What's in the Surname: A Prologue

A herd is not a clan and surname recounts this aspect of human history along with our name. A herd can have owners and they may be shepherded but humans belong to a clan?  Surname indicates 'who are your own'( who owns you, if you are a women) among resemblances. Surname marks the long history of the leader of a clan. The metropolitan and cosmopolitan urges and rural and rustic moorings relish surnames. Stuff with which orders are built, negotiated, sustained and reproduced.

Scott, Tehranian, Mathias relate permanent family surname to state-making and state-naming practices as a clear attempt to get past vernacular variety and ineligibility to introduce synoptic, aggregate and standardised orders.

Surname is about lineage.

Title, entitlements and estates were historically connected and materially fixed in land-holdings and continue to harvest the advantages that accrue with them. The distribution of power, prestige and honour are hinged with surnames. What a name can tell is already canvassed by ones surname.

Whether it is 17th century's John Locke's Social Contract and Treatises on Government or more recently of Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State and Utopia the connection between property, estates, titles, entitlements and rights and liberties are unabashedly discussed, extended and defended. An occasional weighing and scaling of redistribution with recognition, largely shifts the focus away from restoration, restitution and reparations.

Honorifics as surnames indicate the story of historical human labour. However surnames are more about how the spoils and advantages of labour, enterprise and endeavours were collectively settled to form a society.

If one were to be knighted, sires, SIR would precede your name and surname. You will have, then, the honour of relating to the royal lineage.

A sir as civil mode of address is preferred but surnames can reveal how distinctions arose and the histories of conflicts and violence among clans, groups.

The invisible link between your name and surname is the notion of father. The ancestor.

Sur/Asur dichotomy in the worlds that Sanskrit encompasses has real dimensions as well as mythological proportions. Before we all leave for the surpur(after death), sur in surname reminds us of how lives were lived on this earth? Sur in hindi also stands for a note/tone and attached to name in English is surname. In that sense, is the sur in surname reveals what we are in tune with surnames? Anil Persaud pointed out that in the surs( sa, re, ga, ma, pa) Ma precedes Pa.

Last paragraph and a lot more may be not in sur and the purists may object but can the histories and contemporary forms of surnames be sung without jarring notes and in one raga and alap? Sigmund Freud( Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism) talks about a primordial murder, the modern individual emerges in his account through developmental stages which is both biological and psychological and only after symbolically slaying his father.

Big fish is an influential Hollywood feature film about how one young man struggles and finally resolves his relationship with his father( his stories). Am I mistaken to presume that for a nascent country like United States of America, history literally lies between the father and a son. 

Godfather, the film and godfathers in life who work like compass when you navigate or act as anchors/shores.

And then there is the theme of the possibility or emergence of prodigal, mythical, messianic son where the history and tradition reverses in religion, myths and in life with Jesus Christ, Gautam Buddha, Krishna and Ram. And in another garb the suspicion and expectation that ones child is special or gifted pervades life.

Surname is a prologue, father a book.

*The great bard has already wondered what's in the name, when blood feuds surround love and found sweetness of roses, not in its name.