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?

> Nowadays many people of all the castes have started using caste neutral surnames.

As someone very ignorant of that whole issue, if it's that simple, why doesn't the lower caste(s) always do that? Why "nowadays" only "many" do?

If all the lower castes do it and all the people from higher castes keep the signifying surnames, what does that change?

> and all the people from higher castes keep the signifying surnames

But that's not what was said. YetAnotherNick said many of all castes are doing this.

That's literally the point... now people from all castes are doing it, so it changes something.

The comment I replied to implies "why didn't the lower castes just always change their surnames", I pointed out why.

> 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.

Proud parents who resent children who throw away the family name. Not specific to India.

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.

For Reservations

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.

> But people should be allowed to use any surnames.

Is this not currently the case?

Legally yes, but there is some judgement involved in changing the surname.