Omar Syed

Indian Americans

An overarching concept throughout the research for this paper was the idea of how though Indian Americans are in America, and may even be naturalized citizens in some cases, they are still made to feel like outsiders. However, though they may deal with discrimination and racism, they still struggle to manage to bridge the gap between their two worlds, sometimes creating a tertiary culture of the Indian American.

While some of the discrimination against Indian Americans is pure racism due to the Indian American’s different skin tone, accent or appearance, some of it is far farther reaching than merely skin deep. For example, even something as seemingly innocuous as last names or surnames has fallen under scrutiny. Prabhu Patil states in his note in Nature, that “surnames have widely fallen into disuse because our fathers and forefathers avoided using the to prevent discrimination on grounds of caste” (450) Patil speaks of how surnames, once left our and disused, have become a source of pride for Indian Americans, who now use them diligently and, as Patil explains, have a very integral part in the scientific community, where papers, reports and findings are published and cannot simply be published under a person’s first name. This notion about something as innocuous as surnames leads into what Lewdin discusses as the way thoughts about racism has been shifted; he states that, “It has been suggested that there has been a shift in the way “racism” is constructed in recent years so that social factors such as values, attitudes, and group mores take precedent over physical differences” (635). Rather than something purely revolving around skin or surnames, racism now bleeds into social factors including the values people have or the thoughts they hold true or view as being right. No longer does racism happen only because of the way a person looks but now happens because of what that or another person thinks, feels or values as well or despite their lily white appearance.

However, while surnames and other ethnic markers are a source of identification and pride for some Indian Americans, others, particularly the Indian American youth crowd, find both a sense of identification and dissonance from their Indian heritage.  Sunaina Maira states that, “For Indian American youth, it is easy to see this diasporic musical remix as an attempt to mediate between the expectations of immigrant parents and those of mainstream American peer culture by trying to integrate signs of belonging to both worlds” (37) The diaspora she talks about is seen at full swing in Tanuja Desai Hidier’s book Born Confused, where seventeen year old Dimple must traverse between the worlds of being Indian and being American. As simple as this sounds, it causes undue tension for her, especially when her parents set her up with Karsh, who they feel is a “suitable boy”, who she spurns, but later repudiates when her best friend, who is Caucasian, suddenly falls for him. Dimple, like the teens discussed in Maira’s paper, deals with the views of her parents, her friends as well as the views of American society at large. Her willingness to force herself into stereotypes of either “good”, “trashy”, “normal” and others show how badly she wants to have a sense of belonging, which is what all teens want, in some way shape or form. Maira states that immigrant parents view  “the ancestral culture is “good” and “innocent” whereas the influence of American culture is “bad” and “corrupt”” (38)