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The root su in Sanskrit/Vedic means "to press" in the sense of "to juice". The twigs of a certain plant used to be pressed between rocks, and the milky extraction filtered, mixed with butter etc., left (presumably to ferment) and consumed in religious ceremonies; this drink and the plant was called soma, which literally would have just meant the "extract". The milky drops exuding from the pressing would be compared to the big drop of light in the dark night sky, the moon; and the moon itself was called indu (drop) or soma (extract). saumika literally means related to soma, and could mean anything related to soma, the drink or soma, the moon, or soma, the religious sacrifice in which the soma drink played an important part. In particular, it could mean the vessel for collecting the soma, observance of a religious fasting in accordance with the phases of the moon, etc.

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As a relatively modern name, it probably caught on because of the popular sibilant + rounded vowel + nasal stop + short (in Bengali pronounciation this just means nondipthong) vowel + unvoiced unaspirated stop sound structure, and the moon being the symbol of calm beauty and strength.

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The sibilant went from dental s- to palatal sh- when the three Old Indo Aryan sibilants reduced to one in Eastern India, this common sibilant being palatal in the dialect of standard Bengali, for example. The dipthong au had already changed the initial segment from open (English car-like) to more rounded (English cot-like) in the early period, in Bengali, it rounded further (as in English prefix co-). The schwa -a at the end of syllables usually dropped: all these changes led to the spelling shoumik for this name. though spellings in the Latin script for Indian names tend to be highly variable.