What's In A Middle Name?
The story behind mine (and maybe yours, too).
Today, I’m addressing a question I am asked very often. It’s about the sudden appearance of my middle name Vadini.
What is Vadini, they ask, almost as if the name is an unwelcome addition to my personality. Vadini is a name I have chosen to add to mine, I tell them. Yet many people have asked me about the name more than once.
The act of re-naming yourself in the absence of an apparent life-altering event, like matrimony, is difficult for people to understand. Why Vadini, why now?
I have always been known as Richa Singh, a woefully common name that hardly befits anyone’s individuality. Having a name like mine is akin to showing up at a great party to find that you and your least favourite person are wearing the same outfit.
Obviously, Richa Singh is not the type of name anyone would choose for themselves. But that’s the irony of it all—you learn to live with that which you cannot choose. Our name bears the inheritance of someone else's dreams for us, and we spend the rest of our lives on antonymous pursuits. Perhaps infants are named far too prematurely and far too intently, long before they have had a chance to come into their own.
As a girl, I would judge the boys I fancied by the surname they had on offer, because of course, until I was much older, I didn’t know that it was a matter of choice to take on your partner’s last name if you chose to marry them (that, too, I thought wasn’t a matter of choice). What a pity that some boys were rejected solely on the basis of their name! If there’s one thing I have learnt as an adult, it is to reject prospective lovers for the right reasons.
In 2018, as I was transitioning in a professional capacity from a ‘service provider’ to a ‘creator’, establishing my sole proprietorship (which, I promise, is a lot fancier than it sounds), carving an identity that borrows heavily from the work I do (as is wont in the post-industrial age of automation), it dawned on me that I needed a name with character. I couldn't be just another Richa Singh among the many I already knew, who I daresay are as insipid as their name. I would think twice before reading anything authored by a Richa Singh. So, why was I writing as Richa Singh?
Take on a pen name, I was advised.
Change your name, better still.
I have trouble changing the arrangement of the two items on my nightstand, so there’s no way I could have changed my name, the one that is so familiar that its sound has no ring to it.
An epiphanic compromise, therefore, was the insertion of a middle name; the subtle, unobtrusive, dispensable-when-needed-to-be-dispensed-with, middle name.
Here was a blank I wanted to fill with a name that was as uncommon as Richa is common. For this purpose, I went to my Nani (mother’s mother), whose distaste for common names is apparent in the names she has chosen for her children. She had objected to my name when I was being christened as a newborn, but all objections were summarily dismissed in favour of a hand-me-down suggestion, which was a name that had first been chosen by my father’s father for another grandchild (who was, of course, not named Richa). That’s the sweet story of my name, but also of patriarchy and the lineage of names that flows through its veins.
Sometime in 2018, I requested my Nani to help me pick a middle name. She asked for some time to think, and only took a couple of days to suggest Vadini. The name had the most sonorous ring to it, and I knew right away that it was the one. And, wonder of wonders, it worked beautifully with Richa.
Richa (Sanskrit Devanagari: ऋचा) refers to a shloka (couplet) or mantra, usually two to four sentences long, found in the Vedas.
Vadini: Sanskrit word for the one who recites (the Vedic hymns), or female musician.
Nani had a few more suggestions, but I was sure about Vadini. A quick Google search assured me that the name is as uncommon as I believed it to be. That very day, I made room between my first and last name for this middle name. I now publish as RVS, although my legal documents still have me down as RS. But those IDs also have the worst mugshots, and that’s not the face I go by.
Decades later, giving my mother’s mother a chance to modify my name was empowering in more ways than one. Like with most things in my life, big and small, there was no announcement to accompany the change in my name. Needless to say, I am delighted with my not-so-new name. I respond to it reflexively.
The Politics of Name Changing
A trend that has caught on with women of the millennial generation (the term trend doesn’t necessarily have a derogatory connotation) is to retain their maiden name as the middle name even as they adopt their spouse’s (typically husband) last name.
Ten years ago, this was a ‘bold’ thing for a married woman to do—preserving the father’s legacy without simply discarding it in favour of the husband’s.
Ten years on, adding your husband’s last name to yours is a ‘choice’ that has to be defended as, well, a matter of choice. A feminist is not expected to take on the husband’s name at all, you see. The problem there is that for you it is simply a matter of choice, but for many people, these instances of ‘choice’ become what appears like the norm against which they are defenseless.
Anyway, whose name you wish to honour as a part of your identity—at least on paper—is and should be a matter of choice, no doubt. But as long as the trend of the less important name being the middle name remains, the fact of the matter is that that will always be the dispensable one.
Another trend observed commonly in the names of the children spawned by the urban millennials: the offspring no longer simply adopts the father’s last name as theirs, but the child’s name is now a sweet concoction of the mother’s last name as their middle name, and the father’s last name as theirs. More often than not, the last name is the last word. So, while you can have all the fun playing with the middle name, it’s the last name that counts, it’s the last name that’s remembered, and it’s the last name that’s passed down from the clutter of increasingly long names that are sometimes strung together by the binding hyphenation, but often left loose to get lost in the crowd, to be massacred in a misspelling, and forgotten in the retelling of the story about the writer who chose her own (middle) name.
If you could remove 'h' from 'Singh', your last name would fit aptly with first and Middle name.
As always, your articles are insightful and uncommon like your middle name.