Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

Monday, October 23, 2006

Our water bill comes addressed to a “Huchamma”. In Kannada, that loosely translates to “mad woman”. How did they come up with that one?

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  ashwinne — Oct 24, 2006 8:32:40 AM — # ↩

  Must be the same way they named Tippeswamy.
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    fiveonehalf — Oct 25, 2006 6:49:42 PM — # ↩

    I asked my granny how Tippeswamy, Tippegundamma etc came about. It was something like this, since infant mortality was high in those days, they named babies after dustbins, basically garbage(tippe) so that there is no evil eye on them and they would live long!
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      ashwinne — Oct 25, 2006 7:22:29 PM — # ↩

      Interesting … hehe :-)
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      Kiran Jonnalagadda — Oct 26, 2006 10:09:42 AM — # ↩

      Interesting. I didn’t get the tippe = garbage reference at all. I thought the joke was that the name sounded like “Tip Swamy”.
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        pradeepg — Oct 29, 2006 10:16:05 PM — # ↩

        There are a lot of similar names:
        
        * Gundappa (as in Gundappa vishwanath, the cricketer) - the baby is named gundappa/gundamma so that he/she is as strong as “gundukallu” - the grinding stone.
        
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        ashwinne — Oct 31, 2006 1:41:29 PM — # ↩

        There is also “sunamma” (sun being pronounced as son) meaning short/small woman.
        
        Check out the names of some of the older roadside temples, they’re fun too - plague-amma, AIDs-amma, etc.
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          deepix — Oct 31, 2006 4:22:43 PM — # ↩

          > plague-amma
          PiLekamma, actually. ;-)
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        chandrachoodan — Oct 31, 2006 7:30:34 PM — # ↩

        The same concept exists in tamils too. If you are are childless, and pray hard, and the child does come - you name it Pichai (beg/alms/charity)
        You have Pichaimani, Pichaimuthu, Picha and so on. The child is what god throws to you as alms.
        
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      pradeepg — Oct 29, 2006 10:22:08 PM — # ↩

      You theory is right. :)
      
      One such name is ‘saakamma’. If there are too many girls in the family, they used name the youngest girl as saakamma hoping that the next one is a boy. saaku means “enough”
      
      I once heard about a atheist Gandhian who used to name his kids like “Dus”. Yeah, you guessed it right, Dus was his tenth child, a girl.
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        Anonymous — Oct 30, 2006 6:57:47 PM — # ↩

        more names
        Like in telugu they have “penta ayya” and “penta amma” - penta stands for garbase in telugu. When someone is loosing too many babies at birth or when young , they named the child with an unattractive name.
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          Kiran Jonnalagadda — Oct 31, 2006 10:15:31 AM — # ↩

          Re: more names
          Doesn’t “penta” mean cowdung in Telugu?
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            Anonymous — Oct 31, 2006 1:45:24 PM — # ↩

            Re: more names
            Cowdung too is useless stuff thrown out of the body - isn’t it :-P.
            You might have heard “Penta Kuppa” - which is garbage dump :-).
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              fiveonehalf — Oct 31, 2006 1:57:53 PM — # ↩

              Re: more names
              Yeah, that’s where kuppamma and kuppaiah come from
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                fiveonehalf — Oct 31, 2006 1:59:17 PM — # ↩

                Re: more names
                In fact, kuppamma is my great-granny’s name. Thats how I came to know its origin
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          brainz — Oct 31, 2006 2:40:39 PM — # ↩

          Re: more names
          we used to have a telugu teacher called ‘Pittchi Reddy’ literally means ‘mad’ Reddy in telugu.
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  kruthi — Oct 31, 2006 10:42:59 AM — # ↩

  It seems there is a hanuman temple near shikaripura, and hanuman there is called “huchuraya”!
  Hence the names “huchanna” “huchappa” etc ....
  But it’s hard to imagine why somebody called god “huchuraya” .. may be because of the cranky attire!
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  tsk1979 — Oct 31, 2006 11:22:27 AM — # ↩

  Hmm Thippasandra means Garbage bin/village.
  New Garbage bin is a happening bangalore locality next to indiranagar!
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  amoghavarsha — Oct 31, 2006 11:39:25 AM — # ↩

  Ullagadde in north karnataka means onion !
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  lost_almost — Oct 31, 2006 1:42:43 PM — # ↩

  My grandparents’ firstborn, a girl, died within a month after birth. So, my mother had a temporary name ‘Pichchi’ (mad in Telugu) for about 5 years before she was given a decent name. It’s the same reasoning fiveonehalf suggested - giving a nice name is a sign of vanity and the gods will strike you down, so name the kid something weird.
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  latelyontime — Oct 31, 2006 2:37:30 PM — # ↩

  talk about theorising your life :)
  
  I always used to wonder about the huchamma thing, considering the first word I learnt in kannada was Huccha, courtesy Lawrence Liang :)
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  deponti — Oct 31, 2006 4:19:47 PM — # ↩

  I think this practice is prevalent all over South India; we have names like Picchai, Pichamma (alms, presumably given by the gods), Vembu (neem tree, neem leaf, an association of “bitter” and hence not desirable).When small pox struck, at least names would be changed…one my aunts got her name changed in this way. They did hope they could fool the gods…
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    chandrachoodan — Oct 31, 2006 7:35:43 PM — # ↩

    Damn, missed deponti’s comment. Yes, Pitchai/picchai are common names in the Tam part of the peninsula.
    
    Some other ‘throwaway’ names
    Kuppai
    Kuppama
    Kupp(u/a)swamy
    
    And you have people naming their kids after cities.
    Madura(i)
    Palani
    Chidambaram