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Under Ayyub Khan, the Basic Democrats system was introduced so that democracy could reach the rural village areas – and this was applied to Azad Jammu and Kashmir too.

What’s in a Name

Explaining names of Mirpuri Migrants

Names essentially act as markers of identity. Once this function is fulfilled, the actual name appearing in written records can be quite arbitrary; it can bear little relevance if not actually indicative of what the person was widely known as. Pakistani and Kashmiri names in particular differ from traditional British standards of naming children, simply because the British conventions were not necessary, nor were they implemented formally, in the village regions. This article endeavours to clarify how the naming system for migrants (notably from Pakistan and Kashmir to Leeds) initially worked, and also how it is adapting. We will use names of people hailing from the Mirpur and Dadyal area of present-day Azad Jammu and Kashmir as case studies, given that this diaspora community has a prominent representation in Leeds.

In Islam, soon after the child is born, the parents or immediate family decide on a name. This can be any name – as long as it has a positive meaning or etymology, i.e. not a negative denotation. Generally, that is all which is really required by religion. A large proportion of names have Arabic etymologies, and many are names of Prophets or Islamic persons and ideas. Nonetheless, many are also Indo-European, being from the Pahari, Pothwari, Hindi and Punjabi languages – thus ultimately descending from ancient Prakrits and Sanskrit. The name that the family decides on is the given name. It is one whole name, rather than a forename and a surname in the British sense. For example, Allah Dad is actually one name with a complete meaning, translating to “God gives”: it is not a forename and a family name, even though it may appear so when written out with a space in-between.

In a village scenario, if you wanted to identify someone, you would use their name supported by some contextual information. I will use my name as an example. If you were talking about me in the village, you would typically say “do you know Awais, the one from the village Pind Khurd?” and the conversation would continue from there. As there would probably be more than one person with the same name and from the same village, or as I may not be well-recognised immediately, more details such as the sub village, the caste, the clan, profession, father’s name or mother’s name, other relatives’ names, and other aspects of this sort would be used to clarify who exactly you were talking about. This acts in a similar way to how British surnames originally did, before they linguistically evolved from descriptions to become concrete as proper nouns. A person in the village might say “do you know Ismail, the Lohar (ironmonger)?” and in Britain, the equivalent occupational caste is the blacksmith, and this has become the family name as preserved in surnames such as Smith.

Caste and tribes (also known as zaat, gotra, goth, khumba, aal, subcaste among other names) for instance Jatt Kalyal, Rupyal, Gakhar Rajput and countless others, act more like British surnames in that they are supposed to indicate a patrilineal affinity and a hereditary connection through the direct male lineage. In the villages, it is generally believed to be this way: these various clans are believed to be descended from a common forefather whose offspring have over the years inevitably spread out. The few village records which existed were primarily related to land (the mehkma maal – department of land) and genealogy (kept by the Mirasi or the Raah) and these were organised on a clan and caste basis.

Economic migration to Britain from the Mirpur region has a long history. Mirpuris have been arriving in Britain since the turn of the 20th Century, and by the implementation of the First Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962, the majority of male migrants who had come in search for work had settled in Britain. This initiated the large presence of the Mirpuri diaspora population now in the UK; once the male working force had migrated, their families followed in a process of chain migration. Passports and official documents required a full name with a forename and surname, but people were not familiar with these conventions.

In 1962, the Union Council made it obligatory to record births and deaths, the first attempt to make it mandatory. Under Ayyub Khan, the Basic Democrats system was introduced so that democracy could reach the rural village areas – and this was applied to Azad Jammu and Kashmir too. This meant that recording of births was supposed to be compulsory, yet in many cases, especially in rural villages, it was still sporadic, with there being variation in name spellings and approximate years of birth.

Names were often randomly added in official paperwork, simply as a formality. There are almost certain formulae and patterns in names used in official forms. Most women’s names from this region end in “Bi” or “Bibi” or “Begum” or “Akhtar”. In the same vein, men’s names generally start with “Mohammed” or end in “Khan”, “Ali”, “Hussain” or “Mahmood”. With the exception of “Khan”, which may have some bearing on caste, these names are detached from the idea of an actual family surname; they have little to do with what a surname usually denotes and are equal to given names.

Consequently, phrases like the “Hussain family” or the “Ali family” do not have much currency at all and are ambiguous. These names were generally only used when gaps needed to be filled in official forms. Instead, the village conventions have continued to work in Britain. Interactions nearly always begin with a mention of residence, for the most part, of village location, and then a mention of elders and relatives, which quickly establishes a good rapport. Any form of anthropological or sociological research should appreciate the kinds of kinship ties involved in the community. Ties of biraderi meant elders knew each other[1]; migration and population expansion in general weakens these initially strong bonds, which is why the youth are not as acquainted with each other, but their elders are still well-recognised. As a result, when discussing names of families, people much more frequently speak of “the family from this village” or “those from that village”.

Customs such as nendra, the traditional gifting of money at weddings, have continued with the diaspora to Britain. These usually involve writing who has gifted what. A typical format for an entry in a nendra list would be:

  • Awais Hussain, Bradford, great grandson of Haji Jeevan of Khanabad – gifted £x.

People to this day are called in terms of their ancestors. To illustrate this with examples of migrant families in Leeds, Numberdars were those in the village who the Maharaja had given authority to collect maalia (taxes); an elder being a numberdar often meant that their descendants gained the same epithet. Thus, the “Numberdars of Bughoar [a village]” immediately acknowledges who is being referred to, an early family of setters in Leeds. Likewise, Sring was the title for those men who were foremen in the engine rooms of ships, and many of their descendants are known as being “from the Sring family”.

People often have up to three different names: their birth name, potentially a single word, a given name with a meaning; their official name in passports; and perhaps a nickname too, which may be a shortened version of the name or phonetically adjusted, or could even be something completely different.

Spellings form another whole heated discussion. Many people feel strongly that there is a particular way a certain South-Asian name should be spelled, when actually, there is no standard, nor is it necessary for one. Names from other languages ultimately have to surrender to the English language’s orthography when it comes to writing them in the Latin alphabet, and thus there is a miscellany of ways they can be written. Names have a specific spelling in the language they come from, but when transliterated it could be in any number of ways, none of which are incorrect. محمد can be written as Mohammed or Muhammad, among many other variants, and it all depends on the parents’ discretion, not any strict ruling. None of these are correct or incorrect, as it is a transliteration from another linguistic system and so there are nuances.

The old naming system of given names is becoming increasingly replaced with more British conventions, so as to be compatible with societal norms; Mirpuri children born in the UK generally take their parents’ forenames or surnames as their own surnames, the ones that their parents or grandparents included or invented when migrating. In future, this may make it difficult for future generations wanting to research their ancestry having grown up with the British norms of the naming system, given that many of the early migrants came under different names. Nonetheless, as more people are becoming interested in their roots, there are more opportunities to explain and research our heritage, so that this article can be a gateway to learning about how names were used.

Overall, a naming system may ostensibly seem straightforward, but the actual workings are more complex because a name, what someone or a community is known by, is intricately connected to identity and how we represent ourselves.

Further reading:

[1] Alavi, H. A. (1972) ‘Kinship in West Punjab Villages’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 6(1), pp. 1–27. doi: 10.1177/006996677200600101.