Recently, I’ve been thinking about naming trends in India, because a lot of my relatives are starting to have kids, and they’re putting a lot of mental effort into what their kids should be named, from asking relatives to looking at horoscopes and fighting back and forth about names to deciding which celebrity names they should take. So I wanted to explain and give my opinion on a few of the naming trends in India at the moment. I’ll only focus on Hindu names because other religions have their own naming customs and trends.

Some of the top 100 most common boy names of 2023. There’s a mix of names on here, including Muslim ones like Mohammed and Christian ones like Steve. Many of the Hindu names on here follow the trends talked about below.

The first major trend is the replacement of regional names with Hindi or north-influenced names. My own name is the result of this. Deeraj is the Hindi/Gujarati version of the Sanskrit word “dhirya,” which means firm or brave. I think that the reason I was named that provides insight into why these names are becoming more popular. I was named after Deerajlal Ambani, one of the biggest businessmen of all time in India, whose scandal-free career my grandmother thought highly of. As people name their kids after celebrities from all over India, the regional identity of first names begins to disappear. I don’t think this is a huge problem because there’s nothing wrong with giving a kid the name of a person you admire, but what I’m not a huge fan of is the stigmatization of regional names. For example, a common suffix of names in the Andhra Pradesh and Telangana states is ayya, also spelled like aiah. We can add it to a word like Veer “hero” to make Veerayya. In the past, adding this was common; many important figures in the history of these two states had this suffix, like the first poet Nannayya, but nowadays it is considered old-fashioned or even backwards to have a name like that. 

One of the weirdest trends in my opinion is where names themselves don’t come in and out of fashion like in America, but the starting letter does. For example, out of my Dad’s male cousins, their names all start with P. However, nowadays names starting with A or S are more common. Among the top 100 names in India today, 25 start with A. This isn’t a cultural thing either, where a generation will all have names starting with the same letter. Furthermore, this trend seems to have started pretty recently, after name registries were done in English because usually one English letter will correspond to different letters in Indian languages. I think that this trend is okay, because even within a single starting letter there are many different possibilities for unique and thoughtful names. It’s just weird to me whenever I go to some event and all of the other kids my age are named Atharv, Aryan, Advaith, Ananth, and so on. Personally, my favorite letters for Indian Hindu names start with N like Narasimha, or Narayana, so I hope that they become popular in the future. 

The third trend is similar to something in the US, giving your kid a regular name but slightly modified, like spelling Kylie like Kylee or Kyleigh. Instead of adding -eigh, I think that the most common modification is -ansh for guys and -anshi for girls. This word normally means piece or part, but it has other meanings like strength, vigor, or substance. You can pretty much take any name and add -ansh to it, for example, Shrey “excellent” plus ansh is Shreyansh. I don’t think that this trend is that bad either, but it’s just really unoriginal. 

Speaking about unoriginality, Punjabis are the worst, and most names can be created by taking something on the left column and mixing it with something on the right column. To be fair, these names are usually meaningful, but they are made fun of as cookie-cutter.

The fourth and final trend is the general trend of shortening names. All across India, many names used to be longer, such as Robindronath in Robindronath Tagore, one of the most famous historical Bengali poets and artists, but now people tend to prefer one or two-syllable names. Even my dad was first named Lakshmi Narasimha Praveen Kumar before my grandma thought it was too ridiculous and put just Praveen on the birth certificate. The thing is that even if people have long names, they tend to get shortened down anyways, like how Robindronath Tagore was called Rabi in his youth. However, I think that having a long name is badass and I wish my parents gave me one. 

Some people still have long names. Here is a sample of some long Kannada names. Bold represents their first and last name.

There’s plenty more trends when it comes to names in India, but these are the ones I thought of first. I don’t really dislike any of them, but I find it interesting that such a personal and monumental decision such as naming has its own trends, as if it’s still controlled by others. I’m kind of curious to see what naming trends will be in India or the US in 10-20 years as Gen Z becomes parents and has its own kids.