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Message: Emoticon Listing HTML Help	[quote]People just know, I guess, the same way in the States most of us know without being told that Gordon, Douglas, Stewart, and anything starting with Mac- is a Scottish surname, and all the O'___s are Irish, and the Smiths are English, and the Schmidts are German, and so on. (Not like this actually says anything about the ethnicity of the people with the names, though. Well, take heart, then: things are as complicated here as they are in India!) I've noticed that a lot of the really loooong names are generally southern Indian, particularly when the person only gives two initials instead of a first name (and generally, in this case, what you would [/i]think[/i] is the last name is actually the first name. I've had this explained to me as something to do with the village of origin, the father's name, and so on, but I don't remember well enough to recount it to you). Anything ending with -ani is usually a Sindhi name; Ramakrishnan and Radhakrishnan and, I assume, most names ending with -krishnan are South Indian. And of course the name Iyer is an upper-caste Tamil name, which is why it was chosen to be the female character's name in Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. It's safe to assume that any name you regularly hear as a character's surname in films (Sharma, Varma, Malhotra, etc.) is probably one of those extremely widespread, general names, spanning a variety of communities, since Bollywood usually takes care not to demarcate its characters too specifically along the lines of community, caste, etc.. One thing I've found interesting is that Choudhary can be both a Muslim and a Hindu name. I wonder how many names fall into that category? Not many, I suspect...[/quote]
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*meredith*

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How to recognise an indian by their surname?
replied on: 6/19/2003 8:59:32 PM

People just know, I guess, the same way in the States most of us know without being told that Gordon, Douglas, Stewart, and anything starting with Mac- is a Scottish surname, and all the O'___s are Irish, and the Smiths are English, and the Schmidts are German, and so on. (Not like this actually says anything about the ethnicity of the people with the names, though. Well, take heart, then: things are as complicated here as they are in India!)

I've noticed that a lot of the really loooong names are generally southern Indian, particularly when the person only gives two initials instead of a first name (and generally, in this case, what you would think is the last name is actually the first name. I've had this explained to me as something to do with the village of origin, the father's name, and so on, but I don't remember well enough to recount it to you). Anything ending with -ani is usually a Sindhi name; Ramakrishnan and Radhakrishnan and, I assume, most names ending with -krishnan are South Indian. And of course the name Iyer is an upper-caste Tamil name, which is why it was chosen to be the female character's name in Mr. and Mrs. Iyer.

It's safe to assume that any name you regularly hear as a character's surname in films (Sharma, Varma, Malhotra, etc.) is probably one of those extremely widespread, general names, spanning a variety of communities, since Bollywood usually takes care not to demarcate its characters too specifically along the lines of community, caste, etc..

One thing I've found interesting is that Choudhary can be both a Muslim and a Hindu name. I wonder how many names fall into that category? Not many, I suspect...

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