Personal Names of Hyderabad Anglo-Indians: Ethnicity, European Names, and Resistance to Nativising Tendencies

Abstract

This study investigates how personal names of Hyderabad Anglo-Indians constitute an important aspect of their ethnic identity. A combination of judgment and random sampling was employed to elicit the data on Anglo-Indian names.[i] Their names were taken from three decades, the 1950s, 1980s, and 2000s, to arrive at the naming styles across the variables of age and gender. The data was collected from the registers of different schools located in Secunderabad, within Greater Hyderabad. In common parlance, the placenames, Secunderabad and Hyderabad are used synonymously. Additionally, the study also investigated the motivation to give Anglo-Indian names to community members, elicited through structured interviews conducted with fifteen community members. The study showed that their first names (for example, Gavin, Evelyn) clearly aligned with the naming customs of the European and English-speaking world. I suggest that this is an example of projecting a distinct identity that is British or western in style. This aspect of their identity, communicated through personal names, diverges from other Indian Christian communities (such as Telugu Catholics) who give local names to their children.

[i] Judgment sampling is employed when researchers pre-decide the social variables to be correlated with language, whereas random sampling is a method of data collection in which every community member has an equal chance of being selected for study.