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Indian Middle Names

80 Indian names with meanings and pronunciation, labelled by tradition — because India is not one naming culture but dozens, and the middle slot means something different in each of them.

India has twenty-two languages with official status and hundreds more in daily use, and its names come from at least four distinct wells: Sanskrit, which supplies the pan-Indian religious and literary stock; Dravidian languages, above all Tamil, which are unrelated to Sanskrit and have their own vocabulary; Persian and Arabic, through eight centuries of Islamic rule in the north; and Punjabi within the Sikh tradition, which deliberately built a naming system of its own. Treating all of this as "Indian names" is like treating Irish, Greek and Finnish as "European names." So every entry on this page is labelled where the label matters, and where a name belongs to more than one tradition, it usually got there through Sanskrit.

The middle position varies by region more than any other part of an Indian name, and in several traditions it is not a chosen name at all. In Maharashtra the standard formula is given name, then the father's given name, then the family surname — which is why Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar's middle name is his father. Across much of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Kerala there is no inherited family surname in the North Indian sense; a person carries initials that expand into a father's name, a village or a house name, and those initials are conventionally written before the given name at home, then dragged into the middle slot by Western forms that insist on a first-middle-last shape. This is why an Indian colleague's passport middle name is often a place. In Punjabi Sikh naming, Guru Gobind Singh gave every initiated man the name Singh, "lion," and every woman Kaur, historically read as "princess," expressly so that caste surnames would fall away; in Western documents Singh and Kaur very frequently land in the middle-name slot, followed by a village or clan name as the surname. Meanwhile Kumar ("young prince"), Kumari, Devi ("goddess"), Bai, Lal and Prasad function as genuine middle elements in several regions, attached to a personal name almost as a suffix. Our guide to middle-name traditions worldwide sets these beside the Arabic and Icelandic systems.

Two customs are worth knowing before you choose. The naming ceremony, namkaran or namakarana, is traditionally held around the eleventh or twelfth day after birth, and in many Hindu families an astrologer supplies a syllable, drawn from the nakshatra or lunar mansion under which the child was born, on which the name should begin. Families who want to honour that and still choose freely often use the astrologically indicated name in the middle position and the chosen one up front — a genuinely useful trick. Separately, Bengali families traditionally give two names: a bhalo naam, the formal or "good" name used on documents, and a daak naam, the pet name used by everyone who loves you, which may be an ordinary word and is often nothing like the formal name. That is a close relative of the Dutch call name, and it means a Bengali child effectively has a private name and a public one before any middle name is considered.

Pronunciation is more regular than the spellings look, once you know that English spelling of Indian names is a nineteenth-century compromise. The h in Dhruv, Bhavna and Radha marks aspiration — a puff of air on the preceding consonant — and never the "th" or "sh" sound an English reader expects; Radha is RAAD-ha, not "Ratha." Sanskrit's final short a is pronounced in the south and dropped in the north, which is why the same name is Rama and Ram, Ashoka and Ashok, Krishna in Delhi and Krishnan in Chennai, where Tamil adds its own -n. V and W blur, so Vikram and Vishnu are said with something between them. Stress is light and even; English speakers tend to hammer the first syllable, and Indian speakers do not. Spellings vary honestly and permanently: Lakshmi and Laxmi, Siddharth and Siddhartha, Deepak and Dipak, Kartik and Karthik, Meera and Mira, Aravind and Arvind. Choose the family's spelling, not the commonest one.

Top picks, annotated

For girls

For boys

Pairing rule for Indian middles: decide first whether the middle slot is carrying a name or a marker. If it is carrying Singh, Kaur, Kumar or Devi, the slot is spoken for and the only real question is the first name in front of it — those four are one or two flat beats and need a first name with some shape: Amara Kaur reads, Anya Kaur nearly rhymes. If it is carrying a chosen name, watch the -a endings, since Sanskrit names end in -a about as often as English girls' names do: Mia Amrita and Ava Aditi both smear at the seam, while Grace Amrita and Ruby Aditi hold. For boys, the short consonant-final names — Dev, Ram, Jai, Amit — are the ones that survive a long surname intact.

Keep browsing

Neighbouring origins: Persian, Arabic, Vietnamese, Chinese, or all 24 origin lists. If the middle slot has to hold a father's name or a village name rather than a name you pick, read traditions worldwide and honoring family; by style, the light Sanskrit names sit close to nature and celestial middles.