Hindu Name Generator

Hindu names almost always carry a meaning drawn from Sanskrit, and very often a god. Aditya is the sun, Lakshmi is the goddess of fortune, Ganesh, Krishna, Parvati and Shiva are used outright, and hundreds of epithets (Madhusudan, Mallikarjun, Venkateswara, Meenakshi) name a deity by one of its titles. Many families still choose a first letter from the child's birth star, which is why you meet so many siblings whose names start with the same syllable, and a pandit may suggest the name at the naamkaran ceremony on the eleventh or twelfth day.

The surname is where region shows. North Indian Hindus use Brahmin, Kayastha, Bania and Rajput family names such as Sharma, Srivastava, Agarwal and Rathore; Maharashtrians carry -kar and village names like Kulkarni and Deshpande; Bengalis have Chatterjee, Sen and Ghosh; Gujaratis Patel, Shah and Mehta. In the South a Tamil may use only a father's initial, a Telugu puts the family name first (Vemuri Subba Rao), and Malayalis use community names like Nair and Menon. Nepali Hindus use Shrestha, Adhikari and Thapa, and Balinese Hindus name children by birth order: Wayan, Made, Nyoman, Ketut.

Every name here is a realistic pairing from one of those communities, so a character or a baby-name shortlist sounds like it came from a real family.