Black and Bright and Beautiful

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

"C.R. Selvakumar" <selvakum at VALLUVAR.UWATERLOO.CA> wrote:

>     As far as I know Tamil Brahmins, by and large,
>     do not name their children in Tamil. So it is
....
>     I don't know whether this was the situation, say some 1000 years ago.
>

Even a 100 years ago, it wasn't so. One common first
name one can find among Tamil Brahmins of an earlier
generation is Picchai/Picchappa/Pichumani. My father
was officially named Sundaresan, but my grandmother
called him Picchappa, at home. I know at least two
Tamil Brahmin men named Murugan. Another feature was
the use of double names, one in Sanskrit and one in
Tamil. One of my ancestresses was called "aramaNattA
pATTi". It took me a while to infer that this name
was a version of Tamil aRam-vaLarttAL, i.e. Sanskrit
dharma-samvardhinI. There is also a fairly high
incidence of Tamil names among zrIvaishNavas, e.g.
Kannan, Perundevi, and names ending in valli/vaLLi.

Vidyasankar
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