The Politics of Surnames in Academia
And getting your research published without having one
Amidst the worries arising due to COVID-19 and the mundane struggles of adjusting the rhythms of life to the new normal, I was faced with one more challenge, that of having ‘a name without a surname’. Shortly after receiving the comments from the reviewers on a submitted manuscript, the realisation of having a non-academic name that too without a last name struck me. “Just one name? is it OK?” commented the first reviewer, while the second one asserted “Should be full name. First and last.” Having a name without a surname is not an unusual practice across India and abroad. While surnames or last names are often related to a variety of factors such as Family names, Caste, Place of Origin, Occupation but the move towards their adoption may also be deeply connected to the nation’s identity and politics of which family remains an important unit. There is much written in academia and beyond about the cultural politics and significance of a name in terms of class, caste, gender, regional and racial identities, the unsaid requirement of having the last name is rarely talked about in the registers of academic writing.
My introduction to the last name only occurred in School when many of my friends and classmates had one but I did not have any. More often people had difficulty reading my name and read only the part they could make sense of. In school, tweaking and twisting surnames of your friends was often a fun activity to tease each other if you were beyond the privileges or exclusions of caste structures. The missing character of my surname was first felt when I had to create a Gmail account and Google questioned me about my last name which I bypassed using the ‘jugaad’ of splitting my single name into two. There not only I realised the surname deficit in my name but also became aware of the ways in which the global economy and capital normalise the need of having the last name or standardise the name comprising of first name and last name.
And likewise, I navigated the web world of red asterisk marks which required a last name — a mandatory condition — until I initiated the herculean task of publishing a paper. It was at this point that, I became mindful of the fact that the name under which a scholar publishes is not only a publishing requirement but it also becomes a capital deeply enmeshed in circuits of the global publishing industry, where to be ‘visible’ is to be ‘unique’.
While names are profoundly personal, they are also significant in terms of individual and social identities. My name not only characterises me in this world, but it’s the mark that also establishes my social and political identity. While not giving me a surname was a choice my parents exercised, it also reflects the privileges which I enjoy in a society that is deeply organised around caste identities.
There are blogs advising about choosing your academic name tactically in order for a person to be ‘found’ in one click in the dashboard world of citations and h-index along with statistical studies suggesting a correlation of surname initials with academic success. The preference given to last names in academia is undeniable, that too a surname which should look and sound scholarly. In a country where having a Muslim or Dalit name significantly lowers the chances of even receiving an interview call for jobs in the private sector enterprises, the game of surnames in academic spaces is still less explored or talked about.
In India, names and importantly surnames are not only indicative of social and spatial histories but are also an important function of identity both individual and social. Since citation practices are a characteristic feature of academic writing, surnames become equally entangled in the politics of representation and visibility within academia.
While India currently engages with nepotism in the film industry, in academia, it remains a common practice to give certain surnames preferential treatment, higher respect and better opportunities in classrooms, conferences, scientific conventions, journals and even workplaces owing to a parent or an aunt being a stalwart in the same subject. Such politics only reinforces the existing social structures and hierarchies that scientific knowledge attempts to transcend. It is thus not an overstatement to suggest that consciously or unconsciously, academia prefers a politics of names and surnames just as much as the other institutions it so diligently accuses for the same.
