Man of peace

Man of peace is the meaning of Shantaram, the first name the women of the village choose for Lin. The name marks a turn in how he is seen: a man who had made an outward show of menace is received as peaceful, and begins to understand that identity as something he can grow into.

Meaning and Contrast

Lin recalls himself as a lifelong fighter, always ready to defend what he loved and oppose what he deplored. Over time, the posture of hostility became so habitual that it concealed what he regarded as his real nature. The village disrupts that self-presentation. Its residents do not know other foreigners and have no reference point for reading his body language; even when he looks grim or stern, they laugh and pat his back encouragingly. They see a peaceful man, a joker who works hard, plays the fool for children, sings and dances with them, and laughs openly.

In this contrast, peace is not simply a quality Lin claims for himself. It is a possibility recognized by other people, in a place where the threatening message of his face and movements fails to determine how he is treated. He reflects on an inward river of the heart, shared across origins, as the essential truth of what a person is and can achieve. The villagers’ view gives that idea a particular human form: they meet him as someone capable of happiness rather than as the fighter his manner announces.

The Village Naming

On the day Lin learns about the wooden stakes used in the flood-game, less than three hours before he stands alone in the rain, Rukhmabai Kharre tells him she has called a meeting of the village women. They decide to give him a Maharashtrian name, like her own. Because he is living in Prabaker Kharre’s house, he is to take the family name Kharre; because Kishan Mango Kharre is both Prabaker’s father and Lin’s adoptive father, tradition supplies Kishan as his middle name. The women choose Shantaram for his first name because they judge his nature to be blessed with peaceful happiness. It means man of peace, or man of God’s peace.

The name therefore records more than a favorable impression. Its parts place Lin within a family and a community: Kharre ties him to the household where he lives, Kishan acknowledges his adoptive father, and Shantaram expresses the women’s judgment of his character. The naming is a collective decision, not a self-invention made in isolation.

A Name That Becomes a Possibility

Lin describes the villagers’ stakes as being driven into the earth of his life: they know where his inner river seems to stop and mark that place with a new name. He cannot decide whether they have discovered a peace already present in him or planted it there like a wishing tree. That uncertainty matters. Shantaram is at once recognition and invitation, a judgment about who he is and a hope for who he might become.

As he stands near the flood stakes with his face lifted to the rain, Lin understands the moment as the birth of the man he is. He calls Shantaram the better man he slowly, and much too late, begins to be. The expression thus carries both a change in belonging and a moral direction: the village’s faith in his peaceful nature becomes a standard against which his old, combative identity can be measured.