Indian Name Generator

There is no single "Indian name" because India has two dozen major languages and the naming customs change every few hundred kilometres. In the north a Hindi or Punjabi name follows the familiar first-name-plus-surname shape, and the surname usually signals community or region: Sharma, Mishra and Tripathi are Brahmin names, Agarwal and Goel mercantile, Yadav and Jat farming castes, Rathore and Shekhawat Rajput clans. Sikh men carry Singh and women Kaur, often followed by a village clan name like Dhillon, Gill or Sandhu.

The south works differently. Many Tamil and Telugu families traditionally used no surname at all; a person's father's name or village came first as an initial, so Karthik Subramanian is Karthik, son of Subramanian. Telugu names frequently begin with a family name (Vemuri, Yarlagadda), while Kerala uses community names such as Nair, Menon and Pillai or patronymics. Bengali surnames like Chatterjee, Banerjee and Sen, Marathi -kar names like Kelkar and Joglekar, and Gujarati Patel, Shah and Desai each mark a person as clearly as an accent does.

This generator draws from all of those traditions plus Indian Muslim, Syrian Christian, Goan Catholic and Parsi families, so you can pull a believable Mumbai banker, a Chennai grandmother or a Ludhiana farmer, or borrow the Sanskrit register for an Indian-flavoured fantasy world.