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October 24, 2005

A Primer on Indian Family Names

Perhaps the earliest Indian television icon in American minds (unfortunately) is Apu from The Simpsons. Aside from conforming to just about every stereotype about poor, fecund, convenience-store owning Indian immigrants, Apu has the last name Nahasapeemapetilon. With such a family name, he also answers to the stereotype of having an impossibly long, hard-to-pronounce last name. Some Indian last names can make outsiders anxious because their spoken and written versions seem to be little more than a bunch of syllables strung together. Yet, all Indian names have a well-defined internal structure and meaning. This post is a primer about Indian last names. Its aim is not to be comprehensive but it will try to examine some kinds of Indian family names and show how their structure and meanings are related.

India's astounding diversity in languages, climates, costumes and geography far outstrips that of the entire European continent. Unsurprisingly, this diversity also extends to names. Different regions of India have different kinds of family names. This post will mostly concentrate on South Indian names, because they tend to be longer than their counterparts in other regions of India and because I, by virtue of being a South Indian, am most familiar with these names. I will still cover family names from other parts of India that follow easily recognizable patterns. Indian family names tend to be strong indicators of region, caste or occasionally both. If a caste-based name differentiation bothers you (despite the fact that the influence of caste has declined drastically in recent years), consider that something similar happens in the U.S. too, where the odds are overwhelming that someone named LaFawndah Jackson is black and someone named Prescott Anderson is white.

Caste and clan names
Family names like Agarwal, Jain, Saraswat and Pandit are all names of clans. In many cases, members of powerful clans would act in the name of the clan itself and have no significant identity outside of it. Members of such clans simply assumed the name of the clan as a last name when adjusting their names to the relatively modern requirements of having a separate first name and last name. Clan names are sprinkled all over the socioeconomic spectrum and need not signify a particular caste or economic class. Some others have last names that are explicit caste markers. Names like Iyer (pron. EYE-uhr) and Iyengar (pron. EYE-young-AHR) indicate a South Indian Brahmin origin. The last name Ojha (var. Oza) indicates the caste of oracles and soothsayers. More modern and colorful occupational family names do exist. The Parsis are a Zoroastrian community that emigrated to India several centuries ago to escape religious persecution in Persia. This community, which once found significant favor with the British occupiers of India, features names like Engineer, Contractor, Daruvala and Screwvala. The -vala in the last two names can be taken to mean 'seller', but is in reality a general Hindi suffix that associates the whole word's referent with the stem that precedes it. Daruwala (daru Hin. liquor) thus means someone who sold liquor. This custom of taking caste and other occupational names is not unlike taking last names like Cook, Cooper (barrel maker), Shoemaker or Goldsmith.
Places of origin
Indian family names may sometimes mark the place from where a family originated. The Western Indian state of Maharashtra has a prolific collection of family names derived from place names. Examples of this kind of family name include Punekar (a native of Pune), Chiplunkar (a native of Chiplun) or Jalgaonkar (a native of Jalgaon). The -kar is a Marathi suffix that indicates affinity to a place. Indian newspapers routinely refer to residents of Mumbai as Mumbaikars, the Indianized version of Bombayites. Other variants of this kind of family name include Hyderabadi, Najmabadi and Jodhpuri, which indicate ancestral domiciles in Hyderabad, Najmabad and Jodhpur respectively. The manner in which these are derived is identical to how Iraqi is derived from Iraq and Pakistani from Pakistan. Western equivalents of this kind of family name would be names like Wiener, Bilderberger and Van Antwerp.
Personal attributes
This is where Indian family names share a lot of similarities with family names around the world. A particularly distinctive attribute of a family originator was codified as that family's hereditary name when the law of the land required every citizen to have a last name. Once again, Maharashtrian names take the cake with the sheer variety as well as, frankly, bizarreness of family names. Names of this kind include Khare (the truthful one), Khote (the liar), Gaitonde (the cow-face) and Kirtane (the hymn singer). Other family names, such as Chaudhuri, Kotwal and Patil are administrative titles that used to adorn tax collectors and accountants.
Religious names
Religion has historically played a strong role in India and is the fount for a number of family names that are usually rooted in mythology. Most of these names tend to be concentrated in South India, which has been less ravaged historically by foreign rulers who systematically persecuted overtly religious names. Names may refer to major deities of the Hindu pantheon, Shiva, Rama, Krishna or Ganesha, to any of their thousands of co-names, Narayana, Gopala and Shankara, or to any of the thousands of holy men (corporeal or mythical) India has produced, such as Bharadwaja, Valmiki or Kashyapa. Some family names such as Vijayasarathy ('the charioteer of victory') allude to India's ancient epics such as Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Religious names tend to be among the longest family names and often try to outdo each other in flair and grandiosity. If you want to construct your own long religious names, use the table below to pick a name from each column and string them together. Not all possible combinations would work, but the next time you see an impossibly long Indian last name, it will be easier to break it down into its constituents.
Venkata-raman
Rama-nathan
Krishna-swami
Gopala-ramanan
Raja-chandran
Muthu-eswaran
Shiva-subramanian
Radha-gopalan
Bala-krishnan
The above doesn't even scratch the surface in terms of addressing the sheer number and kinds of Indian names. I have tried to address the kinds of Indian last names frequently encountered in the U.S. so that outsiders aren't put in uncomfortable social situations the next time they introduce Indian people to others or read a list that includes Indian names.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, Nahasapeemapetilon doesn't actually mean anything and is entirely a figment of Matt Groenig's imagination. Thank you come again!

Posted by Vishy at October 24, 2005 11:49 PM

Comments

Interesting post about names. I wasn't aware of the Marathi names and their meanings, even though I had noticed that a most names ending in -kar were from Maharashtra (Tendulkar, Gavaskar).

In the south we have a similar system. A lot of south Indians have the name of their village as their family name. Then comes the first name and then the surname (last name). Often the family name (name of the village/place of origin) is not spelled out completely.

Posted by: Avinash Bhat at October 30, 2005 12:11 PM

Can anyone enlighten me on the origins on the following surnames?

- Kulkarni
- Hatwalne

Posted by: varsha at November 15, 2005 04:00 PM