Manu also recommended that Brahmin names should indicate auspiciousness (mangla), Kshatriya names strength, Vaishya names wealth, and Shudra names lowness and contempt. It is possible to envision a more humane habitus in which we rethink our implementation of last names. All Rights Reserved. For example, in the light of a growing anti-caste discourse and legal regime, asking one’s caste directly is perhaps offensive. This list may not reflect recent changes (learn more). Usually, the habitus requires a space (educational institutions, workspace, housing, households, etc.) Asking last names is often how some educated Indian elites politely insinuate their caste. It is a set of dispositions that the individual learns and imitates as they grow. The material on this site can not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Multiply. A few years ago, two of us, newly-arrived academics in a small town in Sweden, went to a supermarket on the university campus. It would instead require the demolition of the caste habitus by critically interrogating the caste privileges that surnames extend. Ano ang Imahinasyong guhit na naghahati sa daigdig sa magkaibang araw?
However, their rules were not always followed. But it can also be produced and reproduced by casual, spontaneous conversations and by objectifying the surname culture. India has a much older tradition of the surname culture, but it acquired a unique character because of the caste system. Arun Kumar is a historian based at Nottingham University, UK and tweets at historian_arun. Its religious advocates argued for the abolition of all caste surnames, except for Kaur (for women) and Singh (for men) to eradicate caste distinctions. In both cases, surnames became the markers of humiliation and a degraded status for a section of humanity. Amrita Ghosh is a visiting researcher of cultural and postcolonial studies at Lund University, Sweden and tweets at MsBiryani. The state authorities, on their part, created surnames from plants’ names (Rosenzweig, Mandelbaum), stones (Steinberg, Steinmann), physical appearance (Gross, Lang, Kurz), and occupations (Koch, Schmied, Zimmermann). It normalises and justifies hierarchy, difference, violence, humiliation and systemic othering of the lower castes and Dalits.
“Kumar what?”, he asked in response to one answer, and gleefully acknowledged the other answer with the exclamation “Kayasth”. Caste, as an ideology and practice, evolved to divide the human society among the upper three varnas (Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaisyas); “low and inferior” Shudras (“lower castes”); and Atishudras (the outcaste Dalits, whose only existence was to serve the three higher varnas). It generates certain normative principles and taken-for-granted behaviours that an individual absorbs over time from family, society and the world, and manifests through their body, behaviour and cognitive response.
16. French philosopher and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is useful in understanding the widespread absorption of caste in everyday life.
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Admittedly, these people may not necessarily practice caste-based discrimination, but what they should not forget is that it is an ancient discriminatory practice which, according to historian RS Sharma, was explicitly denied to lower castes and women. There was also, as William Pinch notes, a conceptual reconfiguration of the word Das (a slave) by lower castes who, influenced by the Bhakti movement, linked the term to their devotion to deities than to the caste hierarchy. Its tagline – “Search any surname, find which caste it belongs to” – is a tragic reminder that the claim of many urban, educated Indians and non-resident Indians that we live in a post-caste society is not even remotely defensible. Today's Message: For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, & the strength of the Wolf is the Pack. Indian family names Indian family names Surnames of Indian origin A quarter of them had witnessed physical assault because of their caste, and half were afraid of being outed as Dalits. Shaadi.com, one of the leading matrimonial sites for diasporic Indians, offers a searchable database that classifies caste under community and the drop-down menu shows more than 60 kinds of subdivisions in the Brahmin category alone.
That too, in a foreign land, where there are limited opportunities to practice caste-based inquiry unless people who believe in caste are in a position of authority. The caste-based surname culture solidified under the British colonial regime, which gave primacy to Brahmanical laws and a caste/community-based understanding of the society. The habitus creates these responses as natural, given and unproblematic, and people further reproduce this habitus through their responses and interactions with others. When these people adopted surnames, they turned to the caste system as a means to obtain a family name, thereby adopting names related to … The conversation ended with him informing us of his Brahmin caste. If you are 13 years old when were you born? For Bourdieu, habitus is a normative world that shapes the actions and behaviours of individuals inhabiting it.
Further complicating the matter were gendered surnames. In India, Scheduled Caste is commonly known as SC. Later, however, Grihyasutras (literature on domestic rituals from 600-300 BC) and Manusmriti (lawbook written by Brahmanical scholar Manu around 200-400 AD) proposed caste-based hierarchized surname conventions. To challenge this evolving structuring of the caste habitus, it is important to understand the privilege that surnames produce. After independence, India saw the rise of a more contested surname culture as a result of identity politics, anti-caste movements and greater assertion of the non-Bahujan identity against affirmative action. The caste habitus itself evolves over time through interaction and response. So the Term 'Dalit' Can't Be Used But 'Brahmin' and 6,000 Other Caste Names Can. In an article in The Atlantic, Edward Delman mentions some state-led programmes meant to create homogenous identities, such as Spanish colonisers dictating Filipinos’ surnames, and the Communist Bulgaria authorities deciding Turk and Bulgarian Muslims surnames in the 1980s. This could be because, as Khubchandani explains, last names reveal and silence any tension about where we come from. This question is more salient in light of California suing technology giant Cisco over the allegation that an engineer faced discrimination at its Silicon Valley headquarters because he is Dalit.
Copyright © 2020 Multiply Media, LLC. In practice, though, caste surnames did not totally disappear, and Kaur/Singh sometimes became middle names. : This category lists surnames that are native to South Asia. The people of Scheduled Caste and community lives in different parts of India. But who gets to ask the caste of others and why? “Surname?” the man asked. When did organ music become associated with baseball?
Actress Adah Sharma Caste… A number of high caste communities in the US organise “sacred thread” ceremonies for their children and educate them about their cultural position.