered their musical genius to the court of the Maratha King Serfoji II, the foursome are inextricably linked to the place that gives them their moniker. While she is known globally for the matchless expression of her abhinaya, not many know that the single initial ‘T’ in the name of Balasaraswati (1918-1984) also stands for the same town, Tanjore.
The world of Carnatic music is of course not the only patent holder for place names. The hoary practice has some fine examples from a more prosaic part of south Indian life. The stature of Uthamadhanapuram Venkatasubbaiyer Swaminatha Iyer (1855-1942), the Tamil scholar known as U Ve Sa who brought many works of classical Tamil literature to light, is so great that it has obscured the GPS his full name carries. A pity this, as he has written with evocative feeling of his village, which meant much to him.
So it is with the civil engineer and statesman Mokshagundam Visvevaraya (1861-1962), who bears the name of the place his ancestors hailed from in the present Prakasam district of Andhra Pradesh. Tangaturi Prakasam (1872-1957), the Andhra Kesari, himself bears the name Tangaturi from the place of his ancestry near Ongole.
The great Communist leader of Kerala who was elected to head the first non-Congress government in independent India, EMS Namboodiripad (1909-1998), is so well known as ‘EMS’ that few bother to find out what those initials stand for. The ‘E’ is from Elamkulam, but there are two places of that name—one is a ward in Kochi, and the other, from where EMS hailed, is a village in Perinthalmanna taluk in Malappuram district.
EVR, the peerless Periyar, is Erode V Ramasamy (1879-1973). It’s no routine fact that he was chairman of the Erode municipality during 1918-1919 and brought piped water supply to the town for the first time. Kancheepuram has got so symbiotically absorbed in the luminous personality of the late Paramacharya Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswati (1894-1994) that it is not realised that the charismatic leader of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Annadurai, was Conjeevaram Natarajan Annadurai (1909-1969), being first elected to the Madras Legislative Assembly from that town. Not many know that the ‘M’ in the other Chief Minister and mass leader, M G Ramachandran (1917-1987), is from Maruthur, a village in Palakkad. For his millions of fans, what the ‘M’ in his name stands for is of little importance. He stood for them—that is what matters.
Places give their names not just to the good and beautiful. Fame of another kind also attaches place names to their owners. I mentioned Mylapore. A “Class A history-sheeter, gangster, murderer and criminal” of the 1990s bears its name. Mylapore Siva (1979-2021) met his end at the hands of the sons of a man named Siva he is said to have murdered. Ayodhya Kuppam Veeramani was an extortionist who held sway over the Ayodhya Kuppam slum area along the Marina beach-front in Chennai. He was shot dead in a police encounter in 2003. Kakkathoppu Balaji, another A-category history-sheeter who was involved in dozens of murder cases, got his name from the area in north Chennai and met a similar end in 2004.
Place names in one’s nomenclature take the emphasis off from family, lineage and caste. If we went by the place of my father’s birth in 1900, he would have been called Durban Devadas; I could well have been Durban Gopal, with the bonus of celebrating a common place of ancestry with this year’s Nobel Peace laureate Navi Pillay.
Read all columns by Gopalkrishna Gandhi
Gopalkrishna Gandhi
Former Governor of West Bengal and Bihar