Hindu girls’ names

Hindu naming rests on Sanskrit, but calling these Sanskrit names undersells what is actually happening. Sanskrit supplies the roots; Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Telugu, Kannada and Punjabi each supply their own forms of them, and a name can look quite different in Chennai and Kolkata while being the same name.

The largest single source is the goddesses, and this is where the tradition differs most sharply from the European pattern. Parvati, Lakshmi, Saraswati and Durga each carry dozens of epithets, and any epithet can be a name in its own right. Gauri, the radiant one, is Parvati. Padma, the lotus, is Lakshmi. A parent naming a daughter for a goddess has a hundred options rather than one, and most of them describe a quality rather than repeat a name.

The epics supply a second stream — Sita and Draupadi and the women of the Ramayana and Mahabharata — and the Vedic hymns a third, including Usha, the dawn, who is one of the oldest continuously used names anywhere in the world.

Then there is nakshatra naming, which has no real European equivalent: a child may be named according to the lunar mansion occupied by the moon at birth, which links the name to a specific point in the sky and a specific syllable. Rohini, Revathi and Chitra all belong to that system.

Modern Hindu naming has moved toward shorter forms — two syllables, easy across languages — but the sources are the same ones they have been for three thousand years.