Desi

Who Are They?

In the context of race and ethnicity in the United States, in the popular media as well as in academic journals, the word desi usually refers to the “new second generation,” that is, the children of post-1965 immigrants from the Indian subcontinent. Desi has multiple usages. In a restricted sense, it refers only to people of Indian origin who live in the West. It could also refer to Pakistani people in the West or to anyone of South Asian origin. This broad usage is quite common, especially because the immigrant parents may not identify with a single country (like Bangladesh or India) because they may have been displaced by the act of partition of the subcontinent and before these national identities became distinct ones. A desi necessarily resides in the West. To be more specific, the West is usually the United States or Britain, although arguably, the South Asian continental diaspora anywhere in the world could claim membership of the desi identity.

Why would children of immigrants be referred to as “native” or “belonging to a country”? There is a hint of irony in the term and perhaps a touch of humor, too, because the term might be viewed two ways. In one sense, the children of immigrants are not always accepted as full citizens in their new country; even when political citizenship is granted, full cultural citizenship often lags behind. So they may enjoy calling themselves “of the land” where their parents were foreigners until recently. The term could also mean belonging to the subcontinent the parents have left behind, that is, desi of the original desh. The parents may have left the subcontinent, but the subcontinent lives on in them through cultural identification. Generally, however, desis in the United States do not identify with the subcontinent to the extent their parents do.

Not surprisingly, there are comic linguistic twists to desi—the acronym ABCD is quite popular and irreverently stands for “American Born Confused Desi.” One desi may tease another about “being on desi time,” presumably referring to a shared comic stereotype of the Indian/South Asian as not punctual.

[Page 383]A small body of research suggests that women tend to identify more as desis than men do. This may have to do with the different media portrayals of South Asian men and women, different levels of symbolic status of the South Asian boy or girl identity among peers, and a gendered process of migration by which women maintain stronger cultural roots in the new country.

Sociological or anthropological research has not yet explored a range of issues: How is this identity constructed? How do people identify with it? Is the desi identity in opposition to any other competing identity? What do people who claim this identity share with each other? Are they self-identified or identified by a community of people as desis? Or do their peers have a strong role in identifying them?

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