It’s a region in the Philippines, and intended to give him a pan-Asian flair. AFAIK it is not a surname, or at least not a common one.
Answer: all that’s been mentioned above. The reboot implied a change in the timeline, not abandonment of the past details. The main characters were cast to be similar to the TOS actors and characters. Khan had a distinctive style that was completely abandoned with no explanation. It is jarring. The out of story “explanation” is that he had surgery to change his looks. But this would just raise the question of why Khan didn’t wonder about his own name and ethnicity. Diversity may create all sorts of things in the future, but even Kirk questioned Uhura on her name, so why wouldn’t he ask why the guy that looked like Sherlock Holmes was named Khan?
No, it’s not jarring, unless you are imposing arbitrary rules on fiction that fiction simply doesn’t have to follow.
This guy is Khan. That’s all you need to know. All you need to know about a narrative is what you are given between the start and finish of the narrative.
You’re choosing to bring outside rules to the story and then complaining that they haven’t been followed. That’s your problem, not the movie’s problem.
Did the opening titles start with “You should watch ‘Space a Seed’ and ‘Wrath of Khan’ before you watch this”? No, it didn’t. The minutiae of those things are irrelevant.
And it’s not like it wasn’t expected; in the Khan centric comic book that takes place after the movie, practically the first thing Kirk does at Khan’s trial is point out that the guy on the dock and historical photos of (a very Indian looking) Khan look nothing alike.
Oh, and before I forget:
Yes, it is jarring. The movie depicted every major character with the same characteristics as the original. But they decided that Khan was not worthy of reproduction or explanation.
I loved West Side Story and I’m not complaining that it isn’t a faithful recreation of Romeo and Juliet. It took the plot and theme wholly and changed the characters wholly. The same for Forbidden Planet. What I would object to is taking the entire Superman story with curlicue and stylized S - but just giving him crab claws because that was popular at the time.
[sub]I saw the immediate response as I was typing this[/sub] I note that the comic was attempting to correct the issue BY explaining it. They noticed the jarring inconsistency and addressed it. That keeps the change from being as jarring and works to keep the story coherent. It’s “we can change what we want; the audience won’t notice or care” that I disagree with.
So long as there’s nothing implausible, the audience shouldn’t care unless the work itself gives them a reason to care.
There’s nothing implausible today about a white Anglo-Saxon with an Indian name. Nor is there anything implausible today about an Indian who looks and sounds like a white Englishman.
And that’s not to mention what might be true several centuries hence.
The fact that Khan is s white Englishman is part of the setting, the same as the existence of transporters. Or the fact that Capt. Picard is either English or French depending on the convenience to the plot of any particular episode. You observe it, accept it, and move on.
As I said before, this is fiction. It is not a documentary of a fictional world.
Unless the story itself makes a point of it, it needs no explanation or even recognition of any kind.
It is very easy to construct an excuse for why someone would have an Indian name, and look like Benedict Cumberbatch. And if we lived in a world where there were ample roles for Indian actors in big Hollywood films, this ethnic mismatch would not be a big deal. But as it happens, there really aren’t a whole lot of good roles for Indian actors in big Hollywood movies. So when a character comes along whose plainly written to be Inidian, and they go ahead and cast yet another white guy in the role anyway… well, that kind of sucks.
And, of course, as others have pointed out, the new movie was supposed to exist in the same universe as the original TV episode, where Khan is very much not a white Englishman. So that is, in fact, kind of an issue within the fiction itself, regardless of non-textual issues of representation in popular media.
But is, instead, a tan Mexican…
FWIW, a lot of “Korean-Americans” in 1941 were classified as Japenese-Americans because Japan occupied Korea at the time and forced them to take “Japanese” names and other aspects of Japanese culture with rather predictable results.
I have to admit, I didn’t make the “Khan = Indian name” link when I was watching.
Mainly because the vast majority of times I’ve seen that name it’s been in a Star Trek context, so it’s just another Star Trek thing in my brain.
It does mean that if ever I see a person with that name I automatically pronounce it as “KHAAAANN” in my head.