Back on my Indian!Harry kick & thinking about how Harry could have both recent and historically Indian ancestors.
Today's thought is about how the Potter family became "Potter" considering that the JoKe's world building is stupid and I've elected to ignore a lot of it. I think there could be a mixture of options.
What if, although muggle England hadn't established relations with muggle India until the 1600's, magical populations began to travel and trade much more quickly and freely? What if witches and wizards moved more easily due to the similarities in muggle education standards of the time: that a teacher would be willing to travel great distances to live with and teach a child of noble birth.
Perhaps, through the advanced travel methods created and popularized in the Delhi Sultanate and the southeastern territories of the Byzantine Empire, jadū (jaadoo), or jadd (Arabic load word meaning heritage/ancestors/lineage) began to push the edges of their maps, exploring further and wider, resulting in renewed relations with the central Byzantine and Mongol Empires.
As magical trade increased, so did travel, and Hindi jadd began to emigrate in search of new magic, including someone who became an ancestor of the modern Potter lineage. Perhaps, they became intertwined with the Peverell family of Nottingham and Derbyshire who ruled through their Norman ancestry, through the tutelage of a small group of young English witches and wizards before their Hogwarts letter or some other teaching opportunity.
Perhaps, through typical English/European casual racism & inexperience with other languages, Harry's ancestor's name was misheard or deliberately miswritten in those "oh, Juan is too hard, I'll call you John" types of moments and the ancestor was originally named something else but by the time they arrived in England, they had been renamed Potter as a bastardization of one of the following:
Pawar: meaning slayer of enemies & only on the list due to it fitting with the JoKe's stereotypical lazy naming practices
Panda: surname meaning wisdom, knowledge, learning - a surname I think could have been popular if the family was particularly Ravenclawish
Pandey: surname meaning scholar, from the Sanskrit word 'pandita' - similar reasoning as Panda
and my tied for favorites for the moment
pandita: Sanskrit word meaning scholar where someone (or their translation charm) in the varied immigration offices miswrote the ancestor's occupation in the surname section or deliberately wrote it, leading to the common English surname practice = surname as occupation.
Thakur: meaning deity or lord in the Kshatriya or warrior caste & which would have meant the ancestor could have been a noble/pureblood jadd who specialized in magical fighting & what an easy way to incorporate Harry having parseltongue heritage outside of Voldy's horcrux than to have is in his lineage from a jadd who had specialized in parseltongue fighting techniques
TL;DR: it would have been easy for a poor translation charm or careless intake officer in the 1200s to mix up the Thakur surname, pandita/scholar/teaching reason for traveling, and a dash of casual ethnocentrism to result in Potter.
And if that ancestor somehow fell into a marriage with a Peverell fleeing Death under an invisibility cloak, well...
