Dr Neerja Pathak (PhD)
Thesis title: To Be Named in Marriage: An Anthropological Exploration of the First Name-change Practice of Sindhi and Marathi Brahmin Brides in India
PhD supervisors:
Undergraduate teaching
Guest Lecturer, Kinship: Structure and Process (Soc Anth). 2025
Tutor, Kinship: Structure and Process (Soc Anth). 2025
Tutor, Ritual and Religion (Soc Anth). 2023, 2024
Tutor, Sociology 1A: The Sociological Imagination: Individuals and Society. 2021
Tutor, South Asia in the World. 2021
Research summary
My PhD thesis (completed) is an ethnography of women’s names and women’s marriages in the western Indian city of Vadodara, Gujarat. It focuses on a wedding ritual among the Sindhi Hindus (Lena-Deni) and Marathi Brahmins (Lakshmi Poojan) in the city, where the groom must ritually change the first name of his bride at their wedding, effectively changing her first, middle and last names. Scholarship on names in India has paid attention to last names; however, not enough attention has been paid to the first name-change at marriage. Thus, I foreground first names as my ethnographic vantage point in this thesis.
I ask two questions – first, what can ethnographic attention to women’s names in a patriarchal and a caste-based context tell us? Second, what power lies in names? Based on my twelve-month fieldwork (2020-2021) with Sindhi and Marathi Brahmin women, men, and ritual experts in Vadodara, I animate these questions by foregrounding the power relations that are produced, communicated, and maintained through the act of naming, the choices of names, and the very nature of names within the context of heterosexual, endogamous marriages. My ethnography recognises these power relations as the dual mix of caste and gender and illustrates their minute workings on the site of women’s names – right at the level of a single word. In doing so, I argue that marriage becomes a means to reproduce the working of caste and patriarchy on the very being of the woman, through her name.
In centring name-change in the thesis, I capture the experiences of women after being married – from the beginning of their marital lives and the long durée in marriage, from unmarried daughters to married wives, from bearing their “old” names to “new” names, from living in their father’s house to their husband’s. This thesis, then, makes “names” not only an ethnographic focus but also its method to understand women’s relational lives that have been marked by the normative compulsions of being married in exchange for the stability that marriage promises. However, beyond the caste and gender control, women’s name narratives, in the thesis, are repertoires of memories, childhood episodes, relations, and friendships that grow and fade over time. This thesis shows through these varied narratives that names evade being confined to function in a certain, predictable way. Women’s new names neither erase their old names, nor detach the women from their lives before marriage. I argue that names are words embedded in relations that gain meaning over time for women in the networks of their natal and marital kin, their experiences of marriage and their own changing sense of self. I use the analytic of a “palimpsest” to explain the layeredness of names and relations in the lives of women, like parchments lying one over the other. Finally, I argue that women’s sense of self is made to be instable by the combined forces of gender and caste, through the onomastic rupture in their names at marriage. It is in their very instability that the stability of structures of caste and gender is maintained.
Conference details
- South Asia Anthropology Group
- European Association of Social Anthropologists
- European Conference on South Asian Studies
- Annual Conference on South Asia
Invited speaker
- ‘I do not want to change my name: The Narratives of Refusal within Marriage’. Centre for Research On Families and Relationships, University of Edinburgh. 2025
- ‘Why does Ethnography Matter?’. Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, India. 2025
- ‘What is in a Name?: Introduction to an Anthropology of Names’. Social Anthropology Society, University of Edinburgh. 2023
- ‘The Politics of Names and Naming in India: A brief discussion’. Forum on Contemporary Theory, Scholars Meet, Vadodara. 2019
Organiser
Organiser
Two-day doctoral workshop ‘South Asia in Writing’, University of Edinburgh. 2024
‘Identity and South Asia’ Reading Group, University of Edinburgh. 2020
‘Poetry Reading as Resistance’ Teach-Out, University of Edinburgh. 2021
‘Painting Words’ Teach-Out, University of Edinburgh. 2019
XXI International Conference on ‘Re-visiting Cosmopolitanism’ Puri, India. 2018
Papers delivered
- ‘Living with Names: Histories of women in marriage through the first name-change practice in India’
European Association for Social Anthropology, Poznan. July 2026
- ‘Why this name and not that name? Choosing names, a relation between aesthetics and ethics’
South Asia in Writing Workshop, University of Edinburgh. 2024
- ‘Why Should I change my name? Contextualising Resistance in the First Name-change Practice of Women Post- Marriage in India’. Annual Conference on South Asia, University of Wisconsin–Madison. 2023
- ‘Re-naming of a Sindhi Bride and a Making of a Prosperous Future’. South Asia Anthropology Group Conference, School of Oriental and African Studies. 2023
- ‘On Being Named: Name- change Narratives of Women Post- Marriage’, Australian Anthropology Society Conference, Deakin University. 2022.
- ‘The Namer: Making of Men in the First Name Change Practice of Women Post-Marriage in India’. South Asia Anthropology Group Conference, University of Edinburgh. 2022.
- 'Whispered into Being': The Lena-Deni Ritual in a Sindhi Wedding’. Centre for South Asian Studies Work-in-Progress Workshop, University of Edinburgh. 2021.
- ‘Is there nothing in names? A study of the first name changing ritual of women post-marriage in west India’. Centre for South Asian Studies, Work-in-Progress Workshop, University of Edinburgh. 2020.
- ‘Cosmopolitanism within Partition: The undercurrents of ‘us’ and ‘them’’. Forum on Contemporary Theory and International Lincoln Centre for American Studies, Louisiana State University. 2018