Indian Name Generator

How the Indian Name Generator (Hindi, Tamil, Punjabi, Bengali) works

Indian name generator: how the names are built

There is no such thing as an Indian name, only names from India's twenty-two scheduled languages and hundreds of communities, each with its own rule for what goes after the given name. A generator that mixes Sharma with Murugan produces a person who does not exist, so this one keeps the four largest traditions apart. Hindi-speaking north India uses the family surname that most resembles the Western system, and the surnames are caste and community names: Sharma, Mishra, Tiwari, Pandey and Dubey are Brahmin; Gupta, Agarwal and Jain are merchant; Singh, Chauhan and Rathore are Rajput; Yadav is the largest agricultural community; Kapoor, Malhotra and Mehta are Punjabi Hindu. A middle name of Kumar, Lal or Prasad for men and Kumari or Devi for women is common in the older generation, and the generator adds one occasionally.

Tamil Nadu traditionally has no surnames. A Tamil name is the given name preceded by the father's name, usually reduced to an initial: R. Karthik is Karthik, son of Raman, and would be addressed as Karthik. Where a surname is needed, on a passport or abroad, the father's name is written out after the given name, Karthik Raman, or a caste title is added, Iyer, Pillai, Nadar, Gounder, Naidu, though the Dravidian movement discouraged caste titles and many families dropped them. The Tamil option produces all three forms. Punjabi Sikh names follow the rule of the Khalsa: every Sikh man takes Singh, lion, and every Sikh woman takes Kaur, princess, as a name, with the clan name, Gill, Sandhu, Dhillon, Sidhu, Grewal, following or omitted. Given names are shared between the sexes, Harpreet, Gurpreet, Manpreet, so that Singh and Kaur are what tell you the gender. Bengal has a fixed surname stock of Brahmin names, Chatterjee, Banerjee, Mukherjee, Bhattacharya, Ganguly, and Kayastha and other names, Bose, Ghosh, Sen, Das, Roy, Dutta, Mitra, and Bengali given names are often two-part Sanskrit compounds, Debashis, Subhankar, Anindita.

The spellings follow the usual English forms used in India itself. For the neighbouring conventions, the Pakistani page covers Urdu and Punjabi Muslim names, which share Punjabi given names but not Singh and Kaur; and the Indonesian and Malay page covers the Sanskrit names that travelled east.

Related tools