India's largest job portal is named with a word borrowed from Persian for servitude.
नौकरी (naukrī) is the standard Hindi word for a job or employment. It entered Hindi from Classical Persian nawkarī, meaning service.1 The word carries connotations of service to an employer, a relationship shaped by centuries of Mughal administrative culture in which naukar meant a servant or retainer in the employ of a nobleman or state official.
In 1997, Sanjeev Bikhchandani launched Naukri.com, India's first major online job portal, choosing the Hindi word for employment as the brand name. The site launched with 1,000 job listings scraped from 29 newspapers. At the time, India had approximately 14,000 internet users.2
By 2005, Naukri.com was the largest web-based employment site in India. In 2006, its parent company Info Edge became the first Indian internet company to go public.3
The choice of name was strategic. In a country of more than twenty major languages, Hindi provided the widest cultural resonance for a concept that transcended regional boundaries. The word naukri is understood across North India and in much of the Hindi-speaking diaspora as the single most important thing a young person can secure after education.4
The Persian root nawkar originally described a relationship of dependence, a person in service to another. That this word became the name of the platform through which millions of Indians seek employment reflects both the cultural weight of salaried work in Indian society and the linguistic trace of an older hierarchy embedded in the language of aspiration.5