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Purujit Banwasi

Professor Madhavi Menon

Introduction to Literary Theory

ENG-1002-3

14 December 2022

A Prose By Any Other Name

Mahasweta Devi’s short story ‘Draupadi’ opens by naming its main character - Dopdi

Mejhen - her family, her residence and more. We are given a biographical description of her

identity which is preceded by her name. Despite knowing so much about her, a livery member

notices her name and remarks “How can anyone have an unlisted name?” (Devi 392) indicating

that her identity lies outside the list of ‘legitimate’ names. Through this interaction, we notice the

importance of names in creating an identity. We know that he is talking about a “most notorious

female. Long wanted in many…” (Devi 392), and we even know her husband and residence. Yet,

her name being unlisted is what makes us understand the deviance of her character. In doing so,

we take part in the creation of an identity by virtue of a name. We take part in this process while

fully aware that names are just arbitrary signifiers which provide a convenient way to describe

the things we see around us. We know that a rose by any other name would, in fact, smell as

sweet (Shakespeare 2.2.42-43). Why, then, do we try to extract any meaningful identity from

names? Why is a name enough to acquaint two strangers, train a dog, or describe a literature
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essay? How do we engage in the creation of the meaning of names and how does this meaning,

that we create, in turn, create us?

By diving into a search for the true origin of names we find that each name is taken from

a previous name and that name, too, was taken from a name before itself and so on. By taking

this route we risk falling into the trap of infinite regression in the search for an origin. While it

might be futile to locate a single origin of names, what is clear is that all names exist in relation

to other names. The naming of a child by their parents places the child’s name in a temporal

order of signification. When the child is named after something, it implies that the naming, and

therefore existence, of the initial object, preceded that of the child. Therefore, names act as

symbols that carry over the existence of other symbols in themselves. Forming a chain of

symbolic signifiers that have a seemingly linear relation to each other.

To conclude that names only exist in a singular linear relation would fail to acknowledge

the complexity of the nature of names. Names are infected with a multiplicity of meanings that

are simultaneously prevalent. This is what Jacques Derrida calls ‘trace’ in his essay ‘Differance’.

“There will be no unique name” (Derrida 297) as names are made up of “a whole complex of

meanings at once, for [they are] immediately and irreducibly multivalent” (Derrida 283). When a

name is presented to us we understand it through the multiple threads of names that we already

know to exist. In any name, we can identify the ‘trace’ of names that have existed before,

alongside and after it. On hearing that a new acquaintance’s name is similar to a childhood

friend’s name we are simultaneously retrieving memories about the childhood friend while

weaving new threads to the fabric of that name. In this way, we play an active role in the creation

of a tapestry of meaning that can be unwrapped only as a symbolic representation of other

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symbols. When we name a child, we are aware of all possible meanings of a name. We look, not

only at the meaning that the name has but, at all the meanings that the name has and has had.

Thus, In choosing a name, we affect the existence of names before and after the moment of

naming. Through the selection of symbols, we manipulate the fabric of meaning. Some threads

remain while other threads are removed, with each change in the tapestry of names signifying a

change in the cloth of meaning that we weave.

In Devi’s short story, we know the two versions of the name of the central character. She

is introduced as both Dopdi and Draupadi. While the text mentions only one at a time, we

recognise that each of the two names bare a ‘trace’ of the other. We can not understand the

meaning of ‘Dopdi’ without hearing ‘Draupadi’ as well. This connection is made even more

apparent in how we understand the character of Dopdi in the short story by having an

understanding of Draupadi in the Mahabharata. The latter acts as a layer of fabric, covertly

underlining the former, where the use of one will always bring into existence the other. Every

name is “inscribed in a chain or a system, within which it refers to another” (Derrida 285).

Names take part in a relationship where they are always referring to each other and to the

position of the self. In the Mahabharata, Draupadi’s Sanskrit name directly translates to ‘The

Daughter of Drupad’, tying her self, through the referral of her father’s name, to the identity of

her father. In Devi’s short story, Dopdi briefly escapes this referral by not using the Sanskrit

meaning of her name and replacing it with its tribalized form. However, by virtue of her last

name ‘Mejhen’, she is still tied to her family in a relationship. By naming someone, we give

them meaning and make them legible. The use of both Draupadi and Dopdi in the short story

indicates that it is impossible to escape this fabric of referral that creates meaning. Dopdi is
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always infected with the ‘trace’ of Draupadi. This meaning can only be understood as it refers to

other meanings, perpetually tying things together to form an inescapable fabric of meaning. Our

names also indicate the way in which multiple things are related under one name through the

symbol of a ‘full’ name. In our ‘full name’ the first name is our ‘identity’ and the second is our

relation to the world around us. Our first name gives us an illusion of freedom, individuality and

independence. An illusion which is immediately wiped away by the existence of our last name,

commonly a ‘family’ name that we share with our ancestors and which is least our own. Our first

and last names act as the latitude and longitude indicators of a map, marking our location and

fixing our identities. By knowing our ‘full’ name we know our caste, religion, family, marital

status etc. We use this information as a mannequin on which we clothe our identities. We forget

that the name is only referring to something other than ourselves. We hold our name to be a

self-encapsulating signifier that describes who we are. The expression of this phenomenon of

ignorance occurs when we precede the introduction of our names with the rather inaccurate,

deceivingly static term ‘I am’.

The problem arises when we come to the deeply unfortunate realization that our names,

into which we invest so much meaning, have nothing to do with who we are. Names, exist solely

to differentiate us from other people and do not express any inherent identity of their own. Our

names only inform us of our position in society through a differential negative relation to

everyone around us. Our names succeed in telling us who we are insofar as they describe our

relation to others and not a relation to the hole of identity that exists within us. As we are not the

relation that ties us to different people, our names will not, to our great dismay, inform us of who

we ‘truly are’. This is because to discover who we ‘truly are’ is to venture into a bottomless pit
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filled with a lack of meaning. The lack of meaning is born out of the dynamic nature of our

identity, making it impossible to fix ourselves in place. Jacques Lacan, in his essay on The

Mirror Stage, talks about the unstable nature of identity as a “temporal dialectic that…projects

the formation of the individual into history” (Lacan 444). With each intangible moment that

passes, we are constantly casting ourselves into the past. As we express the identity behind a

name, we place it in a symbolic temporality that has already fleeted away before the moment of

its expression. This recurring movement makes it impossible to unwrap the existence of a

‘present’ in time as it is always moving away from us. Due to the inability to fix a symbolic

present, we will never be able to fix a stable identity of the self.

The process of naming, consequently, is an exercise in futility as it is hindered by the

notion of non-coincidence, where we will never coincide with the image that the name prescribes

before us. It is an act of trying to fix a static meaning to that which we know to be dynamic. We

experience a fissure in our unity of self when we are given a name as we are given an image of

ourselves to live up to. However, it is an image with which we have no inherent relation. The

fissure that is created when we realize the inability of the image to encapsulate our identity is

what Lacan terms as a ‘lack’ in ourselves. To coincide with that image, it, and us would need to

be fixed in a moment. However, as the present will never exist, we will never coincide with the

self that was named.

The ubiquitous fissure is first created by the act of giving someone a name. When “Surja

Sahu’s wife gave her the name” (Devi 392) she gives Dopdi an identity. However, her act of

giving is actually an act of taking away. It is an act of taking away Dopdi’s unity of selfhood

forever and replacing it with the fissure in her image of herself. Her identity is under threat when
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the army men are hunting her. To cope with this, Dopdi runs away from her identity with her

husband and goes “underground…in a neanderthal darkness” (Devi 392). This darkness prevents

the visibility of Dopdi’s location as well as her identity. By resisting visibility, she resists being

identified and being caught. Her refusal to be physically visible is a symptom of the fear of

responding to her name. A response which would bring back into existence the identity from

which she is running away. Dopdi’s act of fleeing away is an act of coping with a lack of stability

in the identity given to her at birth. Similarly, our names set us in a movement where we are

always in an act of fleeing away from the identity given to us at birth by seeking refuge, like

Dopdi, in our names. Only for it to be shaken, setting us, once again, in a frenzied search to make

up for the lack of selfhood. Our name, therefore, has been given to us in a blindfolded barter

trade in exchange for our unity of self. This destructive realisation of a lack is what allows us to

exist in the symbolic realm, instituting the name as a symbol to which we respond. Due to this

fissure, we spend our lives “yearning to hark back to the lost unity” (Lacan 441) of self that

occurs when we are ‘given’ a name. We realise that the “lack can never be filled” (Lacan 441).

Our act to fill up the lack and perceive our names to represent an identity is the creation of an

“exteriority in which this form [of the name] is certainly more constituent than constituted”

(Lacan 442). By using this veil of meaning to hide behind, we aim to fill up the lack that we were

given when we were born. We do this by investing effort in identifying with our names.

Our names serve as nothing more than a ground for us to place our identity, despite there

being no inherent relation between our names and ourselves. The two only share a negative

relationship where “[t]he one is only the other deferred, the one differing from the other”

(Derrida 291). Our names differ from who we are as they are not us, they also act as a symbol for
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us to defer our identity. Thus, our names share a relation of transience, where they act as a

signifier insofar as they defer our identity. Our names also help us differentiate our identities

from everyone else. Derrida and Lacan - two theorists who would be indistinguishable by using

only their first names - both understand this process of movement between signifiers as one of

fictional meaning creation. While Derrida calls the play of differences “a theoretical fiction”

(Derrida 291), Lacan situates “the agency of the ego…in a fictional direction…which will only

rejoin…the subject asymptotically” (Lacan 442). They both view the meaning that is created

through the symbolic register to be fictional in that it exists in order for us to make sense of the

world. Just like how we transfer the responsibility of walking on course ground to a layer of

shoes, where we have no inherent identity in the shoes except that it allows us to walk; we

transfer the responsibility of having an identity to the symbol of our names, where we have no

inherent identity in the name except that it gives us a convenient designator. This game of

meaning creation through symbolic designators is something that we play throughout our life. It

is a game where the match will never be called, as we will never be able to exist without

differing, and deferring, from our identities.

When we invest meaning in identifying with our name we load it with the burden of

carrying out the expression of our idea of self. This self, expressed by our name, is something

that we identify to be whole and to have meaning in and of itself. In doing so, we create another

symbol onto which we defer an identity. Lacan calls this symbol the ‘Gestalt’ – the name for a

whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. This gestalt “symbolizes the mental permanence of

the I” (Lacan) that exists in the absence of any reassuring symbol for identity. We take comfort in

identifying with this form as it shifts the responsibility of having to deal with the lack of meaning
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that the impermanence of ourselves creates. When we learn, through “a series of gestures”

(Lacan), the way of existing in the symbolic world, we are given a name onto which we defer our

identity. We hide behind this name as a way of coping with reality by constructing a fictional role

under which we project our actions. As we take part in this fictional game, we sacrifice the

difference between referral and being. We assume that saying ‘Her name is Draupadi’ is the

same as saying ‘She is Draupadi’, collapsing her identity and her signifier to be the same thing.

By confusing our identity with our name we begin to use the symbolic latter as an “armor of an

alienating identity” (Lacan 444). It is an armour that tries to give us a means of fighting for

meaning in reality. However, it also alienates us from the meaning that we create for ourselves as

the actions that we do are attributed to the fictional identity of the name rather than to us.The

insufficiency of this armour in protecting us from reality is due to the process of a constant

deferral. We constantly hide behind the identity of our names as armour to shield us from the

lack, while only deferring the confrontation of the lack of self.

When Dopdi is in hiding with Mushai and his wife, she hides behind the name ‘Upi

Mejhen’ and “doesn’t respond if called by her own name” (Devi 397). Dopdi uses the alias ‘Upi’

as an armour to protect her from being caught. This does not lead to her escaping the army men

who are hunting her. Instead, it only creates another symbol onto which the threat of being

captured is deferred. Dopdi’s refusal to respond to her “real name” (Devi 398) places her in a

differential, negative relation to her old self. There is just as little truth to her identity with her

name being either Upi Mejhen or Dopdi Mejhen. She is not so much affirming a new identity

with Upi Mejhen as much as she is denouncing her old identity as Dopdi. We can identify that it

is only a move away from a signifier as her identification with ‘Upi Mejhen’ does not bring with
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it any innate safety in the name. Her disidentification from her old name is merely an attempt to

erase the threat that responding to ‘Dopdi’ brings with it. Therefore, it is only a movement away

from the past, a movement that defers the danger of identification from one signifier to another.

“Differance is what makes [this] movement of signification possible” (Derrida 287). When we

change our name or use different names, we are only moving away from what we were, a move

that, despite its temporal relation to our lives, places us no more in the future than in the past.

The use of a pseudonym is a performance that, appearing “on the stage of presence,...retains the

mark of a past element” (Derrida 287) only in a negative relation. The use of a new name is

useful only in its ability to demarcate who a person is not rather than indicate any presence of

what is. In this process of disidentification, the name also lets itself be “hollowed out by the

mark of its relation to a future element” (Derrida 287) where a person defers identification, like

how Upi defers being captured, by using another name. Through this relation to what we are not,

our name constitutes itself, if only fictionally, as an armour for us to fight the battle of

constructing ourselves.

In constructing our identity through the armour of our name, we become attached to it to

an extent that the desecration of the name reads as a desecration of the self. When someone

misspells or mispronounces our name, they are taking part in the process of attributing a signifier

to us with which we do not identify. In mistaking our name for something else, they fail to

provide a signifier that is congruent with the armour into which we invest meaning. It is for this

reason that the act of mispronouncing a name brings with it the immediate apologetic worry of

having offended someone. This is the case as to misname someone is to offend or strike against

the armour into which they invest meaning. However, due to the alienating nature of the name as
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armour, the harder we try to hold on to it, the more it alienates us. The more we want to identify

with a name, the more we are alienated from ourselves. Being misnamed brings with it the desire

to identify with our name, reinstating the lack that our names make in us. Therefore, in the

process of being wrongly named, the ‘wrong’ name completes all the functions of differing,

deferring and identification in the same way that our ‘right’ name would. We acknowledge that

the name is not who we are, yet respond to it. After which we provide an alternate ‘real’ symbol

with which we wish to be called, not realising that the ‘real’ symbol equally differs from who we

are.

The identification with names is a play which signals the inescapability of symbolic

identification. In this play, our names are actors who only play the roles of who they are not. Our

name creates a periphery of negatives, that we begin to notice as things that we are not. Through

the negative signification, we begin to notice the existence of an empty self in the centre, into

which we posit meaning and assume to be a coherent whole. The creation of meaning through

the role of name takes place throughout our life despite us acknowledging the complex process

that goes behind responding to a name. In knowing these processes we realise that a child, a dog

or a piece of prose, by any other name, would still fall into a symbolic order of identification for

it to be read, to be legible and for it to exist.

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Works Cited

1. Derrida, Jacques. “Différance”. Gyldendal A/S, 2020.

2. Devi, Mahasweta, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. "Draupadi." In Other Worlds.

Routledge, 2012.

3. Lacan, Jacques. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in

Psychoanalytic Experience." Reading French Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 2014.

4. Shakespeare, William. "Romeo and Juliet." One-Hour Shakespeare. Routledge, 2019.