There are four variants of the name Subramanya: Subramanyam, Subramani and Subramanya, in addition to the Sanskrit original that I will spell as Subraman-yuh. The Four Subramanyams cause no problems for themselves or for society in most Indian scripts, for they are unambiguously spelt as they are pronounced.
When expressed in the Latin alphabet though, the variants proliferate: from the common ones like Subrahmanyam, Subrahmanyan, Subramaniam, Subramanian and Subramanniyan that you will come across in top government offices, to Subramonium, Subramanium and others that remind you of chemistry, to exotic ones like Subramoney, Soobramoney, Soobermoney, Soubramanion and Soebramanjam that belong to our colonial cousins.
And this is before numerologists get involved and recommend things like adding some more ‘u’s and a double ‘n’ to make the concerned name bearer excel in entrance examinations.
Indians are okay with this variety of spelling, although the Subramaniam couple I know gives me some difficulty. Addressing ‘Dear Mr Subramanian and Mrs Subramaniam’ feels like writing to two halves of two different couples.
All this pluralism stops being funny when spellings meet the state. Subramaniam has to appear before a notary and sign an affidavit saying that the Subramaniam who passed the Tamil Nadu school leaving exam and the Subramanian who has a birth certificate by that name are one and the same. This has to be published in two newspapers whose cuttings have to be produced, along with the original certificates and affidavit, while applying for a passport.
If this Subramaniam’s father was Sreenivasan in one document and Srinivasan in another, then more affidavits, notaries and newspaper advertisements follow.
Not just individuals, names of streets and places have variations too, which you discover when going through your third KYC process. Over 15 years ago, the unique identification (UID) project came up with an elegant solution for the problem by assigning each individual a number that could be validated biometrically.
Unfortunately, controversy, politics and usage changed Aadhaar from a number to a card, with Subramaniam’s name spelt using the document used for UID enrolment.
Over the past few months, many people have had to make the rounds of notaries and government officials to sort out discrepancies noticed by the Election Commission as it conducted its Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. The spelling business is thus at best an inconvenience and at worst grounds for disenfranchisement.
The economic cost of having multiple spelling variants have not been calculated, but they are immense and make normal life unnecessarily difficult. Documentation anxiety accompanies every interaction with banks, hospitals, government offices and delivery companies.
A friend once had to swear in an affidavit that Mr Shailendra Nayak and Shailendra Nayak are one and the same person to the best of his knowledge just to clear a shipment.
Standardized spelling is a form of public infrastructure. Independent India did not build this for the Latin/Roman alphabet. China, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam are among those that did, following decolonization. Germany and South Korea reformed spellings more recently.
The complex world of the Chinese language—with its pictograms, dialects and tones—was simplified by the hanyu pinyin system, which standardizes the spelling of all words.
The use of the Roman script has the added advantage of making the language easier for others to learn. In the 1970s, Malaysia and Indonesia not only harmonized spellings (which were different because of their English and Dutch colonial history), but practically did away with the older Arabic-derived Jawi script. Vietnam pragmatically standardized the French-influenced Roman script imposed by its colonial masters.
India, however, adopted a laissez-faire approach to spellings, which is not a good thing when it comes to infrastructure. Allowing everyone to set up railway tracks of any width makes a national railway system hard to run.
There is a case for creating a standard Roman transliteration scheme for Indian words. It is not technically difficult: unlike Chinese and Vietnamese, we do not need a number of accent marks to distinguish several tones for each sound.
There are a handful of sounds like the zh in the Tamil (actually Tamizh) word ‘kazhagam,’ that do not have straightforward equivalents, but we have established usage that can be standardized. Roman spellings can co-exist with Indian scripts.
Apart from making life easier for Subramaniams, Indians will be able to learn other Indian languages without having to learn a new script. The Indian Army, with troops from across the country, already enables communications in Hindi by writing it in the Roman script.
A standard for spellings is best left as a recommendation. It should not be imposed. People should have the option to adopt it because it is simple, phonetically accurate and makes life more convenient. There will still be parents who want to name their son Zhubhraamanjyam. They should be free to do so.
The author is co-founder and director of The Takshashila Institution, an independent centre for research and education in public policy