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‘Desi’

There’s been a lively discussion happening with a friend that started when I said the word ‘desi’ one day. You can track some of it here and, more recently, here.

My stance is that the d-word indicates a shared experience, and is particular to the diaspora. It doesn’t indicate a homogeneity of people coming out of the subcontinent, nor some essential trait, but of something that binds the people together. Whether it be racism, classism, or more (seemingly) positive things like cultural similarities, food, or the commonalities that emerge out of hours of desi satellite TV watching, there are things that bind us, whether we want to smash other so-called desis to bits and pieces or not.

There are a ton of organizations that rely on this term, or rather what this term is rooted in, to do their work. Immediately, DRUM (Desis Rising Up and Moving) in NYC, ASATA (Alliance of South Asians Taking Action) and FOSA (Forum of South Asians) in the Bay Area, and SAN (South Asian Network) in LA come to mind. They work in different segments - with young people, with working class folks, with yuppies, with immigrants, etc. etc. But there is something shared, that desis have to deal with issues such as immigration, racism, classism and more importantly, have enough commonalities which can serve as the grounding point for organizing to change the norms that structure peoples’ experiences.

So I want to know - what do you all think? What does ‘desi’ mean to you?

Posted by Vivek on Sunday, June 18th, 2006 at 12:28 pm.

7 Responses to “‘Desi’”

I’ll concede that you probably know a lot more about this than I do, because my limited exposure to Desis has been confined mostly to the Sikh community in Houston. You have organized around this issue and sought a diversity of perspectives and probably have a much better grasp of the issue.

And I’ll also concede that the term “Desi” is most meaningful in a relative context–i.e. in the presence of, or in reference to non-Desis.

Among Desis, the differences emerge, and the term requires regional or religious modifiers. “What kind of Desi are you?”

However, your willingness to overlook historical and cultural differences to unite disparate peoples under a general banner belies your privilige in coming from the dominant majority subgroup. And many people in the minority groups believe in the existence of a real, insidious conspiracy to rob them of their cultural identities–the “Hindostan” is for Hindus movement.

But you and I? In response to the last sentence of your comment on my blog, I think this conversation we are having speaks more to our American-ness than our Indian-ness. You and I share a common interest and background in social justice movements–we speak the same language, by which I mean that we can throw around words like “privilige” without needing to define them. The fact that we are middle-class, first-generation American social-justice activists allows us to have this conversation more than the fact that our parents came from the same country. Like I wrote on my blog, I was able to carry on a conversation on this same topic just the other day with a West Indian (of mixed African creole descent) woman…

Left by Harbeer Sandhu on June 18th, 2006

I forgot to tell you about the Gujrati girl from my seventh grade life-science class. One of our classmates, at one point, referred to our “Indian” commonality, to which she responded, “We’re not the same! My people HATE his people.”

Now, is it a testament to our shared Desi heritage or our American-ness that she and I ended up dating for eleven months, four years later? (She later converted from an apathetic, default Hinduism to a fervent Christianity and married an African-American.)

Left by Harbeer Sandhu on June 18th, 2006

I agree that my membership in the dominant Hindu, North Indian, merchant caste, mid-upper class subgroup affords me a distinct privilege that makes things a bit easy for me, including, up until now, glossing over the differences within those from the subcontinent.

I grew up in a community that, from time to time, savored the occasional Muslim-baiting. A family friend actively despises Muslims, to the point that a comment must be made if Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s CD ends up on the CD changer, something to the effect of ‘oops.’

No doubt, the differences are critical and important. That there are different independence movements within South Asia and the fact that there was bloodshed during Partition only begins to dive into those critical differences. This also speaks of, in my opinion, the active (not insidious) anti-Muslim, anti-Sikh, anti-minority attitude that is so prevalent in India, especially in the community I come from.

And I don’t think there is an essential ‘desi’ identity that serves as the binding point for desis. I’ve known several folks that refuse to be called ‘desi’ or ‘South Asian’ whatever because they think the term is exactly what you were talking about - an extension of the creation of the ‘Hindustan’ you were talking about.

But even so, I still think that the term is useful. Its the same problem with the term ‘people of color’ - it demarcates people who have to deal with racism. But it such a HUGE category that it is on the verge of ridiculous label-making. I always think of what happened in LA when there was an uprising in 1992 that was due partly to Korean-Black tensions. They’re both communities of color, but the differences are huge. It is used almost universally, though, in organizing circles, to denote those affected by racism. The real stuff there, as well as those defined as ‘desi,’ is to work it out. In the meanwhile, the term will be used, partly in hopes of a future where those differences are no longer irreconcilable.

If neither of us had a vested interest in the creation of the word ‘desi,’ we probably wouldn’t be spending our blogging time on this subject. I think its a combination of where we come from as well as our interest in social justice. I don’t think we can pin it down so easy.

Left by Vivek on June 18th, 2006

I hella feel ya bro. (Sorry, West Coast-speak creeping into the bones.)

Of course it’s a useful term–I’m just being devil’s advocate.

What do you think of the Wal -Mart bit in my response to your comment on my blog?

Left by Harbeer Sandhu on June 23rd, 2006

I will go along with the school of thought that makes ‘desi’ a social construct, not that any term we use to describe a collective identity isn’t. But I wanted to go further and say I also think it is used primarily as a form of othering. Though I agree that ‘desis’ have common experiences, and form collective identities, I don’t believe the converse is true. As in, I think that people in ‘the diaspora’ have things in common, and that is what allows the term ‘desi,’ and your discussion with Harbeer, to exist. The problem is, though, I think the terms ‘diaspora’ and ‘desi’ are used interchangeably when maybe they shouldn’t be. I might be a young’n at 20 to even talk like I know, but I feel that the term ‘desi’ is always used to describe someone who is acceptable to other ‘desis,’ hence, the othering that follows suit. Calling myself ‘desi’ is not even a trophy to show for the rites of passage through inequality that I, like many in the community, struggled through to succeed.

I read a crazy article once on the role mythico-history has to play in ‘othering’ by Lisa Malkki. I think that the construct ‘desi’ implies a sort of mythico-history, some arbitrary commonality that unites all ‘desis,’ on the basis of heritage, race and immigration experience. Having been brought up in the US on Hindu-influenced family values imported from Bangalore and Bombay, I don’t have the same diasporic experience as one of my peers who has been brought up on values which are influenced by other religions, caste politics, class politics, (regular) politics, language community, and so on. I have a hard time believing that my ‘desi’ is your ‘desi.’ I also feel that being called ‘desi’ and calling someone else ‘desi’ devalues any struggles and experiences that are not common between two people. This is why I feel that ‘desi’ homogenizes and, in convoluted, anthropological terms, inflicts a certain ‘oppressive violence’ on a person trying to form an identity. But then again it all depends on how one looks at it because if Benedict Anderson’s theory on unbound serialities was applied here, you are absolutely correct in saying that the term ‘desi’ is an unrefined collective identity, a form of crude reference.

But aside from all of my angst against the ‘desi’ identity, I admit there may be a social need for South Asians to have a form of self-reference. It serves as another type of qualification to show that the ‘desi’ community has arrived and is burgeoning in more ways than one in America (or whichever country). Considering South Asians are not exactly indigenous to any place other than South Asia, we need a culturally relevant way to address ourselves, and simultaneously qualify ourselves with. So, sure, ‘desi’ is a necessary evil and a way to associate. Personally, I’d rather stay away from such dangerous politics as cultural exclusion and categorization and call myself a hyphenated American.

Left by Aditi on June 30th, 2006

How about Desi-American?  Or even American-Desi?  Oh wait, thats similar to a really crappy movie.  That\’ll be the subject of another blog post - the stunning diversity of bad films about South Asians in the U.S.

Left by Vivek on June 30th, 2006

hello,

First off, great blog!

A few years ago I tried to start up an organization of sorts for progressive South Asian youth, and the hardest question to resolve was the name - while some people liked and were comfortable with the term ‘Desi,’ others decried it, saying that the term only applied to North Indian and Pakistani Hindi/Urdu speakers.

My family is from Tamil Nadu in southern India, and when I asked my mother about the term (which I hadn’t really encountered in a big way until my third year of college), she confirmed that this was how she thought of the term ‘Desi.’

That said, I think there is a strategic value to using the term ‘Desi,’ but I think that, just like the term ‘South Asian,’ people throw it around a lot in an attempt to be as inclusive as possible, but most of the time end up being Indo-centric anyway.

Left by another vivek on August 31st, 2006

Something to say?