Indian names?

[Voadam]

Anybody know a site where I can find lists of Indian names? Asia India, not Amerindian.

I'm running a ravenloft game that is going to be in Sri Raji at least until June and I want to be able to rattle off random NPC names easily. I know that there are a lot of arab names from the 200 million muslims in India, but I'm running a straight hindu country setting so I'm looking for non muslim names.

Thanks.

 

[pensiv]

you could go through the Hindu mythology at www.pantheon.org
There's easily close to 100 names there: http://www.pantheon.org/areas/mythology/asia/hindu/articles.html

 

[turtle]

This place has ALL kinds of names

www.kabalarians.com

Everyone check it out!

Just search by category for Indian. They also have several sub-types of indian names...

 

[Voadam]

Thanks, these are great sites. I'm heavily using the hindu pantheon and while the short descriptions of the gods are useful, I'm looking for more Joe the beggar, Jack the rogue, and John cleric of Shiva, type names than actually assigning people gods names.

That Kabal site is exactly what I was looking for, the list of just names are great (even if the site itself seems a bit kooky).

Anybody looking for ethnic names to add to their games check it out and click to baby names, then to surf by category.

 

[Desdichado]

Delete duplicate post

 

[Desdichado]

I've been using kabalarians for years. Although the new age-y focus of the site is a bit flakey, I've never found a better list of names broken down by ethnic origin.

 

[Skarp Hedin]

I'm heavily using the hindu pantheon and while the short descriptions of the gods are useful, I'm looking for more Joe the beggar, Jack the rogue, and John cleric of Shiva, type names than actually assigning people gods names.

Just as a note, in my experience (primarily with men from Andhra Pradesh, native Telugu speakers), most Indians have names which -are- names of gods. For example, the two most common names in southern India among Hindus are Srinivas and Venkata -- names for Shiva and Vishnu, respectively. The issue is that each god has tens upon dozens of names and forms of address, so there's lots of variety. Anyhow, if you wanted Jack the beggar and Joe the baker, I'd say go with names like Srinivas, Srinivasa, Srinivasan, Venkata, Venkateshwara, etc. They're really common. There are other common names as well, of course, but the name list websites posted should help you with that.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

I know there's a site out there that has a list of the 100 most common names of different nationalities such as North American, British, Chinese, Korean, Russian and Indian. Can't seem to remember the address though.

 

[Voadam]

Skarp,

Thanks for the info, I personally know some people with the last name Srinivasan and have read the name in literature set in India, but I did not know that it was a Shiva name. I know in some places they use god names as common names (for example the variations of Thor in scandinavia) but I din't know if it was so in India.

 

[Skarp Hedin]

Well, India's a big place -- what? 15 major languages and dozens upon dozens of dialects? Different subcultures may do things differently, since, as I say, I only know a bunch of Telugu-speaking programmers

Another interesting bit is this: in Andhra, at least, they often either totally disregard the surname and also put it in the first position, as in Japan.

And heh, they sure do love Thor derivations in Iceland, at least.