What's in an Indian woman's surname?

Yashika Singla's book reminds us of the distance women are yet to cover even in seemingly small, everyday things

How far can a society go to keep its women invisible? Frighteningly far, if Iran, where women are being shot dead for showing their hair and where girls are reportedly being poisoned to keep them from going to school, is anything to go by. Or if Afghanistan, where divorced women are being sent back to their abusive ex-husbands, is an example.
 

That is why societies like India, which have travelled some distance from barbaric practices such as sati (dowry deaths continue, though) and jauhar, need to constantly work on themselves. Not only to keep them from slipping back into the dark days but also to keep moving consistently and resolutely towards a world that is fair to both genders. History shows us the decline can happen rapidly (look at America where abortion rights have become such an issue today).
 

And that is why books like Yashika Singla’s matter — they remind us of the distance we are yet to cover even in seemingly small, everyday things.
 

Ms Singla’s book, My Subconsciously Feminist Father , is written through lived experience. The second of three siblings, with a sister on one side and a brother on the other, she grew up in a regular family, one could say, with a doctor father and a lecturer mother. If there was an oddity, she became aware of it only at the beginning of Class 6, when she filled out her planner.

Father’s name: Dr Y P Singla. Mother’s name: Nirmal Gupta. Her name: Yashika (no last name). Her classmates sniggered: Why did this family have different last names or no last name at all? What’s the big deal, she argued? But the jibes continued.

At home, when she enquired about it, she found that it wasn’t because of some feminist assertion that her mother had kept her maiden name. She was already a lecturer when she married her father, who, being “conservative” with time and energy, felt it would be too much of a hassle for her to get her maiden name changed in government documents. He left it to her to decide; she chose to stay with “Gupta”. For the children, he thought why give them a last name when they might have to change it later.

So on festivals, the greeting cards that come from her father’s colleagues were addressed to “Mr and Mrs Singla” and those from her mother’s colleagues read “Mr and Mrs Gupta”, and everybody in the family had a good laugh about it.
 

It was as simple as that. Only it wasn’t. Come 1996, and Ms Singla is through with her degree without a last name appended to hers. Businessman Sabeer Bhatia has just introduced Hotmail, but to create an account one needs a last name. There’s a tossup between Singla and Gupta, and Singla wins because there’s already a Yashika Gupta in school. So, Yashika Singla is born. But for all official purposes, passport et al, she remains simply Yashika — until she needs a visa to Italy. The Italian authorities look at her passport and tell her it needs to have a last name, her father’s. So, Yashika Singla is officially born.

End of story? No.
 

Marriage to her best friend, a Maharashtrian, leads to demands from his family and friends that she change her name. The police, when she goes to them with her husband to file a complaint after a road-rage assault, also grill her on why she doesn’t have her husband’s name. 
 

The book has several such exhausting experiences. And through them, you keep getting glimpses of this man, her father, who didn’t set out to be a feminist but who ended up raising three. You see him pushing all his children to be independent, hands-on, self-reliant individuals — at home, in the kitchen, in the world outside. You also see shades of patriarchy in him, but what you see most is a man simply trying to be a fair parent, raising his daughters and son equally.

Through nine such chapters, each ending with “unsolicited suggestions” (Ms Singla’s expression), the author makes a case for parents of all genders to raise feminist families, which go about life as a team, routine frictions and differences notwithstanding.

Among other feminist writers, Ms Singla draws from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. (The Nigerian writer’s letter, a tiny book, to a friend who wants to raise a feminist daughter should be on every parent’s must-read list — not just for their daughters but also for their sons.)
 

Unlike Dear Ijeawele, Ms Singla’s is a long book; it could easily have made the point in half the number of pages.

Ms Singla’s childhood was spent in Chandigarh, before she lived in New York, Pune, Goa and other cities. Besides being brought up by a “subconsciously feminist father”, there is also something to be said about being brought up in Chandigarh — a young, modern city that, in many ways, does not carry the burden of problematic social ways and facilitates empowerment. Ms Singla misses this point.