Dotting Your T's and Crossing Your I's

Why Saying My Name Could Score You Points with God

On August 29, I had my first Bhagavad Gita class. I grabbed a vastram from under my bed, slung it around my shoulders, and logged on to the Zoom link to find a sea of black screens and one man kindly smiling at me. This was Vijay Uncle, and he was the teacher. As soon as I logged on, I heard a child’s voice say “Jai Guru Datta,” a phrase that is both a greeting and something similar to amen. I smiled, thinking it was sweet for a child to be joining, only to realize a moment later that most of the class was under the age of 15. I was one of maybe three adults. Humbling.

We were told that for class, we should sit up straight on the floor, have our cameras on, and wear a bindi on our forehead. I was one for three with my bare forehead and comfy bed position.

We spent most of the class going over pronunciation, learning about the different kinds of letters and what mouth positions could make them: cerebrals, palatals, labials (lol) and dentals. For the non-linguists in the room, these terms refer to the part of your mouth that makes the sound. In English, the letters “d” and “t” are dentals because you place your tongue against your teeth to make the sound. In Sanskrit, there are different kinds of d and t sounds. As you can see in the pronunciation chart that my teacher sent around, there is ṭa, ṭha, ta, and tha just for t. The dotted ṭ represents a palatal sound in which your tongue touches the top of your palate. Think about someone with a heavy Indian accent saying “time.” They will often use the dotted, palatal t instead of the dental t.

Since most of our Bhagavad Gita class consisted of American kids, we needed a lot of help. We spent most of the class learning how to make these unfamiliar sounds, and also how to hear them as separate noises. To my English-trained ears, it sometimes felt like Vijay Uncle was playing a joke on us:

“Repeat after me: ta ta ta. No, not ta ta ta. It’s ta ta ta. See? Now you try. No, again, it’s not ta ta ta…”

After that class, I finally understood why some toddlers opt for unintelligible shrieks instead of proper words. Getting the individual letters down was only half the battle. We then had to do combinations of these new sounds to form full words. It felt like my tongue was playing double dutch, trying to jump from one tricky position to another.

When I first started Bhagavad Gita classes, my boyfriend was teaching English to adults. He would spend hours watching YouTube videos and reading articles about linguistics to help his Japanese students form sounds that they had never made before. I learned about fun linguistics terms like voiced vs. unvoiced consonants. Voiced consonants involve the movement of your vocal cords. Try this: put two fingers to your throat and say the following syllables: ba, da, ja, pa, ka, sa. If you feel a vibration (like you do for b, d, and j), it’s voiced, and if you don’t (like for p, k, and s), it’s unvoiced. This is an excellent tool for language learners who want to check if they are saying letters and words correctly. It also resonates with something that Vijay Uncle told our visibly frustrated class during our first lesson.

He told us that although it was difficult for many of us Americans, we had to be exact in our pronunciation. Why? In order to receive the spiritual benefits of chanting, we had to create the right vibrations with our words. I know, it sounds like something a white, incense-seller in Woodstock would tell you, but vibrations have always been an important part of Hinduism and other Eastern religions. It’s why Buddhists use meditation bowls and why we chant Om to begin our prayers. Whether you’re a Hindu who believes in the healing properties of vibrations or not, Sanskrit is God’s language. It’s probably best not to butcher it.

When I think of the importance of pronunciation, I am immediately transported back to a middle school classroom where a substitute teacher stands at the front of the room taking attendance.

“Kendall, Cameron, Aaron… V-va….”

I would cringe, hoping the substitute would say something vaguely close to “vah-nee.” Often, they would add in unnecessary letters, or worse, try to do an accent. Some boys would laugh and mispronounce my name for the rest of the day. The mangled version of my name would loop in my head. While no one likes having their name mispronounced, I had another reason for being taunted by this behavior. My name, which is another name for the goddess Saraswati, is a sacred word.

I was born during Navaratari, a festival celebrating the nine baddies of Hinduism aka Goddesses. Each day celebrated a different Goddess. As I was born on the ninth day, I was named after Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge and music. Unlike most people I know, my parents didn’t name me. Instead, they called our guru and asked for him to bless me with a name, something to carry me through the world and remind me of where I came from. I always thought my name suited me— I was a know-it-all kid. I would watch nature documentaries and read fact books about the world. I have a strong love of music, and I did choir for a number of years (Please don’t ask me to sing, I’m not very good. I just liked the camaraderie and songs). When I was a kid, my guru would often tease me about the American way I pronounced my name. The actual pronunciation has a palatal n (written as ṇ) so when Appaji said it, my name had a swallowed sound in the middle, almost like a curl at the start of the n. My American accent and ear never got it right, and I would angrily retort that my name was pronounced “vah-nee.” Funny that I thought the man who literally named me couldn’t say it right. Like I said, I was a know-it-all.

Still, I liked having a name that reminded me of my roots. My name carried my Indian identity all through the predominantly-white towns I lived in during my youth. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t speak Telugu or that the neighbor kid demanded to know how I could worship a God with an elephant head. My name and I were inseparable, and therefore so were my connections to my ancestors and family. It was something to be proud of, and at the same time, something that other people treated carelessly— not bothering to remember its pronunciation. I would have to correct them time after time until eventually I stopped caring. I’ve always been a people-pleaser, and often I wouldn’t say anything when someone mangled my name. There are probably a few well-meaning Midwestern neighbors who still think my name is Bonnie. At coffee shops, I’d watch my mom give a false, Americanized name instead of her own so she wouldn’t inconvenience the cashier. I adopted that practice as I became a young adult, using my friend Meg’s name instead. While I wrote rants about cultural appropriation and privately fumed about assimilation, I let the biggest gift from my guru echo away.

There is a second meaning to my name. Vahni (or Vani as it is often spelled) is a word in Sanskrit. Vāṇī means something similar to: voice, words, vibrations. By allowing people to mispronounce or ignore my name, I was rejecting a kind of magic that had been gifted to me. Words spoken aloud have the power to transform the listener. Anyone who’s seen their favorite singer perform live, or attended a political rally knows what I mean. It’s why so many people argue that poetry must be read aloud to get the full effect. It’s why humanity’s greatest epics, including the Bhagavad Gita, were able to be passed down for generations before they were ever written out. Hindus have known about the power of words and vibrations for centuries. In our lore, there are stories in which Gods defeat each other not with weapons, but with wit and their words. There is another story in which the sound of the human voice defeats the supernatural Asuras. To us, words are worth more than just what they represent because there is something more fundamental to their value; something that a baby knows as their mother sings a lullaby passed down through generations, something that a lover feels lying with their ear to the chest of their beloved as they talk about their day, something that a concert-goer taps their foot to as a foreign singer belts in a language they do not understand. Call it connection. Call it tradition. Call it divine. Whatever it is, there is true magic in words that are spoken with conviction and care.

A few years ago, I heard my guru give a speech in which he directed his devotees to not use nicknames for their kids. He poked fun at all the silly names that Indian kids get called by their parents— Pinkie, Sweetie, Cutie. He asked: if you wouldn’t mispronounce the names of God, why would you do that to your children, whose names are also divine? Nowadays, I don’t change my name at coffee shops. I work at a mentoring organization for youth where we encourage people to write out the phonetic spelling of their name in our Zoom calls, so that we know how to address them properly. I still don’t quite say my name right, and I know my guru privately laughs at me. But for 3 hours every week, I sit in a class with other American kids and we try our hardest to roll our rs, palatize our ds, and twist our tongues to say the ancient words that have been passed down to us by people who loved us enough to get it right.

Bonus: You can hear how my name should be pronounced in this bhajan by Sri Ganapathy Sachidananda Swamiji, called “He Vani He Vani.”