Aji sunte ho… Guddu ke papa now has a name

Ivdoral: that was how my mother addressed my father. It was a smash-up of 'ivide oru aal' or 'one man here'. There were other men around the house but only one ivdoral. Inspired, the family knighted him Sir Ivdarhal for his polite, measured ways.

My grandmother was more direct — Maniyande achha, Maniyan's father, was how she referred to her husband. One daughter-in-law, altogether too 'modern' for the 1970s, dared call her husband by his name the day she arrived as a bride. The backlash was swift: "Is he her playmate? The arrogance!"

Today, 'chetta', dominates the scene in Kerala. A bit bewildering because it is the Malayalam equivalent of dada, or older brother, and sounds rather incestuous. The substitute-for-name assortment also includes ivide (here), ketto (do you hear) and so on.

And that is the story across communities in India — elaborately circuitous modes of getting around the taboo of naming one's husband, to his face as well as when referring to him.

Many women in the metros are absolutely cool with naming their husbands, even an 'oye' is okay. But step out of the cosmopolitan circle — even into conservative urban homes — and you realise that taking the pati ka naam is a transgression, sometimes severely punishable.

To get a sense of how little things have actually changed in much of India, watch Why Can Women Not Name Their Husbands, a video quickie shot early this year in Belwa Karkhandar, a village in Kashipur district of Uttar Pradesh, by Video Volunteers (VV).

Why do you not call your husbands by their names, asks Madhuri Chauhan, a community correspondent with VV, of a small gathering of married women, young and old. "Pati bhagwan ka roop hota hai...devta ke saman hota hai...mai baap hota hai" — a husband deserves respect reserved for the almighty and he can't be named.

But he can name you? "He has the adhikar...we are smaller than our husbands...he is maibaap, can do anything," come the answers.
VV is a platform for alternate and marginalised voices, especially on gender issues. Chauhan and 56 others like her are working on the theme of everyday patriarchy across small towns and villages.

The young dulhans of Belwa Karkhandar, says Chauhan, would like to call their husbands by their names. "We want to be friends with them. Par buzurgon se darte hain," they tell her. Some are bold enough to speak the name when asked but only outside their village and out of the hearing of familiar elders.

Video Volunteers then decided to use the film made earlier this year to hold discussions at its gender groups. It found that even naming an uncle-in-law was an act of outrage in very conservative rural pockets. In Odisha, Malati Mahato from a hamlet in Sundergarh paid the price for her impudence by being declared a social outcaste by a kangaroo court.

"A woman shouldn't name husband or her in laws," decrees an elderly village woman justifying Mahato's continued boycott for a year and a half.

But in Walhe village, off Pune, VV community correspondent Rohini Pawar shrugged off her fears and decided to take the lead. "Prakash," she called out to her husband. When the bomb dropped, there was stunned silence. "I told him if we are living together as equals so why not?
When we are alone, now I can call him by his name but not before the joint family or out in the village," she says.

At the discussion group Pawar organized, some women decided to go ahead and name their husbands. Pawar captured their emotions in a video called What's in a Name? The rest of Walhe isn't happy going by comments like: "These women go out too much...they've become too shaani...haath se bahar...kya sikha diya?"

So why can't women name their husbands? In Divine Passions, The Construction of Social Emotions in India, edited by Owen Lynch in 1985, scholar Margaret Trawick talks of her journeys into the interior Tamil Nadu to understand 'The Ideology of Love in a Tamil Family'. She found that the avoidance of the spouse's name in favour of "father of so-and- so" or even caste name ('my Reddiar') and other arch references were part of a convention of "hiding love" to protect it from unknown harm.

Scholar Pauline Kolenda who went to Western UP found that women referred to their husbands as malik or voh "not so much a matter of deference as of sexual embarrassment".

Will getting women to take their husband's name change much? "Some aspects of everyday patriarchy are so deeply embedded in us we don't even register them as such. The fact is that these symbols of matrimony that we are questioning through our groups - the ghoonghat, the vermillion, the rituals - are all the women's domain. Just getting women to talk about these small things means ceding them some thought. Change can come only after questions are raised," says Pawar.

What they call hubby:

Evandi (what ji): Telugu

Yennanga (what ji): Tamil

Sunte ho (listen), aji, so-and-so ke papa, voh (third person), profession+sahib (eg doctor sahib): Hindi

Ketto (listen); chetta (older brother): Malayalam

Aaho aiklat ka (did you hear this): Marathi

Ei je suncho (listen), o go: Bengali

Maharaz (third person): Kashmiri
Jaan, baby: For cosmo types