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Comment by alex_smart | Hacker News Reader

Usually you know someone's caste from their last name.

I am someone who was not given a caste-based last name because my parents were influenced by a regional movement against caste. (I didn't even have a last name to begin with but eventually added a non caste-based one to avoid visa issues.) Whenever I traveled by train and chatted up with a co-passenger, almost surely they would ask my name and would never be satisfied with just knowing my first name. They would get visibly confused when I would tell them I didn't have a last name.

Edit: Curiously, based on the last name of the person (Soundarajan) whose talk got cancelled, I would actually have guessed that they were upper caste (Brahmin - the highest).

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So why people (specifically immigrants in other countries) just do not change their last name to ones associated with higher caste?

As far as I know (from some coworkers) they do. But last name is only the first step/flag in identifying to which caste person belongs. Sorry, I don't remember exact details, but there some additional steps like special clothes I think?

Yeah, I think the Brahmins have a vest you can feel on the shoulder, so they do a shoulder grab to act close.

Oh, ffs, that is just ridiculous.

Can't you wear the special clothes without belonging to the specific caste?

The main benefit of caste comes from 2nd and 3rd degree connections from your family. Simply changing your name won't help you with that.

For the same reason that I, a white English-speaking person, am not going to be able to fool a British old-money old-boys club that I have the same cultural background that they do.

> Edit: Curiously, based on the last name of the person (Soundarajan) whose talk got cancelled, I would actually have guessed that they were upper caste (Brahmin - the highest).

This is most likely because her parents/grandparents changed to using patronymical last names, precisely to avoid this problem. There was a very popular movement in South India (particularly the state of TamilNadu), called the self-respect movement, which a large part of society (except for the upper castes - who had a lot to lose), adopted.

This is why my own name does not give away my caste. Because my grandfather switched to patronymics from the existing caste based last names.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Respect_Movement

I’m curious: would you say the absence of a surname implied anything about caste? I’ve dealt with the children of people with leprosy (mostly SC, with a little ST and OBC) in the vicinity of Hyderabad, and it wasn’t dreadfully uncommon for their parents or grandparents to have no surname on their Aadhaar card, at least, and perhaps even a few of the children.

(In Telangana, surnames are almost exclusively used as just an initial preceding the given name, and sometimes that’s even all that ends up on official documentation.)

I don't know, in my personal case, this was definitely a regional movement - with plenty of upper caste families also giving their children no surname or a generic non-caste based ones. That is why you will see a lot more "Kumars" and "Anands" and "Ranjans" and "Jyotis" from Bihar than from other parts of the country.

> Whenever I traveled by train and chatted up with a co-passenger, almost surely they would ask my name and would never be satisfied with just knowing my first name.

What happens of they find out you’re a lower caste, so they just stop talking to you, talk down to you, etc.?

I don't think any of those things are true. Indians in general are hyper "hierarchy" aware (not just with respect to caste btw). They just feel the need to know how to place you.

I'm also not lower caste (or particularly upper caste for that matter) and my parents were doctors, so my family was relatively well-off in a very, very poor part of India, so almost all other social indicators would tell them to place me higher in social status. So, the experience of others would vary.

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