I'm not Indian American my origins are Caribbean but I have some Indian origins and can offer a few answers from my experience.
> Is this something that comes up in conversation among Indians?
It starts casually with "where are you from?" and the questions get more invasive.
> Do names tend to correlate to you caste?
In India, yes it does family name is derived from caste. I had some friends adopt English names to get from under their caste names. So quite a few Johnsons, Smiths, Matthews, Pauls out there.
> I had some friends adopt English names to get from under their caste names. So quite a few Johnsons, Smiths, Matthews, Pauls out there.
There is an interesting history behind this. When Christian missionaries first arrived in India to spread their religion (in the late 1700s/1800s) they were initially unable to make much progress, but then found success among lower caste Indians by promising them a life of equality. So the vast majority of Christian converts in India are from these castes.
The history was more complex. There are Syrian Christians (600AD), Catholics (1500), Anglican Protestants (1800) and more recently, evangelical Christians. Each group is linguistically and culturally distinct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_India
In fact Saint Thomas (as in literally Doubting Thomas the apostle in the New Testament) was supposedly martyred in India, according to tradition at least.
LOL. The first Indian American I met with an English surname I assumed was adopted. Then I met another with the same surname and assumed they were related.
India also has a minority population of Anglo-Indians with British surnames. Williams, Jones, Norton, Barnes, Peters, O'Brien are names you can find in Mumbai and Kolkata and Chennai.
NB: "where are you from?" is a question your HR training should already explicitly tell people not to ask candidates. I'm not in HR or management and I still make sure to mention it to new hires before doing my first interview alongside them. National origin is a protected class. Even within the US , "where are you from?" can proxy for a protected class. Race, mostly, or possibly religion.
It's also a question that's very easy to ask in good faith while making small talk, which makes it noticeably dangerous.
Ugh, this is a classic example of skewed logic going way too far before the underlying truth can catch up.
I am in tech management (also a recovering attorney) who routinely conducts interviews, and it is perfectly acceptable to ask where someone is from in a professional setting.
The unacceptable part, as OP at least hints at, is using the response as a proxy for some other verboten criteria or perhaps to kickoff an overly intrusive line of questioning.
These behaviors are odious on their own and why HR should be explicit in training against antipatterns, not spreading meaningless FUD which miss the point and permit bad habits to foster elsewhere.
It’s really inane that modern software recruiting claims to focus on getting a proper picture of the whole candidate , yet untrained interviewers counterfeit the whole endeavor thinking they’re politically correct because they’re afraid to ask anything but the same broken whiteboard questions.
If you don't collect the data in the first place, you can't misuse it - and it's much easier to prove that you didn't misuse it, because all you have to show is that you never had the dangerous data in the first place. This is the same advice we give about handling PII in applications.
> It starts casually with "where are you from?" and the questions get more invasive.
Whenever I mention to a team member that I was interviewing somebody for a position on our team, they always ask: "are they in India?" I had never really wondered why before.
> In India, yes it does family name is derived from caste.
That is not always correct (but is true in most cases). There are caste-neutral names in India - especially Tamil Nadu. But that itself is a hint about the person's caste, since it is adopted mostly by people of the unprivileged caste.
> Is this something that comes up in conversation among Indians?
It starts casually with "where are you from?" and the questions get more invasive.
> Do names tend to correlate to you caste?
In India, yes it does family name is derived from caste. I had some friends adopt English names to get from under their caste names. So quite a few Johnsons, Smiths, Matthews, Pauls out there.