So what's in a name, one might ask. "Everything," will be the answer in a small village in Tamil Nadu. The village in Virudhunagar district has been following a strange and unique practice for years now. For nearly 10 generations, residents of Valayapatti village have been naming their first-born child, irrespective of gender, ‘Kuttiyan’ or giving any name that starts with ‘Kutti’ in honour of their ancestral deity Sakthi. Presently, there are around 50 people whose name starts with Kutti there.
While earlier there used to be many Kuttiyans in the village, in recent times, villagers have been using Kutti as a prefix to avoid confusion and complications.
There are around eight children at the Kannappar Hindu Primary School at Valayapatti, who are named Kutti Priya, Chinna Kutiyan and so on, while the school’s headmaster is, you guessed it—Kuttiyan!
One among the many other Kuttiyans says their ancestors, who were cowherds, had migrated from a village called Mavoothu near the Mahalingam temple in Virudhunagar. Another Kuttiyan says people brought the tradition of worshipping Sakthi from their ancestral village, where there is a temple to the deity as well.
“About 10 generations ago, three of our ancestors—Periyasamy, Ponmalan and Podukalam—went hunting and caught a deer. It is believed that when they were cooking the venison in three different vessels, they found elephant calves in one vessel, baby snakes in the second and baby deer in the third,” Kuttiyan says, adding that his ancestors attributed this as a miracle by Sakthi. The custom of naming the firstborn child Kuttiyan began since then.
T Dharmaraj, the head of the Folklore Department at Madurai Kamaraj University says residents of Valayapatti belong to the Moopar community, a tribal group.
“It appears that the custom of naming children as Kuttiyan started as some ancestor of the villagers may have killed a cub or pregnant animal and named their first child as Kuttiyan out of a guilty conscience,” says Dharmaraj.
