Saroya appears to be a modern South Asian style name, possibly related to Persian and Sanskrit forms suggesting richness or beauty.
Saroya is an elegant variant of Soraya (also spelled Suraya or Thuraya), a Persian and Arabic name meaning "the Pleiades" — the luminous star cluster in the constellation Taurus that has guided sailors, farmers, and astronomers for millennia. In Persian poetic tradition, the Pleiades symbolized beauty that was simultaneously brilliant and remote, making the name a natural metaphor for a woman of rare grace. The root draws from the Arabic *thurayya*, and the name has traveled widely across the Persian, Turkish, and Arab worlds.
Its most famous 20th-century bearer is Soraya Esfandiary Bakhtiari, the strikingly beautiful second wife of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran. Their marriage in 1951 was a fairytale quickly shadowed by tragedy: when it became clear she could not provide an heir, the Shah divorced her in 1958 — a story that transfixed the international press and gave the name an almost cinematic melancholy. She later became a minor film actress and a fixture of European café society, and her story inspired books, films, and a generation of parents who named daughters in her memory across the Middle East and diaspora communities worldwide.
The Saroya spelling, with its softer terminal vowel, has a particular currency in South Asian Muslim communities and among parents in the West seeking a name that is both exotic and pronounceable. It carries a stellar elegance — literally written in the night sky — combined with a warmth that the harder Soraya spelling sometimes lacks. As interest in Persian-origin names grows beyond their traditional geographies, Saroya stands as a quietly luminous choice.