KOCHI: While Abdul and Mary continue to echo across generations in Kerala, names like Santha and Thankamma — once staples in birth registers of the 1960s and ’70s — are quietly disappearing. Bindhu and Sindhu rose together from the mid-1960s and collapsed after the mid-1980s, mirroring a familiar family memory: the first daughter, Bindhu, the second Sindhu. In their place have arrived waves of Aishwaryas, Vishnus and Fathimas, each reflecting a cultural moment.
A painstaking data exercise by Subin Siby, a self-taught programmer and free-software enthusiast, helps decode that pattern. After downloading electoral rolls from the Election Commission website and analysing nearly 21.97 lakh names — roughly 8% of Kerala’s voter population — Subin has done what elders and school teachers long did from memory: trace generations through names for the period of 1920-2007. This time, nostalgia comes with numbers.
“The name of a person is closely tied to the time of their birth,” Subin said. “In my school alone, there were four Vishnus and three or four Aishwaryas among just 200 students. That made me wonder why a name suddenly becomes popular and then disappears.”
To make the study workable, he estimated birth years from age data in voter lists, corrected spelling variations and tracked the top 50 male and female names year-by-year across corporations and major municipalities, from Thiruvananthapuram to Kannur. The graphs that emerged read almost like Kerala’s social history.
One striking example is ‘Baby’. Affectionate, secular, and oddly ageless, it was widely used between the 1950s and early 1970s — for both boys and girls.
The recent elevation of CPM leader M A Baby to the party’s top post has revived curiosity about the name, which belonged neither to a religion nor a caste, and not even clearly to a gender. Subin’s data also shows something unexpected: more girls were named Baby than boys.
Ravindranathan P of Manipal University says post-Independence Kerala consciously moved away from caste surnames. “Names like Baby, Babu and Raju were neutral and egalitarian. Reform and Left movements encouraged people to drop caste markers. Even Russian-inspired names like Stalin and Lenin appeared,” he said. That period also explains the popularity of paired sibling names.
Subin’s dataset also reveals a subtler linguistic rhythm — a cycle in syllables across generations. An older cohort favoured longer, three-syllable names: Thankamma, Ammini, Rajamma, Omana, Annamma, Lakshmi, Janaki and Saradha. The next generation shifted sharply to shorter, two-syllable names: Bindhu, Sindhu, Beena, Sheeja, Sheeba, Geetha, Deepa and Nisha.
Subin pointed out that now the pattern appears to be returning to longer forms again: Aswathi, Gopika, Aishwarya, Fathima, Athira, Devika, Nandana, Anjana, etc.
Cinema later shaped another wave. Actress Sheela popularised ‘Sheela’ in the 1970s, while Aishwarya Rai triggered a surge in ‘Aishwarya’ in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Siby’s dataset also shows a spike in Fathima after 2000, overlapping with a popular Malayalam song carrying the name.
Since formal naming often happens at school admission, trends usually appear a few years after the cultural trigger.
In Kerala, a name is never just a label. It is a timestamp — a quiet personal record carried through everyday life, telling the story of a society as much as of an individual.