The Hindu Business Line : Just name it!

It was in one of Edgar Rice Burroughs' novels set in Africa, about the adventures of his fascinating creation, Tarzan of the Apes, that I came across the peccadillo — in the form of the name of a `Hindoo' (referred to as `the brown bwana' by the natives). The name is Raghunath Jaffar. It seems that Burroughs was unaware that a name like that was highly unlikely, the first name being Hindu and the surname, Muslim. Another gaffe by the same author is in the form of a lascar's name — `Jabu Singh'. I have encountered many a `Singh' but none with the name `Jabu'. During my school years I came across a character called `Zakir Shastri' — another Hindu-Muslim combination — in one of the light espionage thrillers about a fictional American secret service agent, Nick Carter, set in `the remote hills of Calcutta'.

In the 1960s, out of Hollywood came the film, The Party, starring Peter Sellers as Hrundi V. Bakshi — a bumbling, Indian film extra who is inadvertently invited to a party thrown for Hollywood glitterati. His antics in the course of `the party' provoked uncontrolled mirth among audiences, particularly in the US. Sellers' portrayal of a Punjabi — accent and all — was truly flawless. One wonders, however, how he came up with the name for his character. While `Bakshi' is a common enough surname in the Punjab, `Hrundi' is unheard of.

Even the works of Frederick Forsyth (of The Day of the Jackal fame) — products of meticulous research, with an eye for detail — are not free from flaws when it comes to references to people from the sub-continent. In one of his short stories from the paperback collection No Comebacks, he refers to a character with the surname `Chatterjee' as a `Gujerati'. In that great science fiction movie, The Fifth Element (starring Bruce Willis), the female protagonist who is an alien created by the Big Bang of the universe, says `big bada boom'. No prizes for guessing which language the `bada' came from! In the same movie there is a group of ugly aliens who are called the `Mangalores'.

In Richard Attenborough's much-acclaimed, Oscar winning Gandhi, a scene depicting the Partition riots in Calcutta has a mob screaming `Allahu Akbar!' while attacking burqa-covered women.

The names of Indians settled in former British colonies such as Mauritius, Fiji, West Indies and South Africa have taken on interesting forms — `Sewoosagur', `Cheri Jegan' and `Mackerdhuj', among others. A Mauritian friend of Bihari origin has the last name `Bissessur'.

Mad magazine's caricature of a Hindu ascetic — a human `pin cushion' observing penance with needles stuck all over his body — was given the name `Gung-Gohome', probably inspired by Rudyard Kipling's Gunga Din.

In my boarding school I had a dormitory mate, Narsing Rao, who would turn into an insomniac as the end-of-term examinations neared. Other students who wanted to be woken at a particular time would inform Narsing Rao who, candle in hand, moved from cot to cot gently waking each of them. This arrangement helped avoid the use of many alarm clocks going off in the middle of the night. For such service rendered, Narsing Rao earned the sobriquet `Florence Narsingale' after the `lady with the lamp' made famous during the Crimean war.

During the long, boring and hot Sunday afternoons of my college-hostel days, my friends and I played around with names. A. Jagannathan would become Jack Norton, Colin Dawson customised to Kalidasan and Samivel `converted' to Samuel. Mess attendant Amir Khan was referred to as the American.

For a long time, I thought the narrow Arundel Street in Mylapore was named after some `Arun'. Only later did I learn that the street was named after the famous Irishman George Arundale who had been married to the equally famous Rukmini of `Kalakshetra' and the Theosophical Society.

Finally, here's one that is not from the land of the `catamaran' and `mulligatawny'. Out in the Nevadan desert, I was approached by a Mexican who asked me where I was from. I said that I was an Indian and he immediately said: `What tribe? Paiute? Shoshonee?...