Indian Last Name Generator

An Indian last name usually tells you where a family comes from and which community it belongs to. In the Hindi belt, Sharma, Mishra and Tripathi are Brahmin names; Agarwal, Goel and Mittal are trading-caste Bania names; Yadav and Kushwaha are farming communities; Rathore, Chauhan and Shekhawat are Rajput clans. Punjabi Hindus carry Khatri surnames like Kapoor and Malhotra, while Sikhs use Singh or Kaur followed by a village clan name such as Sandhu, Gill or Dhillon.

Gujarati families are Patel, Shah, Desai and Mehta; Parsis often took trade names like Engineer and Contractor; Marathi surnames frequently end in -kar (Kelkar, Tendulkar) or are Maratha clan names like Bhosale. Bengali names such as Chatterjee, Bose and Sen, Odia Mohanty and Patnaik, Assamese Saikia and Hazarika, and Kashmiri Pandit names like Raina and Dhar are instantly placeable, and Sindhi surnames tend to end in -ani: Advani, Lalwani.

In the south, many Tamil and Malayali families traditionally used no hereditary surname, so community titles like Iyer, Nair, Menon, Pillai and Naidu, or the father's name, serve that role; Telugu family names such as Vemuri come first; coastal Kannada names include Shetty and Hegde. Goan Catholics carry Portuguese names like D'Souza, Kerala Christians use Varghese and Koshy, and Indian Muslim families are Khan, Syed, Ansari, Siddiqui or Qureshi.