Almost all of the major surnames can be linked to the caste. Nowadays many people of all the castes have started using caste neutral surnames. Banning the use of any caste related surnames is too much I guess. But people should be allowed to use any surnames.
Somewhat tangential but in Korea people used to buy in to higher prestige surnames which has resulted in the great majority of people sharing a couple handful of surnames.
Non-Indian here, I've always wondered how does this work in practice? Is there some giant book with a surnames-to-caste look-up table that Indian children memorize so they can recall later when they hear someone's name? That seems to be a lot of to pack into each of 1 billion people's heads. How many distinct surname "keys" in this table are we talking about?
> The comment I replied to implies "why didn't the lower castes just always change their surnames"
Not implied. I was outright asking.
> I pointed out why.
By adding a non-existent condition that doesn't follow and using it as a reason.
That's unless you're saying that if the remaining lower-caste also used these neutral names, that would cause the upper-caste that had chosen to also adopt these neutral names to return to using the upper-caste names.
What's wrong with having these neutral names be used by many of the upper-caste (as they apparently are) and also all of the lower-caste? Am I not making sense? Because that's the scenario I was asking about.
I was thinking it was the parents that assigned the different surname when naming their newborns, not the children that threw the name away. The former sounds legally easier than the latter.
My question was, why assign a lower-caste name to one's child if they have the option not to? But I suppose even then not all people with these lower-caste names see their surname as bad or harmful to their children, if I understood you correctly.
No. Caste based reservation is not tied to your surname. Major chunk of population of Kerala and Tamil Nadu don't have a caste related surname. It doesn't make them ineligible for caste based reservation. Because the point of the reservation is to level up these communities from the descrimation they faced for hundreds of years. Just changing the caste name doesn't automatically level the playing field. It helps. But they need more support as well.
