Black and Bright and Beautiful

[Periannan Chandrasekaran]

--- Vidyasankar Sundaresan <vsundaresan at HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:
> "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

Vidyasankar is right.

It can be corroborated by checking UVS Iyer's "piRkAlap pulavarkaL" ("latter
day poets")
where you can find many names such as "kandappa iyer" which would surprise
Tamils of today, "country"  names like that having been stereotyped as not
favored by non-brahmins.

That makes one wonder what exactly changed in the society for such a major
shift in naming policy among brahmins; of course non-brahmin Tamils also have
completely abandoned the same collection of  "traditional" names.
It could be that brahmin Tamils started that process early this century and
non-brahmins simply followed them.

After all the brahmin Subramanya Bharathi's wife was named "Chellamma" which
today is unthinkable as a female brahmin name.

Chandra


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