Indira is an Indian name meaning beauty or splendor and is also used as an epithet of the goddess Lakshmi.
Indira is a Sanskrit name of great antiquity and beauty, derived from the root indu, meaning "moon" or "drop" (as of water or nectar), and connected to the quality of splendor or beauty. In Hindu tradition Indira is another name for Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, fortune, love, and prosperity — wife of Vishnu and one of the most widely venerated deities in the Hindu pantheon. To name a daughter Indira was to invoke divine abundance and luminous grace, a practice with roots thousands of years deep in South Asian culture.
The name entered the modern global imagination most powerfully through Indira Gandhi, born Indira Nehru in 1917, who served as Prime Minister of India from 1966 to 1977 and again from 1980 until her assassination in 1984. The daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, she was the first and to date only woman to lead India, and she remains one of the most significant political figures of the twentieth century — controversial, formidable, and in many respects the embodiment of the post-colonial assertion of Indian national identity. The name Indira became inseparable from her legacy.
Outside South Asia, Indira has found admirers among parents drawn to Sanskrit names for their melodic depth and ancient philosophical resonance. The name sits in good company with Priya, Ananya, and Kavya — names that carry the full weight of one of humanity's oldest living civilizations. Its four flowing syllables, its divine associations, and its twentieth-century political gravitas make it a name of unusual richness: ancient goddess and modern leader at once.