Dear Manish,
Hope this article will give you some insight in your query.
India is a country with numerous distinct cultures and language groups within it. Thus, Indian surnames, where formalized, fall into seven general types. And many people from the southern states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala do not use any formal surnames, though most might have one.
In Northern India, most of the people have their family name after the given names, whereas in Southern India, the given names come after the family name.
- Patronymics and ancestry, where the father's name or an ancestor's given name is used in its original form or in a derived form (e.g. Aggarwal or Agrawal or Agrawala derived from the ancestor Agrasen).
- In Eastern India like Odisha (formerly Orissa), West Bengal Occupation of ancestors were as per their Surnames (as per Hindu Community) like Sethi, Behera, Mallick, Das, Dash, Mohanty, Subudhi, Kar, Dhal, Nayak, Panigrahi, Pattnaik, Mishra, Sahoo, Sahu, Senapati, Prusty, Rath etc.
- Occupations (Chamar, Patel or Patil meaning Village Headman, Gandhi, Kamath, Kulkarni, Kapadia, Nadkarni, Patwardhan, Patwari, Shenoy, etc.) and priestly distinctions (Bhat, Bhattar, Trivedi, Shukla, Chaturvedi, Twivedi, Purohit, Mukhopadhyay) Businesspeople: Amin, Shah. In addition many Parsi, Bohra and Gujarati families have used English trade names as last names since the 18th and 19th centuries (Contractor, Engineer, Builder).
- Caste or clan names (Pillai, Gounder, Boyar, Parmar, Sindhi, Vaish). Reddy and Naidu are not surnames but suffixes to first names to indicate their clan or caste.
- Place names or names derived from places of ancestral origin (Aluru, Marwari, Gawaskar, Gaonkar, Mangeshkar, Kapoor, Wamankar, Kokradi, Karnad).
- The father's first name is used as a surname in certain Southern states, such as Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. However after the marriage the bride uses her husband's first name instead.
- Muslim surnames, generally following the same rules used in Pakistan. Khan among the most popular, often signifying Afghan/Central Asian descent.
- Bestowed titles or other honorifics (titles bestowed by kings, rajas, nawabs and other nobles before the British Raj (Wali, Rai, Rao, Tharakan, Panicker, Vallikappen, Moocken, etc.) and those bestowed by the British (Rai, Bahadur). In Bengal, it is also common custom to create hybrid surnames based on the previous last names and new titles (Raichoudhury)
- Names indicating nobility or feudal associations or honorifics (Chowdary, Naidu, Varma, Singh, Burman, Raja, Reddy, Tagore, Thakur)
- Colonial Surnames based on tax or after religious conversion, particularly in Goa which was under Portuguese control (D'Cruz, Pinto). Often, surnames of Portuguese noble families who were accepted as godparents were used as the surnames of the converted. Some families still keep their ancestral Hindu surnames along with their given Catholic Surnames eg. Miranda-Prabhu and Pereira-Shenoy.
The convention is to write the first name followed by middle names and surname. It is common to use the father's first name as the middle name or last name even though it is not universal. In some Indian states like
Maharashtra, official documents list the family name first, followed by a comma and the given names.
It is customary for wives to take the surname of their husband after marriage. In modern times, in urban areas at least, this practice is not universal. In some rural areas, particularly in North India, wives may also take a new first name after their nuptials. Children inherit their surnames from their father.
In some parts of Southern India, no formal surname is used, because the family has decided to forgo its existing clan name. There has been a minor reversal of this trend in the recent times. This practice is prevalent in
Tamil Nadu and
Kerala. For example, people from the kongu vellala gounder community of Tamilnadu have in general two titles: the caste title Gounder and the clan name, example Perungudi. Nowadays it is common for people not to use any of these titles. So a Konguvel, son of Shanmuganathan, of say Erode, would call himself Konguvel Shanmughanathan, instead of the traditional Erode Perungudi Konguvel Gounder. This practise is of very recent origin though. Wife or child takes the given name of the husband or father (Usha married Satish, and may therefore be called Usha Satish or simply S. Usha). In many communities, especially Christian, names are formed by the given name as the first name, the family name and house name as the middle name(s) and the father's/husband's given name as the last name. Thus, the last name changes with each generation. The house name would also change as generations move out of their consanguineal family homes with the changing ownership of property upon the death of the patriarch. The Dravidian movement in the beginning of 20th century was instrumental in knocking off the concept of surnames in Tamil Nadu. Since many companies in the industrially rich Tamil Nadu managed to filter candidates just by looking at their names, the movement went on to such an extent that surnames/castenames were simply refused at primary school levels. The movement went so active that even Streets, roads and galis where names with caste name was published, road-tar was applied on caste names. For instance in a Ranganatha Mudaliar street, the
Mudaliar name was struck off with tar, leaving the street as Ranganathan Street. Similar was the case with almost all castes, Now it's hard to find a Mudaliar, Nadar, Pillai, Goundar, Iyer, Chettiar etc in any public display. Only on arranged marriages, people feel proud to publish their caste names. In cases where people arrange their own marriages (intercaste / inter religion), the caste name almost vanishes. Hence the famous "ETHIRAJA MUDALIAR College" in Chennai is simply "ETHIRAJ COLLEGE" or "Kamaraja nadar road" is simply "Kamaraj road". This is being welcome my politicians from UP, Bihar etc.
Jains generally use
Jain,
Shah,
Firodia,
Singhal or
Gupta as their last names. Sikhs generally use the words
Singh ("lion") and
Kaur ("princess") as surnames added to the otherwise unis*x first names of men and women, respectively. It is also common to use a different surname after Singh in which case Singh or Kaur are used as middle names (
Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Surinder Kaur Badal). The tenth Guru of Sikhism ordered (
Hukamnama) that any man who considered himself a Sikh must use
Singh in his name and any woman who considered herself a Sikh must use
Kaur in her name. Other middle names or honorifics that are sometimes used as surnames include Kumar, Dev, Lal, and Chand.
The modern day spellings of names originated when families translated their surnames to English, with no standardization across the country. Variations are regional, based on how the name was translated from the local language to English in the 18th, 19th or 20th centuries during British rule. Therefore, it is understood in the local traditions that Agrawal and Aggarwal represent the same name derived from Uttar Pradesh and Punjab respectively. Similarly, Tagore derives from Bengal while Thakur is from Hindi-speaking areas. The officially-recorded spellings tended to become the standard for that family. In the modern times, some states have attempted at standardization, particularly where the surnames were corrupted because of the early British insistence of shortening them for convenience. Thus Bandopadhyay became Banerji, Mukhopadhay became Mukherji, Chattopadhyay became Chatterji etc. This coupled with various other spelling variations created several surnames based on the original surnames. The
West Bengal Government now insists on re-converting all the variations to their original form when the child is enrolled in school.
