My wife and I are both grew up in North America, and are of Indian descent. We want our children to have names that are easy to pronounce for the Western tongue, but still tie to our Indian/Hindu culture.
We have a child (girl) due in about 3 weeks. We’ve chosen a name, but my wife would kill me if I revealed it to anyone that I know. While I like the name, I’m not tuned enough into Indian culture to know if there are any obvious or subtle reasons for not naming the child “Arya”.
For example, here in the US, not too many people would name their child OJ. Any opinions on the name “Arya” would be appreciated.
Not that i can think of, as a Hindi speaker.
Is it a shortening of Aryan? Also, a quick Yahoo! search (you guys know what you can do with Google) shows lots of people named Arya, more common than my name as a matter of fact.
So it sounds pretty good to me.
The only issue I can think of would be running into non-South Asian people thinking, “Arya”, “Aryan” and then getting wound up about that whole “so-called Aryan” racial superiority thing that caused so much trouble back in the Twentieth.
But I say this as someone of non-Indian descent. I don’t actually know whether this would be a problem.
Congrats on the new child! 
Like Sunspace, the first thing I thought (as a non-Indian) when I read the name was Aryan and its corruption by Hitler and skinheads. Anyone that makes that connection should be smart enough to know about its recent change in popular meaning.
The Arya/Aryan/Hitler connection was the first potential problem that I thought about. I thought about changing the spelling to Aria, but it would lose the connection to the culture, especially since “aria” has a whole different meaning in western cultures. I guess it’s a bit of balancing, because you don’t want to base important decisions on the ignorance of the few…but you don’t ever want to put your child in potential danger because you were stuck on a name…but you don’t want to be cowardly in choosing a name for your child…but you don’t want to let pride interfere with smart decision making.
At the end of the day, we aren’t too concerned with the Hitler thing. She definitely will not have blond hair and blue eyes (and if she does, there will be much more to discuss than her name). We’ll educate our child with the meaning of her name. And she’ll have an older brother who’ll protect her.
I’m more concerned about names that people might say: “I can’t believe they named her that! Don’t they know that Arya X. led the world’s largest drug-smuggling, child protitution, white slavrry ring in the history of India?”