We’re celebrating Ganesha Chaturthi by re-watching Ganeshana Maduve and Gowri Ganesha, two classic movies from the early 1990s starring Anant Nag and Vinaya Prasad.
Ganeshana Maduve is a shop-around-the-corner / you’ve-got-mail kind of story of real-life neighbours who hate each other who court each other through letters. Real-life Adilakshmi has adopted the name “Shruti” for her singing career, and she replies to her fan-mail under the same name.
It is her fan/neighbour’s name that had intrigued me thus far. He is the titular Ganesha, but saying that “Ganesha” sounds too old-fashioned, he writes his letters under the name “Y G Rao”, short for his full name which is “Y Ganesh Rao”.
Now, this would have been fine, except that later on in the movie his father’s name is shown to be Govinda. And under conventional Kannada naming conventions, this simply doesn’t make sense. Typically in most Kannada names, if you have only one “initial” that represents your father’s given name (for example, the S in my name stands for Shashidhar, which is my father’s given name).
Hence, under standard Kannada naming conventions, Govinda’s son has to be G Ganesh Rao. And in what is an overall excellent movie (it’s easily my most-watched movie of all time. Today was perhaps the 50th time I watched it), this naming convention was a bit intriguing.
The thing with Ganeshana Maduve is that each time you watch it, you discover a layer that you hadn’t discovered (or missed) earlier. And one detail I found today that I’d missed earlier, is that the movie is based on a Telugu novel. And then it all started making sense.
It is perfectly okay under Telugu naming convention for Govinda’s son to be Y Ganesh Rao, for a single initial there represents the family name, rather than the father’s given name.
And so it is very likely that when the Telugu novel was adapted into a Kannada film, the names were kept the same, and so we got the Telugu convention into the Kannada movie!
The next item on today’s festival agenda was to watch Gowri Ganesha, but I need to get some work done, so the wife is watching that alone. And while some process runs I’m writing this post.