East Indian Name Singh

Here in California’s Central Valley we have many Sikhs with the last name ‘Singh.’ I’ve been told that this is a name Sikhs take when they leave their homeland to indicate what religious group they belong to. Is this true or are there people named Singh in India to begin with? What is the significance of the name? Although I realize why someone would want to be identified with a group or religious background, why would this be enough to warrant a name change?

The name Singh is required of members in the Khalsa, the dominant order of Sikhs, founded by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699. However, the name in India predates the founding of the Khalsa, and even Sikhism. Although it’s mainly associated with Sikhs, plenty of non-Sikh Indians are named Singh, too.

It comes from the Sanskrit simha, meaning ‘lion’ (you know, Simba the Lion King? Simba is the Swahili form of simha. And wasn’t there a short-lived Saturday morning cartoon in the 1960s about a lion cub named Simba? Did Disney plagiarize that show for The Lion King? But I digress).

Actually, the sound transliterated here by m is a nasalization of the vowel, as in French. (It should really be transliterated by an m with a dot over it.) In some modern languages descended from Sanskrit, like Panjabi, the nasalization is realized as a velar nasal consonant, the sound of “ng” in “singer.” Likewise the -ng- in Bangladesh: in Bengali script it’s actually written BâmladeSa. The name Singh is pronounced the same as the English word “sing” but with an aspiration of the [h] sound after it. There is no hard [g] consonant in it.

I guess the name was chosen by Guru Gobind Singh to instill the ferocity of the lion in his disciples, since the Khalsa was founded as a militant order of fighting men. The women associated with it all take the name Kaur, which I think means ‘princess’.

As an example of a non-Sikh Singh, one has to look no further than professional golfer Vijay Singh, who is from the Fiji Islands, which has a minority Hindu population, as we all learned from this year’s world news.