No Good Words: Linguistic Indianness

And frankly, who gets to be asian, anyway?

Americans, particularly those of the coasts, have had to contend with the notion for a surprisingly brief historical minute. The word Indian has held an uncomfortable spot in the American English lexicon as the Indian diaspora has begun development in the United States. Indians, particularly Indian Sikh populations, have had small presence in the United States since the 19th century. However, it was not until the Immigration and Nationality act of 1965, and most substantially after the 1990s, that Indians – from India and other diasporic communities in the Anglophone, Caribbean and Africa – would find substantial foothold as an immigrant population in the United States.

This isn’t new, of course; this is simply the newest chapter in a fascinating game of colonial telephone. Asian (yes, all Asians), Middle Eastern and North African populations have all, in some way, found themselves under-described by terms in the Western lingua franca. The prime commonality between these vast, inconceivably distinct and diverse geographic swaths is a quite unfriendly word: once, we were all collectively titled as the Orient, by virtue of colonialism.

To the Indian point, is in this recency specifically that the contestation of the term “Indian” has returned English colonially informed exonyms for Asian communities to popular consideration. This is because the term “Indian”, or “American Indian”, remains the predominant, if historical, general exonym for indigenous populations of the Americas. As a case study, Indians in America have few terms to describe themselves without added remnants of colonial baggage. Asian, for example, is typically only ascribed to East Asian communities in the United States. Where the term is often used in the United Kingdom and Canada to describe South Asian populations due to their prominence as a diasporic community. Conversely, East Asian immigration defines the predominant complexion of Asian diasporic community in the United States.

Indian is also a term with a quite storied history beyond its use in South Asians. “India” and “Indies” share a common root – from the Indus River, transliterated from the Sanskrit word Sindhu. At the time of the term’s initial use, the Indus River basin constituted what the Ancient Greeks considered the far Easterly border of the world. This places both words beyond simple geographic or ethnic exonym. As we can see in later adaptations of terms describing Asian geography and diaspora, that in a Eurocentric model of the world, the border between “East” and “West” is both ephemeral and philosophical.

It's a lexicon based, foundationally, in a perceived foreignness of kind. It is also a marker of colonial subjugation, to some degree – this is best seen in the distinction of the East Indies and West Indies. The East Indies is a broad term for the Early Modern “Orient”, though it is primarily used to refer to Indochinese trade routes in the Indian ocean as mapped by Portuguese traders and colonialists. The West Indies, conversely, are named not for shared geography or ethnicity, but shared Portuguese and Spanish colonial presence in the Caribbean and Antilles.

This leaves us with the somewhat clunky, if simple solution of defining Asians simply by their geographic relationship to one another. For many, this does work; returning to the Indian population, using South Asian is often a fair descriptor, as it includes all peoples of the Indian Subcontinent. If we use this term to describe some ephemeral cultural or geographic linkage, at least, a multitude of other nationalities – Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Nepali, Sri Lankan, Bhutanese and Maldivians – can be included in conversation without pause. This is of course not without problem, but there is often time and place for this type of description, in the same way we call upon the terms Western, Northern and Eastern European. This is a big step up from the proximal vocabulary of “Near East” and “Far East”, at least.

However, in the case of diasporic communities, there is a better ethnic signifier born from within the community. Desi, which is a word popularly used as an equivalent for Non Resident Indians, or NRIs, with both describing the diasporic populations of the Indian subcontinent. It is a word with widespread use and equivalent in many Indian languages, derived from a common Sanskrit word equivalent to “country”, in this case “countryman”. Though not a descriptor for all Indian populations, in this case it is the most appropriate endonym for the immigrant diasporic population, and one of the few to breach the American lexicon to a limited degree. The only main problem with these final two terms, of course, is the question of whether it’s at all “worth it” to describe ourselves through these generalized national or geographic indicators, when our ethnicities (in this case very distinct from Indian nationality, though in other countries within the subcontinent this problem is less pronounced) are the more accurate descriptor for our personal and cultural heritage.

In short, even with developing Indian populations in the United States, there is no perfect answer. This case study is simply one of the more exaggerated in the poor taxonomic descriptors of Asian populations in English and other historic imperial lingua franca. In an era of increasingly popularized discourse surrounding how we consider popular language use and colonial history, perhaps the future holds revision, or the incorporation of non-English loanwords to solve the problem of colonial exonyms.

Take me back home!

Oh, oops, nothing here.