Cataloguing Indian Authors: Understanding Naming Conventions

Walk into any library catalogue and search for an Indian author, and you may notice something curious. Some authors appear under their first name, others under a family name, and a few under just a single word. This is not carelessness on the part of the cataloguer. It reflects the genuine complexity of Indian naming conventions, which rarely fit the neat “first name plus surname” structure that most cataloguing rules were originally built around. For students of cataloguing, understanding how to choose and render the correct entry element for Indian names is one of the most practically important and intellectually interesting challenges in the field.

Why Indian names are difficult to catalogue 🔗

The core task in cataloguing a personal name is deciding the entry element, the part of the name under which the entry is filed and searched. In the Western tradition, the last part of a name is understood as the surname, and that becomes the entry element. Indian naming conventions are far more varied. A name may contain a personal name, a father’s name, a place of origin, a caste or clan name, and a religious component, in almost any order. Identifying which element functions as the primary identifier requires real knowledge of the language and region.

Dr. S. R. Ranganathan, widely regarded as the father of library science in India, recognised this difficulty early. He pointed out that cataloguers and indexers unfamiliar with a language could easily make mistakes in determining the proper form of entry for non-European names. A well-known study of Indian naming conventions and standardisation found that errors in rendering Indian names appeared in a measurable share of catalogue records, underlining how real this problem is.

Variability in entry elements across regions 🔗

The single biggest source of difficulty is regional variation. Naming traditions differ sharply from north to south and west, with caste and religion adding further layers. A cataloguer cannot apply one fixed rule across the whole country.

Northern and western India 🔗

In most of northern India, surnames are commonly used and the structure resembles the Western pattern. A name typically has a personal name followed by a family name, so the family name becomes the entry element. In western India, a person often carries three names: the personal name, the father’s name, and the family name. A famous illustration is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. He was the son of Karamchand Gandhi, with the father’s name appearing as the middle element and Gandhi serving as the family name. This middle-name-as-father’s-name pattern is common in regions like Maharashtra and Gujarat.

Southern India 🔗

The southern naming system is considerably more complex. Traditionally, Tamil names do not include a surname at all. Instead, individuals often use the father’s name as part of their own. A South Indian name may have four elements: the village of origin, the father’s name, the person’s given name, and the caste name. Consider the yoga teacher B. K. S. Iyengar: “B” stands for his birthplace Belur, “K” for his father Krishnamachar, “S” for his given name Sundararajan, and Iyengar is the caste name. The Library of Congress establishes him as “Iyengar, B. K. S., 1918-2014,” choosing the caste name as the entry element because that is how he is most widely known.

Another example is former President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, where the initials reveal ancestry and place of origin. His name is established in the authority file as “Abdul Kalam, A. P. J. (Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen),” entered under the personal name component by which he is recognised.

Religious and community influences 🔗

Religion shapes names across all regions. Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Jain, and Christian communities each follow distinct conventions. Many Muslim surnames such as Qureshi, Ansari, and Mufti derive from Persian and Arabic. Christian converts during colonial times adopted names like Thomas, Pereira, and Fernandes, and in Kerala nativised biblical names appear, such as Varghese for George and Chacko for Jacob. Caste names like Sharma, Gupta, Patel, Iyer, Pillai, Nair, and Reddy frequently function as family names. Each of these patterns affects which element a cataloguer selects.

Rules for ancient versus modern Indian names 🔗

A key principle in cataloguing Indian names is that the treatment depends on the historical period in which the author lived. The naming structure itself changed over time, so the rules categorise names accordingly.

Ancient and classical names 🔗

Authors from the ancient and classical period are usually known by a single name. Figures such as Kalidasa or Vyasa did not carry surnames in the modern sense. Their names were often symbolic or tied to cultural and religious identity rather than family lineage. Cataloguing these authors means entering them directly under that single name, much as the cataloguing rules direct for persons known by a given name with no surname. The cataloguer must also pay attention to how the name appears in ancient manuscripts and reference sources, since spellings and forms can vary.

Modern names 🔗

From the nineteenth and twentieth centuries onward, especially during British colonial rule, Indian names began to adopt a more structured form. Western-style surnames became common, and many names started to align more closely with the conventional given-name-plus-surname pattern that cataloguing codes handle easily. Authors such as Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo have identifiable name components that fit this modern structure. The broad span of the mid-nineteenth century is often treated as the dividing line, similar to how cataloguing codes treat the emergence of inherited surnames in other cultures, where a period is used to mark when surnames came into general use.

This historical division matters practically. For a modern author with a clear surname, the cataloguer enters under that surname. For an author with a name like “Venkataraman Swaminathan Pillai,” the components would be separated so the appropriate element is chosen as the entry point and the others are recorded as added access points. The international standard governing this work, the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, devotes its chapter on headings for persons to exactly these decisions, instructing cataloguers to enter a name under the element by which the person is most commonly identified.

Ranganathan’s guidelines in the Classified Catalogue Code 🔗

The Indian contribution to this problem comes most directly from S. R. Ranganathan’s Classified Catalogue Code (CCC), first published in 1934. The CCC is recognised as the first code complete in every respect for a classified catalogue and a significant Indian contribution to cataloguing theory. While many libraries today follow the Anglo-American rules, the CCC offers guidance shaped specifically by Indian conditions.

Ranganathan approached the entry element by asking which part of the name truly identifies the author for the catalogue user. Rather than forcing every Indian name into a borrowed surname-first structure, the CCC encourages the cataloguer to study how the name is actually used and rendered. His broader work, including his comparative study of catalogue codes, drew attention to the gap between rules designed for European names and the reality of Indian nomenclature.

The practical lesson from Ranganathan is consistency through understanding. Because the same author may appear with different spellings or arrangements across publications, the cataloguer must establish one authoritative form and then create cross references from the variant forms. This ensures that a user searching under any reasonable version of the name still reaches the right record. The reliance on references to link variant forms remains central to good authority work today.

Why standardisation still matters 🔗

The lack of uniform style guides for Indian names continues to pose a challenge. Researchers have noted that colonial administration expected Indians to adopt British-style naming, and regions responded differently, with northern and western areas adapting more readily than the south. The result is a rich but inconsistent body of names. For libraries, inconsistency directly affects discovery: if the same author is catalogued three different ways across institutions, users struggle to find all their works. Establishing clear, well-documented entry elements is therefore not a clerical detail but a core part of making knowledge accessible.

Bringing the principles together 🔗

Cataloguing Indian authors rewards careful, informed judgement over mechanical rule-following. The cataloguer first identifies the region and community pattern, then considers the historical period, and finally selects the entry element by which the author is best known, supporting it with cross references for every plausible variant. Whether the author is an ancient single-name figure like Vyasa, a modern writer with a clear surname, or a South Indian author whose name carries village, father, given, and caste elements, the same underlying goal applies: choose the heading that lets the user find the work reliably. This blend of cultural awareness and systematic method is exactly what Ranganathan envisioned for Indian librarianship.

What do you think? How should a cataloguer balance respecting an author’s own preferred form of name against the need for consistency across a shared catalogue? And as more Indian authors publish internationally with Westernised name forms, will the traditional distinction between ancient and modern naming rules remain useful?

References

1. https://las.org.sg/understanding-indian-names-in-naming-conventions-discovery-and-standardisation/
2. https://prepp.in/question/how-to-render-the-form-of-heading-for-south-indian-663490130368feeaa5a1ad29
3. https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/ncarules/rules2.html
4. https://www.librarianshipstudies.com/2018/12/anglo-american-cataloguing-rules-aacr.html
5. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/lisp3/chapter/history-of-catalogue-codes/