Arpita. Pronounced Urr-Pih-Taa. Three syllables were bestowed upon me at birth, and they drove the way my life directed itself. Is it like this for everyone? Does your name affect you? Maybe my story will make you consider.
I was born in 1989, at the brink of India’s opening to globalisation. My mother named me after a painter she read about in the newspaper – Arpita Singh. It was a name close to her own – Aruna – in sound, and she liked that I would be named after a powerful feminist figure. Many years later I asked her, “did you ever see Arpita Singh’s work?” She hadn’t, but we’ll get to that later.
I remember my earliest relationship with my name being one of dislike. With the two consonants together – R and P, it’s a complicated shape for a child’s mouth to form. At the time, I was often Apita. To this day my younger sister calls me Api, an homage to a child’s way of attempting to say my name. I was also Appi, Appu, Arpi – depending on who was calling me.
Appu was particularly challenging for me as a chubby child. In the body-shaming post-colonial culture of India, a non-white (fair), non-skinny body was othered and shrouded with shame. Combine that with ‘Appu – the elephant mascot’ of the 1982 Asian Games, and you have a recipe for bullying. My name made me feel fat.
I also inherited my mother’s pain around a conversation she had with my grandmother; her mother-in-law. Already, there had been some judgment around my being born as a dark child, even though I inherited my colouring from both my parents and my grandmother herself! Compounded with that was a barb around my name and my sister’s. “What kind of names are Arpita and Antara,” she asked, “might as well have named them Papita (Hindi for papaya) and Santara (Hindi for orange).” Hearing about these associations and the pain around them as a child caused me to create a strange dislike for the papaya and orange, a preference I have to this day!
Perhaps a child should not have to inherit the burden of interpreting and processing their caretakers’ griefs, but in systems with generations of inherited trauma, it is a common story nevertheless. So it was that my name made me think of elephants and fruits, not a particularly respectable association.
As I grew up, I also grew my relationship with this word – Arpita. My mother told me that my name means ‘dedicated’, and it took a long time for my little person brain to even comprehend such a complex concept. The easiest interpretation was religious. Every once in a while, I would find my name in a prayer or a religious verse from Hindu texts. It would be a thrill to think that my identity was somehow connected to the sense of divinity that the texts were alluding. I came to think that my name meant for me to be sincere and earnest, dedicated to faith and practice.
With that intention in mind, I threw myself into every activity that appeared before me, applying myself in academia as well as the ‘extra-curricular’ fields of art and oratory. If I ever found it challenging to manage a full schedule as a child with negligible down-time, I would tell myself, “my name means dedicated. It is my duty to apply myself to all that I do.”
At age 13, I began to learn the Sanskrit language. One of my first curiosities in the dictionary were the names of loved ones, trying to understand how their meanings related to personalities. About my own, I learned that Arpita comes from the root ‘Ṛ’ from the old Vedic texts. The verb ‘arpayati/arpayate’ would become the past participle ‘Arpit’, the feminine form of which is Arpitā. It is a verb used for what I was told – dedication, in the sense of dedicating offerings to the divine. Specifically, throwing sacrificial wood into the sacred fire.
I met my name again while reading ‘Shiskshashtakam’, the only eight verses penned down by Chaitanya, the medieval mystic and practitioner from Bengal. He writes that the divine is embedded in every name and form, but it is the misfortune of the human condition that dedicated practice towards this remembrance fails us. I was infused with enthusiasm at this reference, feeling as though my name made me special – that I was born to dedicate myself to divinity, sacrificing all joy and pleasure for the one-pointed aim of burning in the metaphorical fire.
In my social justice work, I was fuelled by the drive to literally burn to help others, to make the world a better place. With the resources that I had gathered and the spirit of youth, I was able to continue in this vein for some years, fully ‘dedicating’ myself in my social and spiritual practice. I envisioned a world of peace and equality, and worked with organisations and leaders who were championing ecology, alternative education and inclusive spirituality.
As with everything in life, I met the shadows of my practice again and again, until finally, I broke down completely. My name had not been enough to sustain the burning for my cause. I realised, and how, that spirituality is a construct to aspire towards, with many human flaws designed into the most well-intended of systems. So also in social work, offering care for others while erasing oneself leads to severe burnout.
When depression overtook my life and devastated everything that I had ever assumed about myself and my internal landscape, my name saved me in a completely new way. Broken down, without words, I found solace in painting. As I would smear colours with my hand on canvas, inspired by the art practice of Iris Scott, I remembered the source of my name again – I was named after a painter.
I found a book about Arpita Singh’s work while scouring a beloved Bangalore bookstore, and greedily devoured her paintings. She was painting women, she was painting community. She was using her art to bring notice to social inequity and the deep humanity that pervades all beings all at once. In her art, I found women as I’ve seen on the streets, unlike the Mona Lisa or Venus de Milo with whom I have so little in common culturally.
Inspired by Arpita Singh and Frida Kahlo, my work started returning again to the composite of my experiences. My social justice work seeped into my paintings, but with a valuable distinction. – this time self-care was deep-rooted in my practice. I had permission to invite joy and pleasure into my life. I was allowed to celebrate life and presence without holding myself responsible for the healing of the world by burning myself in the process.
Three years after the depression began, life looks different for me. I have been writing about my experiences, hoping that my words will float like messages in glass bottles for readers on distant shores. I have compassion for little Api, who went through so much as a child and still insisted on always standing up for others.
I now have a healthy concern about the religion that I unquestioningly followed for years – Hinduism in India in 2022 is a dangerous weapon being used by terrorists hungry for power. Whether the Hindutva agenda will follow the trajectory of Nazi propaganda is something only time will tell, but I cannot remain silent as innocents are tortured, raped and murdered in the name of religion. How can dedication to the divine include being a mute witness?
In my writing spaces, the question of a pen-name has often shown up. Do I want to dissociate from the many ruptures and failings that my name brought up for me over the decades? Or do I claim this identity anyway, with all its scars? Is it a name that allows the playfulness and community that I am inviting now into my life?
Perhaps I never needed permission from my name. Perhaps it is I who can offer some meaning for it. Like Arpita Singh, who inspired me to claim the identity of an artist by shaping her name, I could shape mine to contain the authenticity of all that I am. I will always contain kernels of my past – dealing with body shame and trauma, cultivating faith in the universe, creating art rooted in connection and social justice.
‘Arpita’ has often shaped who I am. And now I am free to shape her – what does she look like unbound by her name?
