Hi, it`s me again, still trying to make sense of 1930s pulp novels.
In THE SPIDER series, the bloodthirsty hero had a servant named Ram Singh, who wore a turban and was deadly with knives. Sounds like a Sikh fighting man, doesnt he? Yet, hes referred to in every book as Hindu and Wentworth gives him orders in Hindustani?
Is this completely impossible? Or is is just unlikely, sort of a rare happenstance like an Orthodox Jew named Sean Reilly, whose mother remarried or something?
Some relevant information:
[ul][li]Hinduism and Sikhism are religions, not nationalities. Hindustani is a language (a dialect of Hindi spoken around Delhi), not a nationality. So there’s nothing stopping a Sikh from having Hindustani as a first language, if he lived in Delhi for instance. For geographical reasons it’s more likely that he’d have been a Punjabi-speaker.[/li]
[li]There’s no reason why he should have been barefoot. There are five symbols of Sikhism concerning dress/appearance - footwear or the lack of it isn’t one of them.[/li]
[li]Although Singh is a name taken by Sikh men at Baptism (women take the name Kaur), there are also Hindus called Singh. Ram is a name used by Sikhs and Hindus - it’s actually the name of a Hindu god (Sikhism is monotheistic).[/ul][/li]It’s even more likely that the book was written by someone who knew/cared very little about all this stuff. It was a pulp novel after all.
I remember an Indian novel, Train to Pakistan, I believe, in which one of the main characters mentions that he is fortunate to have the name “Singh,” as it is impossible to discern whether he is Hindu, Sikh, or Muslim from his name alone. So yes, Singh could be a Hindu name.
Oh, and there was a full-blooded Japanese man a few years ago named Patrick Ohara – Ohara being a quite normal Japanese surname, and his family having been Catholics from Nagasaki who named him “Patrick.”
And with names being what they are these days, I would have no trouble swallowing the idea of a Sean Podsielniek or a Derek Ambroglio.
On a related note, the guy who wrote two Star Trek novels about Kahn Noonian Singh (the genetically engineered Sikh from the episode “Space Seed” and the second film, played by Ricardo Molntalban) had to come up with some fancy explaining, since Sikhs traditionally wear bears and Montalban never did while playing the character. Apparantly, Khan is deliberate iconoclast, or something.
I would’t worry too much about it. It’s just a writer’s mistake; going for exotic but not factual. That said, I’m sure in the near-billion population of India you could find at least one Hindu named Ram Singh. You could probably find one named Brigit O’Herlihay, too.
Thanks for the enlightening information! So good old Ram Singh could have been a Hindu or a Sikh or just a guy who went his own way. He did choose to live in New York with an employer who led a double life as a murderous vigilante.
The days when you could make a fairly accurate guess about someone`s origins from their names are long gone.
I once knew a woman whose father was a very traditional rabbi but whose mother was a wild Spanish woman. All her life, the poor kid didn`t know if she was Carmen or Cohen.
Hindu families in Punjab made their first sons a Sikh. ‘Sikh’ means a Lion. When Buddhism (through its ‘ahimsa’) had almost elminated the Kshatriya (Warrior) clan, Hindus needed people to fight the invading muslims. Sikhism was born.