East Indian, Asian Indian, Indian American or Desi? Francis C. Assisi and Elizabeth Pothen

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And by the same token the various native nations of North America have been compelled to accept the rubric of a pan “Indian” identity – for the convenience of the white man -- an ignominy which they reject.

As far as the Indian immigrant in America is concerned, it’s got to be either East Indian or Asian Indian, or Indian American or Indo-American or Desi. Or, to remove the slightest doubt, it may even require a mouthful as in “East Indian American” or “Asian Indian American” or “South Asian Indian American.”

The ultimate dilemma is that in Britain and East Africa he is an Asian. In Russia, Southeast Asia, and Europe and Fiji he is still an Indian. In the Caribbean he is an East Indian. In Canada he may be an Indo-Canadian. But in America he can never be “Indian,” while at the same time his Asian identity is oftentimes suspect – thanks to the average American’s geographic illiteracy. As Sadanand Dhume wrote, ‘Asian in America means Chang not Chakravarti.’

On hindsight, Hindustani American may have been the most appropriate appellation. But except for its early use by Rajani Kanta Das in his study Hindustani Workers On The Pacific Coast, or in the Free Hindusthan newspaper founded by Taraknath Das nearly a century ago, such usage hardly exists. Pakistani American, yes; Hindu American, yes; but Hindustani American is an unrecognized species.

Now, consider the following observations:

The earliest report of The Senate Commission on Immigration (1911) by H. A. Millis was entitled “East Indian immigration to the Pacific Coast states.” Earlier too, in 1947, Gurdial Singh wrote in Sociological and Social Research on ‘East Indians in the U.S.’ And the very first detailed study of Indian immigrants in America can be found in H. Brett Melendy’s 1974 book ‘Asians in America’ in which people from the subcontinent were referred to exclusively as ‘East Indians.’

Even today the Ivy League institution Dartmouth College lists its resources on Indian immigrants under the title “East Indian Americans.” Meanwhile, a lecture last month by K.E. Supriya, Visiting Assistant Professor of Communications at UT-Austin was entitled: “ Global Desi, Local Swadeshi: Indian Identity and Intercontinental Culture.” Desi, too, has entered the mainstream vocabulary.

In the 1980 standard reference work, Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, a chapter entitled ‘East Indians’ begins as follows: ‘The East Indians in the United States who sometimes refer to themselves as Asian Indians or Indo-Americans, are largely South Asian Indians’ from the Indian subcontinent.

Several years later, historian Joan Jensen, who authored the Harvard encyclopedia article on East Indians, went on to complete a book-length study entitled ‘Passage from India’ and subtitled ‘Asian Indian immigrants in North America’ – which has become a classic in its field.

A book entitled ‘The Asian Indian experience in the United States’ is presently required reading for most courses on the Asian immigrant experience. That’s a 1985 study by Paramatma Saran of the City University of New York. Saran’s earlier book, published in 1980, The New Ethnics : Asian Indians in the United States, was a collection of papers presented at a conference organized by the Research Institute on Immigration and Ethnic Studies of the Smithsonian Institution in 1976.

Similarly, Ronald Takaki, a Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, in his widely used 1989 academic text ‘Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans’, has a chapter on “Asian Indians in America” where he uses the term Asian Indians almost exclusively.

Finally, in 1990, Arthur and Usha Helweg published their landmark study ‘An Immigrant Success Story: East Indians in America.’ Arthur Helweg, a Professor of Anthropology at Western Michigan University, subsequently released a micro study entitled ‘Asian Indians in Michigan’ (2002) and, most recently ‘Strangers in a Not-So-Strange Land: Indian American Immigrants in the Global Age’ (2004).

We asked Dr. Helweg, who has used all three terms in the title of his books, and who has been studying the Indian diaspora for three decades, to comment on his choice of the different terms. His comment: “ The people residing in the United States who claim India as their land of ethnic origin have been identified by various terms- Indian, East Indian, Asian Indian, and Indian American to name a few; Asian Indian was the most prominent identifier in the 1990s and is the official designation still. However, “Indian American” is becoming more popular.” In his latest book, though the title has “Indian American Immigrants,” he acknowledges that he uses “Indian, East Indian, Asian Indian, and Indian American interchangeably to identify people who claim India as their ethnic land of origin, but are living in the United States.”

So, what is the preferred usage? Will it be East Indian, Asian Indian, Indian American, Indo-American or Desi American? Or will they all exist side by side along with NRI and PIO? And, at the micro level, will Indians in America identify themselves on religious grounds as Hindu-American, Sikh-American, Jain-American or Muslim Indian American? Or on regional/linguistic basis as in Tamil American, Gujarati American, Punjabi American, Bengali American etc.?

We’ve mined the World Wide Web by examining all the terms currently in use to identify Indian immigrants. The idea is to provide clues about emerging trends in this direction. For example, though the term “East Indian” hearkens to the artifice of a colonial past, its historical relevance cannot be ignored. While “Asian Indian” is favored by the government and by the academic community, the reality is that of multiple identifiers, depending upon the context. All this is of primary concern for anyone engaged in the study of the Indian diaspora.

We’ve not examined “Desi” in any detail because it is an umbrella for all things South Asian. However, there is a noticeable increase in its usage, especially among activists of the second generation. It’s a term enthusiastically preferred by the activist/writer and academic Vijay Prashad. While acknowledging that the term is still “under construction,” Prashad explains: ‘I love the word “desi.” It is so beautiful. I can go around saying it over and over again. I'm of the view that it is the best word to describe ourselves. ..We who use it do not hearken back to the 'homeland' of the subcontinent, because we are generally not nationalistic in that sense. Our homeland is an imaginary one…”

WORLD WIDE WEB STUDY

In June 2002 we initiated a study examining how people of Indian origin are identified on the World Wide Web’s estimated 4.5 billion documents. We are now expanding our study by examining databases that peer into the ‘invisible web’ or the ‘Deep Web’ with its nearly 500 times the number of documents in the visible web.

We began by querying the major search engines, Google, Teoma, Alltheweb, and Hotbot with the following key words: East Indian(s), Asian Indian(s), Indian-American(s), and Indo-American(s) to ascertain how Indian immigrants are identified on the Web.

For example, with Google as our default search engine, and foregoing the use of filters, we obtained the following results on 2nd October 2004 for our search terms: East Indian (548,000), Asian Indian (392,000), Indian American (94,300), and Indo-American (25,500).

When the same search was repeated with filters, for blocking out adult or sexually explicit content, the results were: East Indian (276,000), Asian Indian (211,000), Indian American (77,400), and Indo-American (19,600).

Our key findings:

50% of East Indian, 46% of Asian Indian, 17% of Indian American, and 10% of Indo-American sites consist of adult oriented material. We have not yet analyzed the nature of this adult material; only quantified it as far as it exists in the internet.

With or without filtering, the number of sites for each of the search terms was in the following order: East Indian >> Asian Indian >> Indian American >> Indo-American. When the same survey was conducted over a period of time, we noticed there was a trend towards an increase in Indian American sites and a corresponding decrease in East Indian and Asian Indian sites.

With or without filters, and using the plural form of the key words we found: Indian Americans (26,000) > East Indians (18,000) >Asian Indians (14,000) > Indo-Americans (703). Here too, the trend over a period of six months was an increase in Indian American sites and a decrease in Asian Indian and East Indian sites.

Our analysis also shows that when different domains are tracked, the term “Asian Indian” is used predominantly in “edu” and “gov” domains, while the term East Indian is used mostly in “com” and “org” domains. For historical documents and while referring to Indian immigrants in the Caribbean, “East Indian” has a special relevance.

When medical sites were examined through Pubmed or Medline database, we found Asian Indians >> East Indians > Indian Americans.

When religion is included as a key word in the identifying process, the search engine results show Sikh Americans (3280) >> Hindu Americans (415), and Sikh Diaspora (2420) >> Hindu Diaspora (627), indicating a larger web presence for the Sikh Diaspora compared to the Hindu. And in the case of regional or linguistic identity, the frequency was as follows: Tamil Americans (104) > Bengali Americans (68) > Punjabi Americans (44) > Gujarati Americans (40). Similarly, Tamil Diaspora (1990) > Punjabi Diaspora (314) >(Gujarati Diaspora (175) > Bengali Diaspora (113).

Finally, though the term Indo-American is the least used, the corresponding term Indo-Canadian continues to be popular and is widely used for people of India origin in Canada.

We hope that our work in this direction will provide a key to Indian diasporic identities as it presents itself in the World Wide Web. And considering the fact that the Web is not static, but constantly changing and evolving, the results have to be viewed and assessed in that light.

(In Part 11 of this study we will examine the way Indian immigrants are identified in the mainstream and ethnic media.)

francisassisi@hotmail.com