Lin Receives the Name Shantaram

Lin Receives the Name Shantaram marks a turning point in Lin’s sense of himself: the people of Sunder village give him a name that reflects the peaceful man they believe him to be, and he comes to understand it as a chance to become that man. The name is at once a family inheritance and a possibility planted in him by the village.

The Naming

On the day Lin learned about the wooden stakes used in the village flood-game, less than three hours before he stood alone in the rain, Rukhmabai Kharre told him that she had called a meeting of the village women. They had decided to give him a Maharashtrian name, like her own. Since Lin was living in the home of her son, Prabaker Kharre, the name would carry the family surname Kharre; because Kishan was Prabaker’s father and Lin’s adoptive father, tradition called for Kishan to become Lin’s middle name. Rukhmabai proposed Shantaram as his first name, and the women agreed.

The choice rested on their judgment of Lin’s nature: they saw him as blessed with peaceful happiness. Shantaram means a man of peace, or a man of God’s peace. The decision thus placed Lin within a family and gave a name to qualities the villagers already recognized in him; it was not simply a label he had chosen for himself.

The Village’s View of Lin

The name carried particular weight because Lin’s outward manner had long communicated something very different. He had spent his life ready to fight for what he loved and against what he deplored, until his face and movements seemed to announce menace and hostility. That defensive expression had become so practiced that it appeared to define his whole life, concealing the person beneath it.

In the village, however, that message did not land. The villagers had little experience of foreigners and no familiar reference point for Lin’s stern expressions. They laughed and patted his back when he looked grim, and continued to regard him as peaceful. Among them he joked, worked hard, played the fool for the children, sang and danced with them, and laughed openly. Their choice of Shantaram arose from this lived experience of him, not from the threatening impression he had learned to project elsewhere.

A Name as a Beginning

Lin later describes the naming as a chance to reinvent himself: to follow what he calls the river of the heart and become the person he had always wanted to be. The flood-game stakes become an image for the act of naming. In his account, the farmers had marked a place within him with a new name, as though either discovering a peace already there or planting it like a wishing tree so that it could grow.

He recalls that, as he stood near the flood sticks with his face lifted to the rain, the man he was began to be born in those moments. Shantaram Kishan Kharre therefore signifies more than his new identity within Prabaker’s family. It names a gradual moral change: the better man Lin says he began, slowly and much too late, to become.