Calling someone by a diminutive such as “boy” or “little” is a way of one race subjugating another. Calling a land a “new world” is a way of wiping out its history and prior identity. The media has inherited many of the assumptions and attitudes of the colonialists, with naming often taking on specific class and gender contours, says Sharmila Joshi
Ever wondered why Malcolm X had an alphabet for a surname? The charismatic African American leader changed his second name from ‘Little’ to ‘X’ for a number of reasons. The change came in the early-1950s with his changing religious beliefs. But equally it was an attempt to reject his family’s white slave-master name. ‘X’ came to represent Malcolm’s unknown generations-old African family name. The tag of ‘Little’ had possibly also come from the common practice of white slave-owners in the American south calling their black slaves, especially men, by diminutives such as “little” or “boy”.
To call an enslaved human being, who was forever forced to labour, by the parts of his or her whole, such as (farm) “hand”, achieved a dual goal for the white slave-owner: it restricted the identity of the slave to the only thing that really mattered to the slave-owners: the dehumanised body that laboured for their profit. And it reduced the full humanity of the slave and, especially in the case of men (women were subject to other injuries and insults), their sense of being grown men, when they were repeatedly called “little” or “boys”. Needless to say, the term “boys” did not come, in this context, from fraternal camaraderie.
This sleight of naming was only one of the many means employed by one race to subjugate the other. Material enslavement and exploitation was accompanied by symbolic means of suppression. The right to name, to construct an identity from the properties implied in the name, to reiterate the name into common usage, is not an equal right. Only powerful groups can exercise it in unequal societies. The power to name the “other” is a potent weapon. It was, as Amitav Ghosh has pointed out, one of the entitlements of colonialism: calling a land the ‘New World’ for example, and thereby wiping out its history and prior identity.
Formal slavery and direct colonialism may be past in most parts of the world. But the exercise of power through the processes of naming continues. It is, not surprisingly, also evident in the urban, middle-class dominated media in India. It is especially, but not exclusively, present in the English language media. The media has inherited many of the assumptions and attitudes of the colonialists, in addition to our own solid traditions of prejudice. In the media, naming often takes on specific contours according to class and gender.
On television and even in film in India, for example, it is routine to see, at the end of a long roll of credits, a list of “spot boys”. In a land where child labour flourishes, these workers may actually sometimes be young boys. More usually, they are grown men doing specific tasks on a TV or film set. In the grandiose scheme of a film production, the labour of these men may be considered peripheral (though crucial to the making of the film). But calling them “boys” serves to diminish their stature, both as workers and as adult men. It would only take a simple change in job description to at least symbolically dignify their work.
In addition, this list of the names of workers that trails the other ostensibly more important tasks almost always uses only their first names: Raju, Salim …and so on. It would take little effort on the part of the persons supervising the credits to ask for and use the full name of all the workers. By denying them a complete name, their identities, labour and contribution are further implicitly abbreviated and reduced. They become just boys who do little work.
This practice prevails in various other locations in the media. Persons who are poor, of economically weaker status—domestic workers, for example—are often granted only a first name. A telling example of this is the extensive coverage of the murders of Arushi Talwar and Hemraj in Noida last year. In the reams of newsprint and the hours of footage, at times, Hemraj went completely missing, as if his life and death were inconsequential. And, whenever he was named, it was only his first name: how many of us know his full name?
At times a person’s surname in print or on TV may be absent because of different reasons: the person may be from a community that does not use surnames, the person may not wish to use a surname that indicates caste, the person may have requested that his or her surname not be used, or the journalist may decide to avoid using the full name in order to protect that person in some way. More often though, the absence of a surname is an oversight. And it occurs only when talking or writing about people on the wrong side of the class and gender divides.
Many newspaper reports, for example, refer to women from villages, domestic workers, construction labourers, and other workers, only by their first name. Others go to another extreme: not only are the woman’s name and surname given, but a middle name—her father’s or husband’s name—is also given. This may be because the woman has said that is her full name; but such middle names come from patriarchal practices. If copy editors often correctly remember to use, for example, Ms (instead of Mrs) in reports of urban, middle class women, similar judgements could be made when using the names of poor women.
Women are also described with diminutives, but in a manner that is somewhat different from those used for men. Saying “girls” when referring to adult women comes less from an impulse to diminish their individual identity, anyway often regarded as nebulous or inconsequential. It arises more from a common but implicit habit to infantilise women, to see their achievements as frivolous.
The practices of naming the “other” are far from innocuous and are not equally available to everyone. Language and names construct distinct realities. As anthropologist Thomas Hansen writes, names do not describe objects or places. They create and fix those objects. The right to name shapes the style and ways in which that object or person is known, and how assumed properties are described. Malcolm X protested by changing his name. The people only half-named by our media, have fewer means than X of asserting their own identities.