A Note on Forms of Address

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In India, kinship terms are generally placed after a person’s name, rather than before. Thus, “Shankar chacha” is the Hindi equivalent of “Uncle Shankar.” As the list below indicates, however, kinship terms frequently distinguish younger from older and paternal from maternal relatives. A chacha, for example, is a father’s younger brother—so “Shankar chacha” would not be used for an uncle who is older than one’s father. To complicate matters further, kinship terms can also used be to address people who are not, in fact, kin, as a sign of respect or endearment. Although this tradition has weakened somewhat in modern urban India, it is still quite common to refer to friends of one’s parents by appending a generic term for “uncle” or “aunt” to their name. Amma’s daughters thus refer to their mother’s friend Kamala as “Kamala mausi,” Auntie Kamala.

As one would expect, Surekha and her sister refer to their parents as “Mummy” and “Daddy”—Amma and Babu. But, in India, the use of a kinship term in place of a family member’s given name extends well beyond the familiar “mother” and “father.” For example, Surekha calls her sister Didi, “older sister,” while their uncle addresses their mother as Bhabhi, “brother’s wife.”

Here, then, are the kinship terms that appear in the book:

India also abounds with honorific forms of address, such as saheb (“sir”) or bai (“miss”) in Rajasthan. Perhaps the most universal of these honorifics is the suffix -ji, which can be added to the names of both men and women. Like many people of her generation who were influenced by Gandhian ideals, Amma taught her daughters to use -ji even when referring to people of humble status, as a reminder that everyone, regardless of their social position, deserves to be honoured.