Gender-Neutral Names in India: Popular Names for Boys and Girls

Six out of every ten people named Chandrika in iMeUsWe's heritage database of 1.47 billion records are men.

That's about 1.39 lakh male Chandrikas. And Chandrika is not the strangest entry on our list of gender-neutral Indian names. There are 1.74 lakh men named Tulsi, over 5 lakh men named Jaya, and nearly 9.7 lakh women named Krishna.

We went looking for names India gives to boys and girls in close to equal numbers, expecting a short list of modern, deliberately unisex choices. What we found were old names, mostly Sanskrit, many of them god and goddess names. They have been quietly split down the middle for generations.

What Makes a Name Truly Gender-Neutral?

Our rule: a name counts as truly gender-neutral if neither gender holds more than 60% of the records carrying it. We also required the name to rank in the top 1,000 of our database, so no name makes the list on the strength of a few hundred records. We call a second group near-neutral: names where one gender holds between 60% and 72%, which is clearly dominant but nowhere near exclusive.

Every percentage below comes directly from our records. When we ran this filter against our database, 21 names passed the strict test. We removed four after checking them by hand (more on that later), which left 17.

The Ones Everyone Already Knew

Some results were no surprise at all.

Manpreet (40% male), Harpreet (55% male) and Balwinder (57% male) are exactly what any Punjabi reader would expect. In Sikh naming, the first name has never carried the gender. The second name does: Singh or Kaur. Manpreet Singh and Manpreet Kaur are equally normal, and our database reflects that with near-perfect balance. Paramjit and Gurpreet belong to the same tradition, though each leans further one way than you might guess. Paramjit is 69% female. Gurpreet is 70% male.

Other entries were familiar for different reasons. Krishna, Sai, Shashi and Kamal all have famous bearers of both genders. Readers will think of Sai Pallavi, Shashi Kapoor, and so on. Nobody needed a database for those.

The rest of the list is where it gets good.

The 17 Names Where India Can't Decide

(Heera and Hira are combined; each spelling has its own rank.)

Look at the top of that table. Kamlesh has over 14 lakh records and ranks 87th among all names in India. It splits into roughly 8.1 lakh men and 6.1 lakh women. It is the most common truly neutral name in our data, and almost nobody outside the Hindi belt would guess it's used for girls at all. Yet across UP, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, families have always had a Kamlesh Devi alongside a Kamlesh Kumar. Vimlesh follows the same pattern and actually leans female, at 57%.

Jaya surprised us most on raw numbers. At 11.9 lakh records it's the second-largest name on the list, and 42% of the people carrying it are men, just over five lakh of them.

Then there's Tulsi. It's the name of a sacred plant, a feminine noun, and a goddess in her own right. It's also, as Tulsidas reminds us, a man's name. In our records it holds almost exactly the 40/60 line.

The Names You Assumed Were Gendered (But Aren't)

This was the section where our expectations fell apart. We thought the near-neutral list would be names leaning slightly from an obvious default. Instead, it's full of names most readers would place firmly in one gender, and they'd be wrong about a third of the time.

A few that made us recheck the numbers:

Sampat is 28% female, close to 48,000 women. The best-known Sampat in recent memory is a woman: Sampat Pal, who founded the Gulabi Gang in Bundelkhand.

Ranjan is 34% female, about 2.1 lakh women. It's a name we'd have bet was over 90% male.

Gulab is 69% male. A flower name, and a mostly masculine one: think Gulab Singh, Gulab Chand. Phool runs the other way. It's 68% female, yet still has 1.6 lakh men.

Bhavani is a goddess name, 30% male. Bhavani Shankar and Bhavani Prasad account for a lot of that.

Rupam is 72% female, though many Bengali readers will know it first through the singer Rupam Islam.

Chandra (70% male) and Kamal (68% male) each have more than 3.3 lakh women. Those are larger female populations than most names that are only given to girls.

Why do names like Ranjan and Sampat, which feel so clearly male, have tens of thousands of women carrying them?

Why These Names Stay Neutral

The answer, mostly, is that in Indian naming the first name often isn't where the gender lives.

Look at how many of these names normally come as the first half of a pair. On the male side you get Rama Shankar, Rama Kant, Chandrika Prasad, Daya Shankar, Heera Lal, Kali Charan, Indra Dev and Noor Mohammad. On the female side you get Rama Devi, Chandrika Devi, Daya Kumari, Heera Bai, Kali Devi and Noor Jahan. The first word is shared. The second word (Prasad, Lal, Shankar, Singh on one side; Devi, Bai, Kumari, Kaur on the other) tells everyone which one you are. Across heritage records spanning six decades, that pattern shows up again and again in the neutral names: the name itself is a deity, a virtue, a flower or a sacred place, and the suffix does the gendering. Daya is compassion. Kashi is a city. Tulsi is a plant, Noor is light, and Heera is a diamond. None of these words has any reason to belong to only one gender, and the families naming their children clearly never felt they did. The Sikh -Preet names follow the same principle, just more explicitly.

That's why this list looks so traditional. Neutrality here isn't a recent trend. It's built into how names were made.

The Four Names We Left Out

Four names passed the numbers but failed a closer look.

Naga, Bala and Dhana showed near-even splits, but in our records they mostly appear as the first part of longer names: Nagaraju and Nagalakshmi, Balakrishnan and Balamani, Dhanraj and Dhanalakshmi. Their balance describes a shared prefix, not a name parents chose on its own.

Frequently Asked Questions About Gender-Neutral Indian Names

1. Is Kamlesh a boy's or girl's name?

Both. In the iMeUsWe database, Kamlesh is 57% male and 43% female across more than 14 lakh records. That makes it the most common truly gender-neutral name we found. Girls named Kamlesh are especially familiar in north Indian families.

2. Is Krishna used as a girl's name in India?

Yes, and more than most people think. Krishna is 67% male in our records, but because it's one of India's most common names (rank 20), that 33% adds up to nearly 9.7 lakh women.

3. Is Noor a boy's or girl's name?

Noor is given to both, with a slight male majority: 58% male and 42% female in our records. It often appears as the first part of a longer name, such as Noor Mohammad for men or Noor Jahan for women.

4. What is the most gender-neutral Indian name?

By our 40–60 rule, the most common truly neutral names are Kamlesh, Jaya, Heera/Hira and Noor. Among names with over two lakh records, Harpreet and Indra, both at 55/45, come closest to an even split.

5. Why are so many Indian names used for both boys and girls?

In many Indian naming traditions, the gender is carried by a second word such as Singh or Kaur, Prasad or Devi, Lal or Bai, rather than by the given name. That leaves names based on deities, virtues, flowers and sacred places free to be used for either gender.

Check Your Own Name

Every name in this article has its own meaning and the full gender split and how common it is. Yours does too. See the male-female distribution of any name at iMeUsWe's Name Page. A good place to start is the Kamlesh name page, India's biggest name that nobody can assign to one gender.