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Notes -
Not Indian, but I grew up around enough of them to observe and ask about such matters.
1. It's possible for someone to be light-skinned enough that they are almost certainly North Indian or dark-skinned enough that they are almost certainly South Indian, but in between it's difficult to tell.
2. If they are from one of the communities that tend to migrate to the US I can do this pretty well e.g. Seetharaman is Tamil, Ravi is Telugu, Bose is Bengali, Jagtap is Marathi, Portuguese names are from Goa, English Christian names indicate someone is from Kerala, the aforementioned Singh and Patel, etc.
3. Among recent migrants, language and religion are probably the two main barriers between communities. For the second generation, religious differences may persist and there is some inertia around food (which correlates very strongly with North vs South), but ancestral language is no longer relevant and most folks just identify as Brown.
4. Absent any other information, not well at all.
5. If they have a surname I am familiar with in the Indian-American community I would guess that they are Brahmin and be right the majority of the time. Otherwise I would have no idea.
6. Discrimination, at least for things like who you are supposed to marry, is not really by geography, but by Jati, which is basically your particular endogamous community. The part of the caste system that Westerners are usually familiar with is Varna e.g. Brahmin, Kshatriya, and so on, and this defines the role that your Jati is supposed to play in society (priest, warrior, merchant, etc.). As an example, Iyers and Iyengars are both Tamil Brahmins, but they are separate Jati. Discrimination along other axes includes "people darker-skinned than me are inferior," "people from [other state] talk funny and eat weird food," and "[other religion]'s men are coming to steal and forcibly convert our women." Basically none of these differences matter to second generation immigrants except for the rare few who let their parents arrange a marriage or are devoutly religious (usually Muslim).
7. I can tell if their native language is North or South Indian, but usually not more than that. I can probably distinguish North Indian languages like Gujarati, Hindi, and Bengali by hearing better than I could those same accents in English.
8. If it's a group of international students playing cricket on the college quad, they probably all came from the same state and are of similar caste backgrounds. Among the second generation this may still happen if it's a group of friends who all grew up together because their parents were in the former sort of group and moved to the same part of the US (I know a lot of Telugus from Northern Virginia, for instance), but they won't go out of their way to exclude others on those lines.
9. The communities I'm familiar with basically have no lower-caste people in them at all, at least if we're talking about Dalits and such, so it's hard to tell.
Even this is not reliable. There are very dark northerners and very light southerners.
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