AHMEDABAD/MUMBAI: When Captain Smit Machchhar’s name did the rounds as the commander who helped avert disaster on a flydubai flight, the applause came with a side of curiosity. Machchhar? As in a mosquito, in Hindi? A creature that has clocked more flying hours than any airline pilot, with no licence, no type rating and never once a boarding pass?Machchhar belongs to a small menagerie of zoological and entomological surnames found among Gujarati communities including Nagar Brahmins, Brahmkshatriya and Lohanas, sociologists point outThe list includes Ghoda (horse), Mankad (bed bug), Mankodi (large ant, such as a carpenter ant), Popat (parakeet), Vinchhi (scorpion), Shiyal (jackal), Tetar (pheasant/partridge) and Hathi (elephant), among others.In the Nagar community, one branch of the family tree can buzz while another trumpets. The surname of Captain Manoj Hathi, former director (operations) at Air India, means elephant in Hindi.“The joke wrote itself. I was type-rated on the Boeing 747, colleagues couldn’t resist the joke about Captain Hathi flying the jumbo jet,” said Captain Hathi. “Back then, at Air India, we also had a Captain Wagh and an inflight supervisor named Homi Ghoda, a Parsi.”“In the West, my surname doesn’t attract much attention. In fact, it’s one of the Indian surnames that is easy to pronounce. In UK, people associated my name with Colonel Hathi, a character in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Jungle Book’, so they found it easy to remember,” he said. “In India, some people would ask, ‘How come your surname is elephant when you are so thin?’ Now that I’ve put on weight, they say I’ve become true to the name,” he added.Abhilash Ghoda, a Gujarati filmmaker from the Nagar community in Junagadh, said the surname draws attention outside the state. “We wear it with pride. I don’t think many of us know the surname’s etymology, but our family has carried it with elan for generations,” he says.Machchhar is associated with the Brahmkshatriya community in Gujarat, especially in districts such as Surendranagar, said Raju Dubal, secretary of the community association in Wadhwan.Bharti Vinchhi, a resident of Ahmedabad and a member of the Brahmkshatriya community, said such surnames are in a minority. “We were told by our forefathers that our ancestors were experts in treating insect bites, including those of scorpions. Thus, the insect was associated with the community,” she said. “Apart from animals and insects, we also have surnames such as Bhoot (ghost) and Jogi (ascetic).”Gaurang Jani, an Ahmedabad-based sociologist, said the only authoritative work on Gujarati surnames was by Vinodini Neelkanth, a Gujarati author and US-trained sociologist. “Her 1942 book, ‘Gujarati Atako no Itihas (History of Gujarati Surnames)’, still remains an important scholarly work on the subject. She explains the surnames as a possible totem — groups revere a specific animal or identify with the positive traits of an animal and thus get identified with it,” he said.“The concentration of such surnames in the Saurashtra region is to do with the large presence of close-knit communities instead of larger association with castes,” Jani added.
