What is your good name? Goan Catholics on a first name basis By Cecil Pinto
My book on Goan Catholics names, published in 2002, received tremendous critical acclaim and went into its third print run recently. I am planning to re-write certain sections, to more accurately mirror current naming conventions, and re-release the book in 2010. For those of you who have not read the original book I am excerpting a few passages below. Please send me feedback and personal anecdotes which I can insert into the next edition. Excerpts from the book Child Naming Conventions of Goan Catholics by Cecil Pinto (Pp. 240, Hardbound - Abbe Faria Productions © 2002) "The Goan Hindus have always followed religious and cultural convention while naming their children. There has been little or no variance over the centuries. The Goan Catholics on the other hand are very adventurous, in an anthroponomastic sense, and shows interesting discernible waves and patterns which can be scientifically enumerated and categorised." "Before the Portuguese arrived the Goan Catholics had no proper names. They just used to call each other Bhau, Bai, Bappa, Lapitt, Soku, Oie etc. In fact before the Portuguese arrived there were not many Catholics in Goa." "The Portuguese converted many of the Hindus to Catholicism and gave them surnames. Please do not confuse First Names with Surnames. The process of giving the new converts surnames was complex and involved the surname of the Portuguese nobleman, the caste and clan of the converted person and some phonetic similarity. This I have covered in my 1997 book Goan Catholic Surnames - Clan, Caste & Kashti. So for example a Pundalik Prabhu would become a Pascoal Pinto" "The native Goans were clueless on what First Names to take. The Portuguese gave them a large printed sheet of paper called an Almanac (pronounced al-man-ac) that basically had a Catholic saint for every day of the year. So depending on your date of birth you take that particular saint's name. Gender issues did crop up. Adolph became Adolphine and Mary became Mario but some names remained neutral like Vivian, Piedade and Innocence causing much trauma and sexual confusion for these named individuals." "No sooner the first printing press in Asia arrived in Goa a young entrepreneur named Dominic Savio printed minature credit card sized copies of this Almanac. The father of the child would just whip out the handy Dominic Savio Card from his wallet, check the date, and viola, there was the name. The villagers of Benaulim and surrounding areas never quite understood the concept and hence a lot of Catholics, and even a few Hindus, there are named Dominic and Savio. Of course the people of this area take their names from the oddest of sources - dead British Prime Ministers, Walt Disney characters, what have you." "Laminated Domnic Savio Cards were available till very recently but are now collectors items, like those signs saying 'I gave on cash I gave on credit' with a fat shopkeeper and a thin impoverished guy with a lot of debtors." "Of course Goans, being the way they are, this naming trend did not last for long. There was rebellion. People started naming their children after the local church saint - Alex in Calangute, Anne in Ponda, Thomas in Aldona, Conception in Panjim, Reception at Alva-Mar, Parra etc" "After a particularly troublesome delivery, as happened often in those days, it was tradition to name the child after the attendant doctor. This didn't make a major difference because the doctor was originally named after a saint anyway. Unless he was a Hindu doctor. In which case an advert was put in the local papers thanking the doctor and the Dominic Savio Card was referred to, as always. This tradition of placing an advert still carries on to date but its origins are forgotten." "Often respect had to be given to a particularly rich or influential dead ancestor or relative. So for example an expectant mother would name her child Cecilia in advance after a recently deceased grandmother. When the child was born and found to be male the name was quickly shortened to Cecil." "All was well until Liberation in 1961. Hundreds of thousands of Goan Catholics now were exposed to All India Radio and those who didn't die of boredom were updated on what was happening in the world. People turned on their radios and heard about the great happenings of the Sixties. This was a period of heroic names like Neil, Armstrong, John, Kennedy, Martin, Luther, Ernesto, Lyndon, Johnson, Julie, Gloria etc. A confusing period for the children, especially the hundred odd who were named after Ringo, Evita, Hendrix, Sonny & Cher." "Interestingly in the early Seventies a few priests took up Hindu names like Fr. Sanyas and Fr. Vipassana. Parent's followed suit and gave children names like Vivek, Nirmal, Jyoti, Avinash & Nash. Curiously despite their nationalistic fervor nobody used Goan Hindu names like Damodar, Sundorem, Sakaram, Pandurang, Ganpat, Mogrem, Shunvtem, Tukaram, and Bhimlo." "Politically correct people point out that these are Indian names and not Hindu names. This is untrue. Abdul and Hasina and Rosemary and Homi are as Indian as Ram and Shyam. At the least they can be called Sanskrit names." "A few years down the line there was a minority backlash against these Hindu names and the Catholics reverted to the Holy Book and used Biblical names like Aaron, Daniel, Saraf, Cleophas, Ruth and Demetrius. Some took the anti-Sanskrit sentiment to its extreme and used names that were totally culture contrary like Stacy, Bach, Fidel and Kurt." "In the early Nineties a strange trend came into being, uniquely first in the civilised universe - combi-names. Such combi-names had been used earlier by Goan Catholics to name their newly built RCC bungalows. But now they started giving combi-names to their children. A combi-name consists of a combination of the names of the Father and Mother. For example Edlen from Edwin-Helen, Loubert from Lourdes-Albert, Fremella from Frederick-Pamella, Luiza from Luis-Eliza." "An earlier book of mine, Residence and Vehicle Names in Goa, touches on this subject, but briefly. There are 227 RCC bungalows in Goa named God's Gift and 324 Maruti Vans named Jesus Saves" "Another common convention is to name all children with the same starting letter of the alphabet. A couple in Assagao has twelve children named - Austin, Annabelle, Alan, Audrey, Auspicio, Alba, Abigail, Anastasia, Anthony, Astrid, Alice and finally Amen!" (ENDS) ---------- The column above appeared in Gomantak Times dated 10th September 2009 =====
