Are Indian surnames related to caste?

Are Indian surnames related to caste?

The caste system is a form of social stratification where, historically, Hindu Indians were grouped by their occupation within society. When these people adopted surnames, they turned to the caste system as a means to obtain a family name, thereby adopting names related to a distant ancestor’s occupation.

What are the lower caste surnames in India?

Mishra, Pandey, Bharadwaj, Deshmukh, Deshpande, Kulkarni, Desai, Patil, Jothi, Kaul, Trivedi, Chaturvedi, Agnihotri, Mukherjee, Chatterjee, Acharya, Goswami, Desai, Bhat, Rao, Hegde, Sharma, Shastri, Tiwari, Shukla, Namboothiri, Iyer, Iyengar and what not. Brahmins use their caste names as surnames with much pride.

Who are known as Harijan?

untouchable, also called Dalit, officially Scheduled Caste, formerly Harijan, in traditional Indian society, the former name for any member of a wide range of low-caste Hindu groups and any person outside the caste system.

What are the names of the Indian caste system?

The caste system divides Hindus into four main categories – Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and the Shudras. Many believe that the groups originated from Brahma, the Hindu God of creation.

Who used Harijan word first?

‘Harijan’, meaning ‘children of God’, was a term first used by Gandhi to refer to Dalits in 1932. He even started three journals in English, Hindi and Gujarati in the same name in 1933.

What is Dalit surname?

Dalit (from Sanskrit: दलित, romanized: dalita meaning “broken/scattered”), also known as untouchable, is a name for people belonging to the lowest stratum castes in India.

What is Patel caste?

Traditionally the surname is a status name referring to the village chieftains during medieval times, and was later retained as successive generations stemmed out into communities of landowners, including Patidars, Kolis, Kurmis, some Parsis and Muslims.