Sheela Banerjee answers the question of her title by showing how her own name, and those of a selection of friends she grew up with, contain histories, religions, politics and much more. In doing so, she creates a kaleidoscopic portrait of the UK from the 1960s when its modern multicultural society was born, not without attendant monsters. What’s in a Name? draws out the many implications of those versions of selves inscribed on registers for the convenience of ruling authorities and how that bureaucratic procedure can set in train alienation with psychological consequences. (Her real name is Bandyopadhyay, a reduction familiar to Irish readers, as, say, Ó Dubhthaigh became Duhig).
Banerjee’s studies of her Jewish, Muslim, Cypriot, Sri Lankan and Jamaican contemporaries’ heritages move easily from the micro-personal through to the macro-international, each if fairly brief, offering impressive character sketches over several generations of their families. These are usually connected by the British Empire’s legacy and Banerjee chronicles an England that grew more racist in her own youth. In this supposedly-liberated age, David Bowie declared he believed “very strongly in fascism” and Eric Clapton launched into anti-immigrant rants on stage. Movingly, Banerjee takes the register of the times’ racist murders in a manner evoking Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.
Banerjee is proud of her surname in England but after her family tries living in India again, she becomes uncomfortable by its caste meaning in that real world. The author’s self-awareness, including of her own relative privilege, is a strength of What’s in a Name? She is alert to the class signifiers of English first names and what they imply for life chances, relating these to difficulties she encountered in her own ultimately successful media and academic career.
The heart of this book for me is where Banerjee describes her friends’ backgrounds and experiences with insight and compassion, not treating them merely as examples to prove a point, but providing a model for how we all might learn from our own fellow new citizens. In this respect What’s in a Name? reminded me of Farhan Samanani’s How to Live With Each Other, his study of multicultural Kilburn drawing lessons from its superdiversity (to use Vertovec’s term), the inevitable future condition of world cities everywhere.
- Ian Duhig’s ‘New and Selected Poems’ won the 2022 Hawthornden Prize for Literature
