Mind the Gap: What's in a name? Plenty if you're a married woman

Hindustan Times

7 hours ago

When I got married, I switched from Khanna, the name I was born with, and took on Bhandare, the name my husband was born with.
Pick your battles, I rationalized at the time. In any case, my last name was taken from a man, my father, so dropping it for another man, my husband, didn't seem that terrible.
Over three decades later, trying to connect with a college alumni group I had not been in touch with for some years, I couldn't remember my user name. Namita Khanna Bhandare or just Namita Khanna as I was back then?
The debate over the last names of women post-marriage remains even though more and more Gen Z and millennial women are asserting their right to retain the names they were born with. If I was to take a decision on my last name now, it would be very different from what I took back then.
'The question of changing my last name after marriage never came up,' says Nisha Prasad, married for 11 years. There was no need for discussion with either her spouse or his parents, she says. 'I am no less than him, so why would there have been a need to change my name?' Moreover, she adds, changing her last name would have entailed a ton of paperwork and hassle of changing all documents from her driving license to her passport.
Both women said their children had taken the last names of their father.
The push to retain birth names crosses borders.
A recent poll published by The Female Quotient finds that among younger unmarried women, 13% are more likely to retain their maiden names than older married women.
'Women are taking charge of their maiden name decisions,' finds the report, The Maiden Name Debate: The power of a name in business and beyond. (Personal peeve: The use of the word 'maiden' in maiden name is way past its use-by date.)
In Japan, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party confirmed that an internal working group is mulling over changing the law to allow women to retain their last names after marriage. In the UK, where a majority of women still take their husband's names, 56% of women in the 18-34 age group favoured retaining their names with 46% believing that combining both names was the best option.
Even in Iceland, the world's most gender-equal country, eyebrows are being raised over the tradition of surnames that are derived from the name of the father with the suffix 'son' for a male child and 'dottir' for a female. So, Jon Eriksson's son will be young Master Jonsson; his daughter will be Ms Jonsdottir. Why father and not mother? Tradition is the reply you're most likely to get.
In March this year, Iceland introduced a bill that will allow individuals to adopt an entirely new surname which could then be passed down through the generations.
In August last year, Jaya Bachchan objected to being referred to as Jaya Amitabh Bachchan by the Speaker of the House. The Samajwadi Party member of Parliament had chosen to adopt her husband's last name so the insertion of his first name as a middle name—a practice common in Maharashtra and Gujarat—should not have irked her as much as it did. Still, it led to a debate on what a married woman's last name ought to be and, crucially, her right to be choose how to be addressed.
In March last year, the Delhi high court sought the Centre's response to a petition challenging a government notification that requires married women to submit a no-objection certificate from their husbands if they wanted to revert to their last names at birth. The petition was filed by a woman undergoing divorce proceedings who wished to legally revert to her name before marriage but was asked to furnish a no-objection certificate from her estranged husband.
The final order in that case is yet to come, says Ruby Singh Ahuja, the lawyer who represented the woman. But as young women surge ahead, making their mark on careers, the feeling that they should honour their parents' names by keeping them has also grown, she says.
The practice of adopting the husband's last name is relatively recent and stems from British colonial rule, points out an analytical piece in The Hindu. 'The emergence of the universal 'surname',' writes feminist academic Nivedita Menon, 'amounts to the gradual naturalization of two dominant patriarchies—North India upper-caste and British colonial.'
India in fact does not have a law that compels a woman to change her last name—or even her first as practiced by some families—it is based more on customary practices.
As women marry later, much of the decision on changing last names, or not, is driven by how that change might impact their brand and identity, states the Female Quotient report. As women content creators flock to social media or get established in careers, publishing research papers, for instance, a name-change would amount to literal erasure.
Among women who change their names in their personal lives, 27% said they had retained their birth last names in their professional lives.
In India, there is also the intersection of gender with caste. Last names more often than not are caste markers. A Brahmin convert to Christianity might well retain their Hindu (caste) name. Equally, some names are adopted because they are caste agnostic: Kumar, Chandra, Bharti and so on.
For those who opt for double barrel names the conundrum remains. A child might be given both parents' names, but what happens when that child has children. How then do you factor in the spouse's name?
[Readers: What do you think. To change or not to change, that is the question. Write to me at: [e-mail]]