Papar

Indian-American Identity

Indian-Americans have been a part of American society since the late 1800s. Currently there are over 1 million Indians living in the U.S. I was born and raised in India. When I was 17, my family and I moved to United States as immigrants. I became U.S. citizen when I was 22 years old and went from being an immigrant to Indian-American. In this paper I’ll talk about what it means to be an Indian, what it means to be an American and what it means to be an Indian-American.

For Indian immigrant communities in the U.S., identity is often a matter of continually holding onto a homeland while figuring out strategic ways to navigate in U.S. Despite having migrated 10, 20 or 30 years ago, the land of their birth will always be their home. This experience makes sense for older immigrant for example, my parents who moved here in there 50s. However, it is vastly different for children of these immigrants who either immigrated earlier in their life or was born in U.S. The stories we tell about what it means to be an Indian are often based in a frozen-in-time memory. Our recollections of India are based on an India of the 1940s and 1950s; culturally, socially and economically. Furthermore, the recollections are highly selective: the positive aspects of certain practices are illuminated and the negative aspects are virtually non-existent, while other practices are marked as completely negative, with positive aspects erased. These memories then get used to define what it means to be Indian and how one then performs authentic Indianness. The question of what is authentic and what is not changes over time.

I, as a child of an immigrant family feel like my identity is about both my Indianness and Americanness as I attempt to navigate being non-white in the U.S. In the U.S., we tend to think of race as binaries: black/white, immigrant/native. These types of dualities leave immigrant groups such as Indian-Americans without a please. As participants in a...