Look up your gotra by surname across Indian communities. Gotra is a patrilineal lineage — descent in an unbroken male line from a common ancestor — and it is traditionally exogamous, which is why families check it before a marriage. Tradition traces all gotras back to eight gotrakarin sages: Kashyapa, Atri, Vasistha, Vishvamitra, Gautama, Jamadagni, Bharadvaja and Agastya, from whom some 108 gotras are said to have branched. Because gotra passes from father to child, it cannot be worked out from a birth date, rashi or nakshatra — only from family. This tool matches your surname and community against recorded surname-gotra associations so you have a starting point to confirm with your elders.
Enter your surname and community above to see the gotra(s) recorded against it. Because the same surname can carry different gotras in different regions, all matches are shown rather than one guess. The most reliable confirmation is your family: elders, an old wedding invitation, or the family priest, since gotra is passed down rather than derived.
No. Gotra is patrilineal — it comes from your father, and from his father before him. There is no calculation, from a birth date, a rashi, a nakshatra or a kundali, that can produce it. A kundali prepared by a priest often has the gotra written at the top, but that is because the family told the priest, not because it was computed. So reading a gotra off a kundali works; deriving one from a birth date does not.
No. The Hindu Marriage Act 1955 prohibits marriage within degrees of prohibited relationship and within a sapinda relationship under section 5(v), but it places no restriction on sagotra marriage. Gotra exogamy is a social custom, widely followed, not a legal requirement. A khap panchayat petition seeking to have sagotra marriage legally banned was dismissed as withdrawn, with the Delhi High Court warning of heavy costs for wasting the court's time.
Sapinda is a closeness-of-blood rule rather than a lineage label, and unlike gotra it does have legal force. Manu Smriti 5.60 holds that sapinda relationship ends after the seventh generation. The Hindu Marriage Act defines it in terms of generations on the paternal and maternal sides. Two people can share a gotra and not be sapinda, and can be sapinda without sharing a gotra.
Marriage between two people of the same gotra, traditionally avoided because they are regarded as descending from the same lineage. The Agni Purana, chapter 154, directs that a bride should not be chosen from the same gotra or the line of the same sage. In practice communities differ in how strictly this is applied, and in South India cross-cousin marriage is common precisely because those cousins belong to different gotras.
In most Hindu communities gotra passes from father to child, and the convention is that a woman adopts her husband's gotra at marriage for ritual purposes. There is a documented exception: among the Tulu people, gotra passes from mother to child.
Usually not. A gotra name can be used as a surname, but the two are different things and the same surname frequently maps to several gotras. Sharma families may be Bharadwaj, Kashyap, Gautam or Vashistha. Some gotra names are also totemic in origin rather than ancestral — Bharadvaja is a lark, Kashyapa derives from kachhap, a tortoise, and Kaushika from kusha grass.
Tradition speaks of 108 descending from the eight gotrakarin sages, but that figure applies mainly to Brahmin lineages. Communities that adopted the system later record far more: Jats, Gurjars and Rajputs together are credited with around 13,000. In a 1945 case the Bombay High Court declined to accept that Brahmin families descend from an unbroken line of common ancestors as their gotra names suggest, calling that proposition impossible to accept.