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narrative / section one

Santha Rama Rau By Any Other Name, 141
Mindy Kaling from Is Everyone Hanging Out without Me? 148
David Attenborough from A Life on Our Planet, 155

By Any Other Name

Santha Rama Rau

Santha Rama Rau (1923–2009) was born in India, while it was still
under British rule. As the daughter of a diplomat, she traveled
extensively as a child, including to South Africa, England, and Japan.
Eventually she and her husband settled in the United States where Pictorial Parade/Getty Images
she taught English at Sarah Lawrence College near New York City.
This piece was published in the New Yorker in 1951.
KEY CONTEXT This narrative tells the story of two Indian sisters,
ages five and eight, as they attend a British-run school in Zorinabad, a village in northern India.
At that time, one of the goals of the British Empire was to “make the world British,” and institutions
such as school and government applied tremendous pressure to conform to the British way of
doing things.
The title — “By Any Other Name” — is a reference to a scene in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet,
in which Juliet, having fallen in love with the son of her family’s enemy, wonders aloud on the
balcony:
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet
Juliet answers her own question by concluding that names do not matter.

t the Anglo-Indian day school in Zorinabad helpless inability to cope with Indian names.
Ato which my sister and I were sent when Her rimless half-glasses glittered, and the pre-
she was eight and I was five and a half, they carious bun on the top of her head trembled as
changed our names. On the first day of school, she shook her head. “Oh, my dears, those are
a hot, windless morning of a north Indian much too hard for me. Suppose we give you
September, we stood in the headmistress’s study pretty English names. Wouldn’t that be more
and she said, “Now you’re the new girls. What jolly? Let’s see, now — Pamela for you, I think.”
are your names?” She shrugged in a baffled way at my sister.
My sister answered for us. “I am Premila, “That’s as close as I can get. And for you,” she
and she” — nodding in my direction — “is said to me, “how about Cynthia? Isn’t that nice?”
Santha.” My sister was always less easily intimidated
The headmistress had been in India, I sup- than I was, and while she kept a stubborn
pose, fifteen years or so, but she still smiled her silence, I said, “Thank you,” in a very tiny voice.
Uncorrected proofs have been used in this sample. 141
Copyright © Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.

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