E Pluribus

If Smith spells his name Psmith, that's his business, but it's a nuisance to telephone companies. The Calcutta phone company decided last week to take a strong line with variant spellings. Its trouble was not with Smiths (everybody in Calcutta knew the billboarded Smith Bros., Dentists) but with Mukerjees. They spelled it Mookerjee, Mookharjea, Mookarjie, Mocurgey, and a dozen other ways. The Chatterjees and the Bannerjees also went in for whimsical variations.

Hereafter, each name would be listed only one way in the phone book. But which way? That was left up to Calcutta University (which already standardizes its students' names). A faculty board found that the high-caste ancestors of present-day Mukerjees, etc., had all been imported from Benares 600 years ago by a Bengali king who wanted to increase the number of Brahmans in his realm. When the British East India Company came to Calcutta, the Brahmans' descendants flocked to work as babus (clerks). Their employers promptly shortened the babus' names and made them more pronounceable for British tongues.*

The university decreed a return to the pre-British forms. Mukerjees, Chatterjees and Bannerjees would find themselves listed as Mukhopadhyaya, Chattopad-hyaya and Bandopadhyaya. Anything simpler, Calcutta nationalists swore, would be a British imperialist corruption.

* An old Sassenach trick. Unable to pronounce Gaelic names, Edward IV issued an order in 1465 requiring all Irishmen to take "an English surname of one towne, as Sutton, Chester . . . or art or science ... or office, as cook, butler." Though the law was generally ignored, the Irish did find it expedient to Anglicize their names. In the proud name O Ceallaigh, for example, the O was dropped, hard Irish c became k, the guttural aigh softened to y; and the result was Kelly. Many Eire patriots are now reversing the process, with Murphy re-emerging as O Murchadha, and Moriarty as O Muircheartaigh.

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