My Perceptions:
Growing up with a North Indian father and South Indian mother, my experience as a second-generation Indian American has highlighted the diversity of Indian culture. I grew up surrounded by multiple Indian languages, namely Tamil and Hindi. I ate North Indian foods such as naan, as well as specialties from South India, such as dosa and idli. I was raised Hindu, but my parents freely shared stories about their friends from various religious traditions. Throughout my childhood, I came to view my personal experiences as merely a fraction of a bigger and richer culture.
I was then taken aback when only certain parts of this rich and diverse culture were viewed as the representation of all Indian culture. For most people I encountered, if they did not think that “Indian” was a language, they had only heard of Hindi and were oblivious to other Indian languages. When discussing Indian food, only North Indian dishes made the cut for conversation. In fact, through my own experience of eating at Indian restaurants, I have encountered an overrepresentation of North Indian food and have had to search at length to find South Indian restaurants, or even restaurants with cuisines from other parts of India.
This one-track view of Indian culture troubles me as it hides the diversity of food, language, religion, and many other cultural aspects of India. This is not only inaccurate but also harmful — it sets a narrow and unrealistic definition of what being Indian or Indian-American means. In this piece I will highlight some of the areas of diversity in Indian culture with the hope of broadening the narrow scope that has persisted thus far. Before I begin, I wish to stress that this article is by no means a complete account of Indian culture, but rather it is intended as a stepping stone to pique the reader’s curiosity. I further wish to clarify that I can only offer my perspective on this topic and encourage the reader to listen to perspectives from other members of the Indian-American community to better understand Indian-American culture.
Some Background:
India itself is made up of 28 different states and 8 territories, each with its own culture. When researchers surveyed Indian-Americans in 2020, they found that respondents identified with a wide variety of states across India.
Figure 1: A chart from the Carnegie Endowment for Peace’s 2020 survey of Social Realities for Indian Americans, which shows the geographic spread of where Indian-Americans trace their roots.
According to their survey, 14% of respondents picked Gujarat as their state of origin, 12% Maharashtra, 10% Andhra Pradesh, 9% Tamil Nadu, 9% Delhi, 8% Punjab, and 7% Kerala, with the rest choosing either another region altogether, or even multiple regions. While this data shows that there are certainly parts of India that are more widely represented in the Indian-American community, it also shows that there is indeed a great diversity of identities within the community. In the rest of this article, I will discuss some of the ways that this diversity manifests itself.
Language
Figure 2: A graph from the Carnegie Endowment for Peace’s 2020 survey of Social Realities for Indian Americans, which displays the distribution of languages spoken by Indian-Americans.
As I mentioned earlier, most people I encounter associate Hindi with Indian languages. However, Hindi is only one language among many spoken in India. A 2011 study found that only 41% of Indians spoke Hindi as their first language. As shown by the table above, not even 1 out of 5 Indian Americans consider Hindi to be their first language. For readers who have only heard of Hindi before, these numbers might be surprising to you, as they demonstrate that the most well-known Indian language is not spoken by a majority of Indians and Indian-Americans. This begs the question — where does this linguistic diversity come from? The answer lies in India’s regions.
Each region of India has its own local language, and while Hindi has been adopted as the national lingua franca, it originated from the north of India, near Delhi. Towards the east of India, one will hear Bengali more often which, as the name suggests, is spoken primarily in Bengal. To the south, predominant languages include Telugu and Tamil. Unlike Hindi, which belongs to the Indo-Aryan language group, Tamil and Telugu are both Dravidian languages, further highlighting the linguistic diversity of India. In the western part of the country, Marathi, originating from the state of Maharashtra, is the major language.
This small list of languages is just the beginning and shows that many languages are represented amongst the Indian-American community. Linguistically, Indian culture is not monolithic.
Religion
Figure 3: A graph from the Carnegie Endowment for Peace’s 2020 survey of Social Realities for Indian Americans, which displays the spread of religion amongst Indian-Americans.
When it comes to religion, most non-Indians that I have encountered tend to associate Hinduism with India. While it is certainly true that Hinduism is widespread within Indian and Indian American communities, with 78.9% and 54% of each group respectively identifying as Hindu, there are several religious traditions that originated in India.
For instance, Sikhism, the fifth most popular religion in the world, originated in Punjab. Jainism, one of the world’s oldest religions, originated during the time of the Indus Valley civilization, which existed from 2500 - 1700 BCE. Furthermore, Buddhism was founded almost 2500 years ago by Siddhartha Gautama in India. In addition to these religions, many in India are Muslim or Christian, India’s second and third most popular religions respectively.
As seen in the graph above, these religions, and more, are represented throughout the Indian American community. Highlighting this diversity is especially important today as there has been a concerted effort by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India to limit the religious definition of what it means to be Indian. This has included an onslaught of Islamophobic rhetoric as well as the false notion that Hinduism is the only religion an Indian can have. When it comes to religious intolerance within the Indian-American community, a significant number (19%) of Indian Americans say that their experiences of religious discrimination have come from other Indian Americans, suggesting that harmful BJP rhetoric has immediate consequences in America as well as in India. It is therefore becoming increasingly important that religious diversity within the Indian American community is recognized in order to reject bigotry and accept all members of the community, regardless of their faith.
Food
Truth be told, countless books could be written on the variety of Indian dishes, but I will discuss a small sampling of this diversity to provide, in a sense, the appetizer for the main course. Each of the different regions in India has different dishes based on which ingredients grow in the area. For the sake of brevity, I will look at some of the culinary highlights from the four quadrants of India.
Figure 4: Typical North Indian curry (Source: FranchiseIndia)
Let’s start with North India. North India consists of several states and territories, such as Uttar Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, and Punjab. Some of the cuisine highlights include thick and creamy curries and flatbreads such as roti and naan. In my experience, North Indian food is the subset of Indian cuisine that most non-Indians are familiar with, yet it is only the tip of the iceberg.
Figure 5: Some traditional South Indian dishes, including dosa and idli. (Source: The Vegan Review).
When looking to South India in regions such as Tamil Nadu and Kerala, one will find the extensive use of lentils and rice in cooking. Some examples include idli, a steamed white rice cake, or dosa, a thin savory pancake whose batter is made from cream of rice and lentils, both of which are pictured above. Another commonly used ingredient is coconut, often found in chutneys.
Figure 6: Rasgulla, an East Indian dessert (Source: AwesomeCuisine)
In East India, a region which consists of states such as Odisha and West Bengal, one will find an eclectic mix of food. Fish figures into a lot of East Indian dishes due to the region’s proximity to the coast. Additionally, East Indian cuisine draws influence from China and Mongolia, with whom East India has had numerous cultural interactions over the centuries. One will also find a lot of sweets in East Indian cooking, including rasgulla, pictured above.
Figure 7: West Indian thaali (Source: istockphoto.com/mukesh-kumar)
Finally, there is West India, which consists of several states including Gujarat and Rajasthan. This is yet another region of the country that uses a lot of fish in its food. Some West Indian dishes, including vindaloo, have Portuguese influence. One staple of West India, specifically of Gujarat, is the thaali pictured above. This is a large dish made up of several smaller portions which include curries and sweets.
Conclusion
As you can see, there is much more to Indian culture than initially perceived, and my article is just the beginning. There are many more areas to be discussed and much more elaboration to come on the presented topics. At the very least I hope this article, in addition to inspiring curiosity about Indian culture, will make it clear that Indian culture is not monolithic. Moreover, I hope it will drive home the point that it is important to recognize the diversity within cultures. Not only is something diverse much more exciting than a monolith, but it also serves an important purpose in increasing inclusivity. When a culture is reduced to a monolith, those within that culture who do not conform to said monolith can feel isolated. Only by dismantling such a monolith can we help create a more inclusive world.
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