Definitely not necessary. I’m Guyanese-American. My last name might be a bastardization but it’s still my name and it represents, to some extent, where I’m from. I don’t think it’s wrong or needs to be corrected.

Yeah…well, as generation of people in India learned English, there seems to have developed a fairly standard way of transliterating names into English. When those born in India moved to America, they seemed to have brought these spelling with them. The Indians in the Caribbean, however, generally did not know English until they had to learn it upon arrival, so they kind of just spelled names in whatever way they thought reflected the pronunciation the most. So, naturally the spellings are different, as they developed as two separate systems of transliteration. “Anjulie” and “Anjali” are spellings of the same name, neither is more correct.

As for “Persaud”, it might look odder, because the “r” sound is at a different part of the word. That’s just a matter of dialect. As LeVar Burton pointed out, the words are Bhojpuri, so they sometimes differ from other dialects of Hindi. No Carribean Indian pronounces the word “prasad”, it always pronounced “parsad”. There are other words too that a Caribbean Indian may use, that may sound odd to some Hindi speakers. For example turmeric is pronounced “hardi” instead of “haldi”, (uncooked) rice is called “chawar” instead of “chaval”, and fire is “aagi” instead of “aag”. At least, those are some differences I’ve noticed.

interesting. she’s really mellow. not to derail the comments, but out of curiosity are there any SM articles about the Indian diaspora? like Guyana or South Africa, etc. any SM readers?

I’ve seen at least one or two other articles that mention these parts of the diaspora. As for readers, we’re here. After leaving UP, my family became a part of the Indian community of Jamaica, though I was personally born and raised in the U. S. of A. Even disconnected from India, an brown is an brown , we can’t resist a good Desi blog every now and again. I read SM all the time, it amuses me.