Category Crisis: South Asian Americans and Questions of Race and Ethnicity

Susan Koshy

Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, Volume 7, Number 3, Winter 1998, pp. 285-320 (Article) Published by University of Toronto Press DOI: 10.1353/dsp.1998.0013

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dsp/summary/v007/7.3.koshy.html

Access provided by Rutgers University (5 Jan 2014 15:00 GMT)

Diaspora 7:3 1998

Category Crisis: South Asian

Americans and Questions of

Race and Ethnicity1

Susan Koshy

University of California, Santa Barbara The identity of South Asians in the United States has proved to be problematic, both for the self-identification of the group and for the identifying institutions and popular perceptions of the host society. As a result, a certain exceptionalism (commonly indexed as ambiguity) has come to attach itself to the historiography of South Asian

American racial formation.2 This exceptionalism, in turn, has

formed the ground for two competing constructions of South Asian American racial identity that wield significant influence today. One view, represented by some of the major immigrant organizations and reproduced by many middle-class immigrants, stresses ethnicity and class and denies or mitigates the historical salience of race for South Asians in the United States. This position emphasizes the anomalous status of South Asian Americans among racial minorities and embraces the rhetoric of a color-blind meritocracy. The second position, associated mainly with scholars and students in the humanities and social sciences and with some activists, treats South Asian color consciousness as equivalent to white racism and criticizes the immigrant community for denying its own blackness. These critics advocate that South Asian Americans politicize their identity, like their diasporic counterparts in Britain, by forming coalitions with other people of color. Ironically, both positions tend to construct racial identification as a choice, inadvertently reproducing the American ideology of self-making and possibility in discussing one of the social arenas where it has been least applicable. In rethinking the question of South Asian American identity, I focus, instead, on the tension between assignation and assertion that sociologists suggest shapes racial identity, the negotiation between the identity categories immigrants bring with them and

those to which they are assigned (Cornell and Hartmann 8O).3

the years, and that what it means to be black or white in Britain

Moreover, it is crucial to keep in mind that race is not a transhistorical category, that the meaning of whiteness has shifted over is quite distinct from what it means to be black or white in the
United States. On the one hand, I will argue that the historical and

Diaspora 7:3 1998

contemporary situation of South Asians in the United States indi-

cates that they have been ineluctably racialized and that the em-

brace of color-blindness amounts to assuming a public stance of

"don't ask, don't tell" on matters of race that leaves no avenue for

redress. On the other hand, despite the radical objectives of the progressive strategy, I will argue that it is politically problematic
for South Asians to claim blackness in the United States (unlike in African Americans requires that the distinction between black and
other racial identities be maintained.

Britain), since the history of slavery and the structural position of Despite the divergence in their goals and strategies, both

political positions are based on a common historical narrative of

South Asian American emergence. According to this narrative, South Asians were unique among nonwhite groups in seeking citizenship as whites in the early part of the century. Subsequently, in the 1923 United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind Supreme Court case, they were ruled nonwhite and hence ineligible for naturalization.
It is commonly asserted that after initial classification in the

Census in 1930 and 1940 as "Hindus," they were categorized from

1950-1970 as "Other'VWhite"; it was only finally in 1980, in order

to secure the benefits of affirmative action programs, that they lobbied for and won inclusion in the category "Asian American." This is the commonly accepted and most widely disseminated narrative of the racial history of South Asians in the United States, and it has assumed the status of common knowledge among scholars and non-academics alike. Within this narrative, the defining characteristic of South Asian American racial formation in the past
and present has been their identification as whites. White-idenjudice and their class position.

tification was secured in the past through their putative racial genealogy as Aryans and in the present through their color preTo deconstruct the established narrative of South Asian

American exceptionalism, I will show that, from the time of their first appearance in the Census in 1910, South Asians have never

been classified as "White," except once in 1970. On the contrary, the

Census Bureau has consistently identified them as "Other Non-

white," "Hindu," or "Asiatic Indian"; hence, in lobbying for inclusion as Asian Americans, they were not claiming a new identity, but reclaiming an old one as Americans of Asian origin. To further substantiate my argument, I will analyze the early naturalization
cases, which are commonly used as evidence of South Asian
whiteness in the United States. I will demonstrate that there was

nothing exceptional about the South Asian attempts at naturalization as whites, since this was the strategy adopted by all other immigrant groups (Chinese, Filipino, Hawai'ian, Japanese,
Burmese, etc.).

South Asian Americans, Race, and Ethnicity Since Aryan ancestry formed the basis ofthe South Asian claim to
whiteness in the naturalization cases, I offer a brief overview of the

basis of this claim and its contemporary significance. In addition, I examine the issue of the color consciousness of South Asians, which is often advanced as an explanation for their white-identification. After examining the historical narrative of South Asian American exceptionalism, I will consider South Asian Americans' contemporary position within racial hierarchies. The model minority position has increasingly come to define the racial identity of a significant number of South Asian Americans; it depends on the intermediary location of a group between black and white and holds

a particularly powerful appeal for immigrant groups.4 In order to

highlight the features of South Asian racialization in the United States and the problems of appropriating blackness in this context, I provide a brief history of the contrasting politicization of South Asians in Britain. Their early classification in Britain as "Coloured"/"Black" offers a contrasting categorization of the same group and reveals both the contingency of racial categories and their embeddedness in particular histories of colonization and immigration. In concluding, I take up the Louise Woodward au pair case, since the public response to this case highlights the contrasting racial representations of South Asians in Britain and in the
United States. It also marks the limitations of middle-class South

Asian American strategies to claim an identity unmarked by race. The Woodward case dramatizes the ways in which, despite the rhetoric of the American dream, class does not provide access to the immunities and privileges of whiteness for racial minorities; instead, in accordance with the peculiar logic of the model minority prototype, class position is used at once to deny recourse to racial explanations and to generate resentments of extraordinary privileges unavailable to the "average" citizen. The analysis of aspects of pre- and post-1965 South Asian American identity is an attempt to reopen the debate on the complexities and contradictions of South Asian American racial positioning. Prevailing constructions of South Asian American racial identity tend to simplify the complex hierarchies of color, class, and caste immigrants bring with them from their homeland by collapsing it with the historical patterns of race in the host country. Moreover, the study of South Asian Americans is further complicated by the disciplinary constraints of an emerging field: the archive is only just beginning to be developed; a significant amount of the research so far has been produced by literary scholars, but much empirical work in anthropology, sociology, and history remains to be done on
South Asian American racial identification; and, finally, scholars

working on this subject also face the challenge of working across disciplinary boundaries in unfamiliar fields. Thus, it is vital to
287

Diaspora 7:3 1998

exercise care in formulating generalizations, especially since the group is very diverse and has a disjunct history of immigration to the United States. There are striking differences between the early
and later immigrants, and a continuous narrative of white-identifi-

cation cannot accommodate either the diversity South Asians bring with them from their homelands or the caste, gender, generation, and class differences that shape their racial positioning in the United States. The study of the racial identification of this group is
an urgent one, since the second generation of post-1965 immigrants is just coming of age and has begun to shape a political identity more actively focused on the US context; for them, even more crucially than for their predecessors, the strategies of disavowal of

racial identity or the claiming of blackness are inadequate to

engage the transformed racial dynamics of the post-civil rights era.

Much of the scholarship so far has focused on the first generation

and left unexplored the significant differences between the first and second generations in terms of their racialization; or, it has dealt with second-generation identity through the analysis of particular

subcultures.5 It seems likely, though, that the second generation

will confront the issue of racial identity and bring it to greater resolution, since the strategies of deferral used by the first generation, whether in defining themselves as "postcolonials," as "global citizens," or as "overseas South Asians," are, for the second generation, inadequate to engage the daily realities of the country where they were born and live. South Asian Claims to Citizenship in the Early
Naturalization Cases

Sucheta Mazumdar's frequently cited essay "Race and Racism:

South Asians in the United States" offers the definitive inter-

pretation of Asian Indian claims to citizenship in the early

naturalization cases from 1900 to 1923. Mazumdar contends that the claims to whiteness in the naturalization cases reflect the racist

attitudes of South Asians, many of whom (particularly those of the upper castes), subscribed to theories of their racial genealogy as Aryans. Speaking of the prevalence of the myth of Aryan origins among many South Asians then and now, she states, "they are themselves acutely color-conscious; they see shades of brown in skin color which to any casual observer is black" (25). The purpose of her essay is to explicate "this racialism among a people who are black, but have sought to prove over and over again that they are white" (25, emphasis added). What is immediately apparent in these statements is the assumption that racial categories are natural and transhistorical Indians look black and therefore they are black; ironically, these
288

South Asian Americans, Race, and Ethnicity assertions run counter to one of the grounding premises of the antiracist position that the article asserts. As Mazumdar herself explains, the anthropological project of defining racial groups in terms of fixed physical characteristics proved an impossible one, and it has been almost completely discredited in the present. Moreover, contrary to Mazumdar's claims, the divergent responses of Americans to the appearance of South Asians seem to suggest that they did not always "look black" to outsiders. For instance, Karen
Leonard notes that court clerks who had to fill in the blank on

"race" on the marriage licenses of early Punjabi immigrants "sometimes wrote 'brown,' sometimes 'black,' and sometimes 'white,'

depending on the applicants' skin coloring and the county" (68, emphasis added). Leonard highlights not only the diversity in responses among the clerks, but also the significance of political factors such as the particular region where the application was sought. Furthermore, in the 1909 case of Abdullah Dolla, the only racial prerequisite case involving a South Asian in which the judge relied on ocular proof as a determining test of whiteness, the court granted his petition. When Dolla, an Afghan born in Calcutta, applied for US citizenship, the government argued that he was a
native of India and therefore nonwhite. Dolla contended that he

could produce a white doctor who would testify that he was of "pure Caucasian blood," that he was accepted as a white in Savannah, Georgia, and that he even had a burial plot in Savannah's whitesonly cemetery. The judge scrutinized Dolla carefully, finally asking him to pull up the sleeves of his shirt. Dolla's pale forearms convinced the judge to grant his petition (Jensen 250). What, then, does it mean to say that South Asians are black? What Mazumdar fails to consider is that, in the US, the meaning of blackness has been very precisely codified in law and not left to the ocular impressions of casual observers. Cheryl Harris explains that the infamous "one-drop rule" even anticipated the possibility
that some blacks did not look black, and that it was devised as a

way to keep them in their place (1740). As numerous examples indicate, the issue of how a particular group "looks" is not easily
settled; at the least, it cannot be considered outside a specific

context, or apart from the question of whose gaze provides the reference. For instance, Dan Caldwell has described the "Negroization" of early Chinese immigrants to the US, who were frequently
identified with native Americans and blacks (123). Ronald Takaki

explains that "the Chinese migrants found that racial qualities previously assigned to blacks quickly became 'Chinese' characteristics.... White workers referred to the Chinese as 'nagurs,' and a magazine cartoon depicted the Chinese as a bloodsucking vampire with slanted eyes, a pigtail, dark skin, and thick lips. Like blacks,
the Chinese were described as heathen, morally inferior, savage,

Diaspora 7:3 1998 childlike, and lustful." The comparisons to blacks were both moral and physical: "Chinese women were condemned as 'a depraved class' and their depravity was associated with their almost Africanlike physical appearance," which was seen as being "but a slight removal from the African race" (Iron 219). Can one then resolve the question of the racial identity of South Asians, as Mazumdar does, by concluding that since most of them do not look white (by the criteria that have come to define whiteness in the contemporary US), they are black? Moreover, to recover intentionality from the claims advanced in a court of law overlooks altogether the way in which the law frames the terms of argument. Noting that the nearly seventy Asian Indians who gained citizenship did so by proving they were members of the Aryan race and therefore "white," Mazumdar contends that what concerns us here is the premise on which the struggle for citizenship was based. South Asians saw themselves as "Aryan" and, therefore, as "Caucasian" and "white" despite the fact that plenty of evidence already existed to the contrary. This self-perception prevented the immigrants from making
common cause with other Asians who were barred from citi-

zenship on grounds of racesuch as in the Ozawa case. Instead of challenging racism, the South Asian struggle became an individualized and personalized mission to prove that he was of "pure-blood Aryan stock." Though victimized by white racism, which denied them citizenship, the South Asian response was equally racist. (30) This conclusion so completely ignores the legal and historical
framework of these cases that, by a profound irony, the racism of the law comes to be constructed as the racism of the appellants.

However, a historical analysis of whiteness opens up a completely different perspective on the early naturalization cases. Congress had established racial prerequisites for naturalization through the passage of the Naturalization Law of 1790, which it amended after the Civil War, restricting naturalization to "free white persons" and "aliens of African nativity or persons of African descent." Soon after, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act explicitly denied naturalization to the Chinese. For all other applicants, the geographical indeterminacy of whiteness opened up the possibility of citizenship. In a superb study, White by Law: The Legal Construction ofRace, Ian Haney Lpez analyzes the "prerequisite cases"

for naturalization that were argued from 1878 to 19526 in state and
federal courts, including the two, Ozawa and Thind, that reached

the Supreme Court. According to Lpez, while most naturalization decisions did not involve formal court proceedings, fifty-two cases
290

South Asian Americans, Race, and Ethnicity construing the racial prerequisite to citizenship reached the courts
and worked in shaping the legal definition of whiteness over this period. The petitioners for citizenship came from various countries:

Syria, Burma, the Philippines, Hawai'i, India, Mexico, China, and Japan; each, with one exception, sought naturalization by trying to

prove that he was white.7 As the terminology "prerequisite cases"

itself indicates, the cases reached the courts and were defined by their construal of the racial criteria, which were a prerequisite for naturalization. Thus, an emphasis on the racism of litigants in
naturalization cases elides the power of the institutional structures that require the use of racist "truths" as the condition for admissibility into the courtroom and as the framework of address to

the law. The courtroom did not provide a forum to mount an antiracist protest or to foster pan-ethnic coalitions around the racist criteria for naturalization; in fact, the terms of the law worked

explicitly to undermine such possibilities, prompting various litigants to prove their whiteness by declaring their dissimilarity
from other Asian groups or by disavowing their Asianness altogether. However, the arguments offered by various parties in their attempts to prove their whiteness often brought definitions of whiteness and the rationales on which they were based to crisis.

Paradoxically, whiteness was brought to crisis not by challenges to its legitimacy as a prerequisite to citizenship, but by the attempts of
diverse appellants to be included within it.

Lpez notes the striking fact that in the fifty-two prerequisite cases, all but one petitioner sought to claim citizenship by proving
his whiteness, although, after 1870, naturalization could also be

claimed by those who were black.8 Why? Preempting the "obvious"

but tautological response that it was because there were few "black" immigrants at this time, Lpez inserts the crucial reminder that the various citizenship claimants did not fit neatly into either the white or the black category within the classification schema ofthat time. He adds, "some immigrant groups, for example the Chinese, were initially characterized as Black, suggesting that for some, attempting to naturalize as a 'white person' was the more difficult route" (51). In explaining the preponderance of white person cases, he refers to the indeterminacy of the legal category of white person (lacking geographical specificity) as compared to the clarity of the definition of a black person as one of African nativity, or African
descent. He concludes,

The existence of more firmly established racial definitions of who was Black may also have obviated the need for new litigation. The legal definition of Blacks, unlike that of Whites, was already well established at the turn of the century. In addition, however, it seems nearly certain that the social
291

Diaspora 7:3 1998 stigma and harsh discrimination imposed on those with Black status discouraged applicants for citizenship from seeking admission on that basis. Immigrants to the country quickly learn the value of being White rather than Black, and thereby

learn to cast themselves as Whites. (52)

One of the crucial elements in Lopez's analysis that opens up a very different perspective on these cases is the recognition that too literal a reading of such cases may be the product of our own view of the naturalness of racial categories that are current in our time. As such, it serves as a very valuable caution: The lengthy categorical debates in the prerequisite cases seem ridiculous only because we have fully accepted the categories these cases established. Decisions about racial identity are complex; they appear obvious only in retrospect, and then only from a vantage point built upon the assumption that races are fixed transhistorical categories. The extent to which the definitional struggles in these cases seems quaint measures on some level the extent to which we have erroneously accepted their simple conclusions. The truly curious, then, is not the typological sophistry of the courts, but our own certainty regarding the obvious validity of the recently fabricated. (55) Thus, contrary to the view that "the attempt to prove over and over again that they were white" was unique to Asian Indian citizenship petitioners, it is clear that this was the avenue chosen by
all but one of the petitioners in the prerequisite cases. If one

extends Mazumdar's argument that the claim to naturalization as whites was proof of racist attitudes, then one must conclude that other petitionersfor example, the Japanese, Filipinos, Burmese, or Chinesewere also racists. But, as Lpez points out, "like others who directly challenged the legal construction of race, Thind had no choice but to pursue his challenge within the institution, pursuant to the rules, and according to the language that would be used to judge him" (149). In other words, to view the terms of the argument entirely as an active choice on the part of the petitioners is not only misleading but neglects to consider the extent to which legal discourse structures arguments within its domain. Furthermore, the contention that Thind and other Asian Indian

litigants should have made common cause with Ozawa is difficult to substantiate, especially if the framework of that coalition were to have been its anti-racist agenda. The arguments advanced by Ozawa in making his case are as pernicious as Thind's; in addition, they are marked by a fervent assimilationism that is an unambiguous rejection of his Japanese cultural identity. Ozawa, like

South Asian Americans, Race, and Ethnicity Thind, based his petition for citizenship on the claim that he was

white. He argued that although he was of Japanese descent, his skin color was white, whiter, in fact, than that of many of those who were legally recognized as "white." To support his argument, Ozawa adduced the observations of various anthropologists: "in
Japan the uncovered parts of the body are also white"; "the

Japanese are of lighter color than other Eastern Asiatics, not rarely
showing the transparent pink tint which whites assume as their own privilege"; and "in the typical Japanese city of Kyoto, those not exposed to the heat of summer are particularly white-skinned. They

are whiter than the average Italian, Spaniard or Portuguese" (qtd.

in Lpez 81). In all but one of the prerequisite cases, irrespective of the national origin or racial mixture of the petitioners, their effort was to prove their whiteness in the terms recognized by the law. The avenue chosen by the appellants from various parts of the world in proving their whiteness varied according to their national

and putative racial origins. West Asian and South Asian litigants
claimed whiteness by citing their anthropological classification as Aryans; East Asians and other "Mongolian" groups asserted whiteness on the basis of their skin color; mixed-race claimants pointed to varying fractions of whiteness. Forced on a case-by-case basis to articulate the criteria by which whiteness was to be determined, and unable to salvage a rational foundation for the idea of whiteness, the law finally resolved the matter through recourse to a tautology: the 1923 Thind ruling stated that a "white person" was a person "the average well informed white American" knew was white (US v. Thind 211). Viewed within the legal context of these cases, the claim to Aryan origins was part of a maneuver for citizenship, one among the several deployed by the diverse appellants in these cases but the most viable one, within the courtroom, for South Asians. Indians who sought naturalization were newcomers to a country in which only citizenship bestowed the right to own or lease landafter the passage of alien land laws in a number of statesand the right to vote. The whiteness they sought, then, was a political status. If the courts showed some early inconsistency in categorizing South Asians, the Census Bureau, which had the official responsibility for classifying the various groups, was consistent in defining them, from their earliest appearance on its records in 1910, as "non-white Asiatics," except in 1970 (U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population 126). As Table 1 shows, they were categorized in the 1930 and 1940 Census as "Hindus"; as "Other'VAsiatic Indian" in 1950 and as "OtherVHindu" in 1960; as "White" in 1970;
as "Asian Indian" in 1980; and as "Asian Indian" within the category "Asian or Pacific Islander" in 1990. In fact, instructions to

Census enumerators in 1950 specifically state that "persons originating in India should be reported as 'Asiatic Indians'" (U.S.

Diaspora 7:3 1998 Table 1. History of the Classification of Asian Indians by the Census
Bureau

Census YearCensus Classification

1910Other/Non-white Asiatic/Hindu 1920Other/Hindu 1930Hindu 1940Hindu 1950Other/Non-white/Asiatic Indian 1960Other/Non-white/Hindu 1970White 1980Asian Indian 1990Asian or Pacific Islander/Asian Indian

classification into sub-categories is drawn from the instructions to the enumerators and the definitions and explanations of terms published in the Census.

Note: Census classifications are taken from the categories listed on the Census form as responses for the question on race or color; these categories are indicated in boldface type. Census

decided to classify them as "White" in order to deny them minority

status. When this decision was challenged by Asian Indian organizations, they were reclassified as "Asian Indians." This analysis clearly shows that an exceptionalist narrative of white-

Bureau of the Census, "United 1950" 469); and in 1960 the instructions state that "for persons originating in India (except those of European stock), mark 'Other' and specify as 'Hindu'" (U.S. Bureau of the Census, "United 1960" cxiii). Thus it was only once, in 1970, in the aftermath of civil rights legislation, that federal agencies

identification based on the naturalization cases and Census data is flawed.9

Orientalism, Aryan Reincarnations, and South Asian

Color Consciousness

Having reconsidered the naturalization cases that have formed

the basis of the equation of South Asian claims with Aryan identity
and white racism, I will now discuss the source of the South Asian

claim to Aryan ancestry. I will also examine contemporary

manifestations of South Asian color consciousness. I would like to

establish at the outset that I am not offering a defense of South

Asian color consciousness, which is pernicious in its effects, especially in calibrations ofwomen's value in marriage transactions. However, I do question the disproportionate emphasis given to color consciousness in scholarship on South Asian Americans, and the impression created by such work that color is the predominant identifications like caste. As a minority from India, who lived in the country for over twenty-five years, I am keenly aware of the
294

marker of South Asian social identity, obscuring the primacy of

South Asian Americans, Race, and Ethnicity oppressiveness of caste distinctions. In doing the research for this article, I was able to locate only two studies of color consciousness in the subcontinent (Adinarayan, Besant), and even these were

dated; this is noteworthy, since the scholarship on caste, religious,

regional, linguistic, and class politics is voluminous, thus emphasizing their salience. Unlike racial identity in the West, color does not constitute a primary social or political identity in the

subcontinent in the way that caste, religion, language, region,

gender, and class do (although it may be loosely configured within some of these other categories). In the following section, I will provide a brief outline of the emergence of an Aryan race theory. It is beyond the scope of this article to undertake a detailed survey of the many versions of the theory and its numerous proponents, or to catalog the numerous modifications and retractions that have shaped the debates. These theories have undergone substantial revisions over time and in the present have been largely discredited. What follows, then, provides the broad outlines of the emergence of the theory and focuses on the basis of the equation of upper-caste Hindu identity with Aryanness. The theory of an Aryan race grew out of the work of eighteenthcentury Indologists such as William Jones, whose studies of Sanskrit revealed strong affinities between the ancient Indian language and European languages like Latin and Greek. From this linguistic evidence, Jones posited the existence of a common source language. Indo-European or Indo-Aryan, as this source language came to be called, was rapidly transformed, in the work of many Orientalists, from a linguistic to a racial category. Ancient Indian texts became the object of scholarly interest because of what they could reveal about the common ancestors of the Europeans and Indians, the Aryans. In Interpreting Early India, Romila Thapar explains that the idea of an Aryan racial identity was partly derived from misreadings of key Sanskrit words. The Sanskrit word for caste, varna, is etymologically associated with color, which the European translators assumed to apply to skin color. This association was reinforced by references in the ancient Sanskrit text the Rig Veda to the initial division of society into two groups, the aryas and the dasas. The dasas were described as being dark-skinned and thicknosed, from which Indologists inferred that the aryas were their racial antithesis. Modern historians have argued that the reference to color in varna is symbolic and not racial, as each of the four castes is assigned a colorwhite, red, yellow, and black. Moreover, a careful reading of the Sanskrit sources indicates only that the arya is an honored person in society, and several references have been located to aryas of dasa descent (Thapar, Interpreting 4). Even before the revisionary readings of modern historians, the findings
of some Orientalists repudiated the race-language equation. But

Diaspora 7:3 1998 although Orientalists like Max Mller later retracted the initial equation of race and language, the theory of an Aryan race gained widespread acceptance in popular and academic circles of the time. Martin Bernai writes that the fallacious equation of language and race in these theories was a product of the enormous power wielded by concepts of ethnicity and race during the nineteenth century as the vehicle for historical explanation (239). According to the Aryan race theory, the Aryans were a white race, one branch of which had left the original homeland or Urheimat in the Caucasian mountains and wandered into India, where they had conquered a dark-skinned aboriginal people. The Aryans had then evolved the caste system, with its ritual proscriptions against intermarriage and commensality, as a way of preserving the purity of their blood and culture. Indologists like Max Mller held to the view that many of the aboriginal peoples had been successfully assimilated and civilized by their Aryan conquerors and had subsequently been incor-

porated into the upper castes (Trautmann 175-6). Others, like the
proto-Nazi Comte de Gobineau, used the Brahmin example to em-

phasize the virtue of maintaining racial purity and the danger of

degeneration resulting from racial hybridity (35). While racial theorists differed about the relative success of the Aryans or Brahmins in maintaining their racial purity, the genealogy of the

upper-caste Hindu as latter-day Aryan became well-established.

While the Indian Aryan represented one branch of the Aryan race, other branches had left the Urheimat later and spread out in different directions to found the various European civilizations. The
Germans were believed to be the last to have left the homeland and

were therefore the purest of the Aryans, and their language the closest to the source language, which many German Orientalist scholars preferred to call Indo-Germanic (Bemal 227). Aryans everywhere, as whites, were uniquely distinguished by their capacity for civilization or spirituality; lapses from this state were the regrettable result of miscegenation or climatic conditions. The term "Aryan" gained currency as a racial category through the investigations of comparative philologists in the late eighteenth century, and this concern was reworked and elaborated within the context of racial theory and Darwinism. The accretion of racial associations was intricately linked to the justification of imperial domination and the ideological interests of competing European
nationalisms (Bernai 230-6). Over the course of the nineteenth

century, the word gradually acquired its modern connotations of a white master race epitomizing the pinnacle of civilizational achievement. As Enrico de Michaelis notes, during this period, India went from being the cradle of Aryan civilization to being its grave (qtd. in Figueira 6). In 1803, it was possible for Romantic writer and philosopher Friedrich Schlegel to enthuse: "Everything,
296

South Asian Americans, Race, and Ethnicity

absolutely everything, is of Indian origin" (qtd. in Bemal 230). By the end of the century, varieties of evolutionary theory lent credibility to the growing emphasis on the degeneration of the Aryan in the Indian environment. Racial admixture with the aboriginal peoples was cited as a lesson on the necessity of maintaining racial purity. According to Dorothy Figueira, by the twentieth century, for the National Socialists in Germany, the Indian Aryan had become a symbol of the failure of a will to selfdiscipline (Selbstzucht). The party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg denounced Indian Aryans as a "racial disgrace," describing them as "miserable bastards ... [who] in the water of the Ganges seek a cure

for their crippled existence" (qtd. in Figueira 18). Thus, although race could testify to the originary whiteness of Indians, race could
evidence of nineteenth-century historiography.

ness, a fall corroborated by the authority of race science and the What does remain to be explained is what the ideological investments were that produced this figure and raised it to such

equally be invoked to symbolize the fall from whiteness into black-

prominence in Europe and India. Britain and France, which both

had colonial interests in India, were at the vanguard of Orientalist

studies in the eighteenth century. But by the 1760s, the French were forced to yield to British ascendancy in the subcontinent and lost all their holdings there, except Pondicherry. Several decades later, by the early nineteenth century, the British shifted to a fullfledged imperial administration in India. By this time, the Germans superseded both at the forefront of Orientalist philological scholarand increasingly restive population (the Indian uprisings in 1857 were a crucial turning point), the British were much less amenable to the idea of kinship with the natives than the Germans, who had
no colonial involvement in India. Nonetheless, the British were

ship. Concerned with the imperatives of governing a large, alien,

forced to recognize the "scientific" truth of Aryan race theory. Via Darwinism, however, the theme of degeneration could be stressed, reinforcing in turn the civilizing mission of the British in India. Utilitarianism and missionary teachings coincided in emphasizing
the decadent state of Indian culture. During the nineteenth century,

the Indian Aryan was to become a progressively darker figure in

the British imagination.

The theory of the Aryan origins of Indian civilization has now been discredited in scholarship. The Indo-Aryans are once again

considered a linguistic rather than a racial group, whose culture spread not through conquest but gradually, through contact with other indigenous people (Thapar, Interpreting 9-13). But although

the myth of the Aryan origins of upper-caste Hindus has been discarded in scholarship, it has nonetheless been periodically resurrected to serve widely divergent political agendas in modern
297

Diaspora 7:3 1998

particularly those in the US and Canada.

Muslims, Christians, and other minorities, who are defined as "foreign" elements, the products of colonial conversions. This movement has received strong support from diasporic Indians,

Indiato justify class and caste domination, to support Hindu modem India. In recent years, Hindutva or right-wing Hindu nationalist ideologies have invoked theories of an Aryan identity to support a claim to the identification of Indian civilization with Hindu religion and culture and to promote violence against

revivalism, and, conversely, to drive anti-Brahmin movements in

resistance through the formation of E.V. Ramasami Naicker's Dravidian movement in the 1940s. The idea of a Dravidian inam10

Dravidian dichotomy became the rallying point of lower-caste

By contrast, in South India, the Orientalist notion of an Aryan-

plains, the idea of a Dravidian inam came to be redefined as a Tamil inamthe Tamils were considered the oldest of the Dravidians, and hence the only "real" Dravidians (132-40). Even further

encompassing several linguistic groups in the South (Tamils, Malayalis, Telegus) was invoked to unify non-Brahmin castes and challenge the political and social dominance ofBrahmans, who were identified as Aryan migrants from the North. However, the movement failed to win the substantial support ofnon-Tamil groups such as the Malayalis and Telegus, who, reacting to the inferior status attached to the Dravidian label, continued to lay claim to Aryan ancestry. As a result, Dagmar Hellman-Rajanayagam ex-

Tamils and Sinhalese is often represented by Sinhalese in terms of

a division between Aryan Sinhalese and Dravidian Tamils.

south in Sri Lanka, the ongoing political conflict between minority

Another important influence in parts of the subcontinent was a

feature of the period preceding British rule. From the eighth

in areas of the northern subcontinent. Their rule was followed in

century onwards, Turks, Arabs, and Afghans ruled intermittently

the twelfth century by the rule of Sultans of Afghan and Central Asian Turkish origin, who were, in tum, succeeded by the Mughal dynasty. The Mughal Empire, or the reign of Central Asian Turks, began in the sixteenth century and held sway until its defeat and supersession by the British in the mid-eighteenth century. From the thirteenth century, as Muslim society developed in the subcontinent, the nobility consisted of Central Asian Turks, Afghans,
Persians, and Arabs. Romila Thapar writes that as titles and offices

became hereditary, the nobility acquired elaborate genealogies to prove their aristocratic origin, and Indian converts similarly began to claim a foreign ancestry. The assertion of foreign ancestry was racial qualification was important" (History 298). Although Islam does not recognize caste distinctions, in the subcontinent, aspects
essential, "since superiority lay in Turkish or Afghan blood and the

South Asian Americans, Race, and Ethnicity of Muslim social life such as marriage and occupation came to be shaped by caste. Muslim castes derived from an ethnic distinction,

with families of foreign ancestry known as the Ashrafs (Arabic for "honored") forming the highest caste; the next stratum was occupied
by upper-caste Hindu converts such as Muslim Rajputs, while the
300-1).

bottom two castes consisted of low-caste Hindu converts (Thapar

The effect of these political and cultural forces has been uneven and regionally divergent, but significant nevertheless. Unlike in the West, where race and color form a primary axis of differentiation and racial identities have been institutionalized and coded into law, there is no commensurate system of color stratification in the subcontinent. The most salient social identities are those of caste, religion, language, and gender, and while some of these systems may draw on loosely racialized identities such as Aryan and Dravidian, the color and racial diversity of South Asians precludes

these primary social differences from being based solely on them." Thus, a Brahman's caste position is not undermined by his being
dark-skinned, and he exerts its social power quite independently of skin color. Similarly, the various members of his family may be of different skin colors, ranging from dark to fair, but this does not affect the legitimacy of their caste identity. Moreover, all the other

identities he draws on complicate the vectors of his caste identity: his class position, his being a Tamilian Brahman or a Bengali
Brahman, and so on.

Maxine Fisher points out that unlike in the West, where race and color are used interchangeably, race and color form two different cognitive domains for Indians (124). When anthropologist Ralph Nichols conducted a survey in Chicago to find out what racial terms Indian immigrants prefer to use as self-designations, he encountered difficulties in eliciting responses from his subjects: In a preliminary test of our questionnaire, we tried to inquire into racial identity using the contemporary American racial designations of "white" and "black." Most preliminary respondents were indignant about these categories; there was so much resistance to answering a question about race with skin color, that we changed the question to "what do you consider your skin color to be? (1) White (2) Black (3) Other (Specify)." Only 11 per cent chose white and only 3 per cent Black, 70 per cent wrote in "Brown." A further 8 per cent named another color such as "Blue" or "Olive," and 8 per cent would not name a color but frequently commented on the undesirability of using skin color as a criterion of race. (qtd. in Fisher 127) The Nichols survey of 159 respondents found that not even a third of the respondents could agree to any of the listed racial desig-

Diaspora 7:3 1998

nations in the survey, which included "Indie," "East Indian," "Caucasian," "Indo-Caucasian," and "Indo-European." When interviewees offered their own alternative racial terms, they listed the following:

"Oriental," "Asian," "Indian," "Indo-Asian," "Indo-Aryan," "Aryan," "Dravidian," "Mongol," and others (Fisher 128). Similarly, in a set
of interviews Fisher conducted with twenty-four Indian immigrants

in New York, which included questions on color and race, she observes, "analysis of responses shows that on the issue of how Indians should be categorized in terms of 'race' there is little
consensus and much confusion; on the question of classification by

color, there is much more agreement" (125). The reactions to these questionnaires suggest that the subjectsmost or all of whom are likely to have been recent immigrants (since the surveys were

conducted in the mid-1970s)do not consider color and race to be

transposable, show considerable confusion about US racial designations, and seem to be operating largely from their homeland ori-

entations. However, some critics have read these reactions as a sign

ofthe respondents' racism, because oftheir unwillingness to classify

themselves as black. But such an interpretation assumes that US

racial categories are natural and self-evident; instead, the history

of the construction of racial categories in the US reveals their

arbitrariness, dynamism, and inconsistency, producing what Sharon Lee calls a "taxonomic nightmare" (91). Had this questionnaire been

presented to another group of recent immigrants, such as Hispanics

or Asian Americans, what would their reaction have been? The tension between assignation and assertion is clearly reflected in this

exchange, but does the refusal of most interviewees to be classified

as either white or black reflect their racism? Working as they do

from very small samples, and in all likelihood with newcomers to the country, these surveys offer an inadequate basis for generalization. More comprehensive surveys that work with a broad section

of South Asian Americans and that address their attitudes to other

racial groups need to be undertaken. What has not been adequately stressed about South Asian color
consciousness so far, and what is lost in its conflation with white

racism, is its gender-specificity. The contemporary color conscious-

ness of South Asians is most influential in setting the ideals of

feminine beauty and in making determinations of women's value in marriage. In Bombay films and regional cinema, light-skinned wom-

en are exalted, while dark-skinned women (when they appear at all) are cast in the role of the "tribal," the vamp, or the servant.

Moreover, the crowded pages of matrimonial advertisements in the Sunday newspapers reiterate the near unanimous preference for a fair bride: "fair," "wheatish-complexioned," "light-skinned." Conversely, dark skin is presented in apologetic euphemisms such as "dusky" or "medium-complexioned."12 Even in marriage transactions,
300

South Asian Americans, Race, and Ethnicity however, caste, class, religious, and linguistic identities are first matched, before color differences are considered, and fair skin color does not provide a sanction for transgressing the other social
boundaries. Nevertheless, the effects of color discrimination are overwhelmingly borne by women; a woman's skin color can sub-

stantially affect her matrimonial prospects and, through them, her relative social mobility. By contrast, a man's matrimonial prospects are not crippled by a dark complexion. His marriageability depends more heavily on family name, social status, employment, and
property.

Equating South Asian color consciousness with Western racism not only obscures the specificity of the former but also obscures the

independently of color and have a greater salience in the coding of

identity. Moreover, the post- 1965 South Asian American refusal of

complexity and persistence of caste, religious differences, and regional identities in the subcontinent and diaspora, which operate

racial identity represents an attempt not just to reject being raced but to hold onto caste, religious, and regional identities through the vehicle of ethnicity. The retention of ethnicity has become more viable with the growing numbers of South Asian immigrants, the
growth of cultural pluralism in the US, and communication and transportation developments that sustain transnational communities. For instance, sub-caste-specific matrimonial advertisements

that once appeared in national newspapers now appear on the Internet and draw on a global pool of potential partners in South Africa, India, Britain, or Guyana, leading to a phenomenon that sociologist Pyong Gap Min has called "international in-marriage"
(287). These networks allow for the perpetuation of subnational family arrangements, capital transfer, business networks) are especially strong in business-oriented communities and further

identities even after immigration. Homeland connections (marriage,

reinforce caste and regional identities.13 Their persistence in

subsequent generations requires further study.
The "Hindu" in America: Belated Racialization

The question of the racial positioning of immigrants within US

society in the early twentieth century is a complex one that needs to engage both the context of their assertions of identity and their assignation to certain categories by the dominant society. The American understanding of the subcontinent was a nebulous one, shaped by disparate episodes like the brief Transcendentalist infatuation with Hindu philosophy in the nineteenth century, smallscale missionary contact, and minor commercial interests. Most

notably, the American connection was a secondary one, mindful of the prerogatives of British rule and heavily mediated by the place
301

Diaspora 7:3 1998

of India in European Orientalist scholarship as a place defined by

religion and spirituality.

were Sikhs and some Muslim and Hindu. The designation "Hindu" on the white popular consciousness of the time, except along parts of the West Coast. The nebulousness of their presence was compounded by the belatedness of their appearance on the US racial landscape. By the time they arrived, the US had already had its "Indians." Since there was no room left for "Indians," they became "Hindus." As Asians, too, they were latecomers, following on the
large-scale migration of Chinese laborers five decades earlier. The
virulent anti-Chinese exclusion movement identified Asianness with

by government agencies and the press as "Hindus," although most

In the US, tum-of-the-century Indian migrants were categorized

was a signifier of the alien and the heathen in colonial discourse. Indians were too few in number to leave a definite historical mark

Chineseness so powerfully to the public that the residues of those associations (along with the long-standing business obsession with ties) still shape US identification of Asia with East Asia. Pearl Harbor and the Japanese American internment, several decades Asianness, as did the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

a Chinese mega-market and deep-rooted missionary and diplomatic

later, left another indelible mark on the popular understanding of Most ofthe immigrants traveled together in work gangs or settled

in pockets of the West Coast.14 In certain areas (California and

phor for economic danger and treachery that was wide in its em-

Washington), they were identified as Asiatic by their foreign clothing and habits and because of the economic threat they allegedly posed to the white working class. White exclusionist propaganda about labor competition turned "Asiatic" into a ready meta-

brace and loose in its distinctions (Roediger; Saxton; Takaki,

Strangers). Thus, soon after the arrival of Indians on the West

the Asiatic Exclusion League so as to target Indians more effectively. In some cases, their physical resemblance to other groups, such
as Mexicans, allowed them to evade a surveillance system that depended on visible signs. Joan Jensen reports that a few Sikhs cut

Coast, the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League renamed itself

offtheir hair and sold tamales in San Francisco, passing as Mexicans to avoid the persecution they faced (41). Some ofthe early immigrants

married Mexican women, creating a bicultural Mexican-Hindu community centered in the Imperial Valley. Anti-miscegenation laws and public hostility prevented marriages to white women, and although some early marriages took place between black women and Punjabi men, in Imperial Valley, where two-thirds of the married couples lived, 93% of the wives were Hispanic (Leonard 66). guing that their Aryan origins made them white in terms of the

A number of Indians petitioned the courts for citizenship, ar-

South Asian Americans, Race, and Ethnicity

the utmost gravity, the tone in the courts was closer to farce. Conlegal dexterity, the Supreme Court resolved the status of Asian

law. While the legal texts set forth the criteria for citizenship with

fusion was rife about the meaning, shades, and methods of verification of whiteness. Finally in 1923, in a display of tremendous Indians. The previous year, the Court had denied citizenship to a Japanese man, Takao Ozawa, arguing that he was clearly "not Caucasian." But in its ruling on the case of Bhagat Singh Thind, the Court had further occasion to clarify the meaning of whiteness. In claiming citizenship, Thind had invoked his Aryan origins as an upper-caste Hindu. The Court decided, however, that the question of Thind's whiteness could not be settled by scientific race theories, but only by "the understanding of the common man," according to
The Court's decision limited avenues for Indian advancement. In

whom Indians were not whites (US v. Thind 214).

1917, with the passage of the Barred Zone law prohibiting the entry of Indian laborers, Indian immigration had been almost completely cut off. Over the next several decades, the population of Indian
immigrants, predominantly male, slowly dwindled. The harshness

reduced immigration, Britain had been the favored destination for underwent a complete overhaul, the flow was redirected to the US. Condemnation of racist US immigration laws in the UN and the

of their circumstances led to the repatriation of 2,000-3,000 Indians after the Thind decision. By 1940, Census figures showed that only 2,405 "Hindus" remained (Takaki, Strangers 299-300, 314). In 1946, with the passage of the Luce-Celler bill, immigration from India was reopened, allowing for an annual quota of 100 immigrants and making Indians eligible for naturalization. But the tiny incremental changes instituted in 1946 were completely overshadowed by the dramatic impact of the 1965 Immigration Act. Until 1962, when the Commonwealth Immigrants Act sharply

South Asian immigrants. But in 1965, when US immigration laws

successes of the civil rights movement led Congress to amend exclusionary laws that had severely restricted Asian immigration for several decades. Asian immigration was suddenly placed on an

equal footing with European immigration. The new laws allowed for

an annual quota of 20,000 immigrants from each Asian country and for the reunification of family members on a non-quota basis. By 1970, there were approximately 76,000 people of Indian origin in
the US (Kaplan 215). their families. They had entered into a national arena where there was almost no public memory of the few earlier immigrants, and many imagined themselves and were perceived by other Americans

The new immigrants were primarily English-speaking urban professionals, men and women, who came with or were followed by

as a new and anomalous minority group whose class position

303

Diaspora 7:3 1998

confounded the historic correlations between race and class in the

US. Unbeknownst to the newly arrived immigrants, their racial

classification had once again become a matter of concern within the

federal bureaucracy. The passage of civil rights legislation and the implementation of affirmative action programs in the 1960s raised
anew the question of what race South Asians were. In a remarkable period South Asians were consistently categorized as nonwhitefederal agencies determined that South Asians were now "white." Accordingly, they were listed for the first and only time as "white"

reversal, almost fifty years after the Thind decisionduring which

in the 1970 Census. As Maxine Fisher recounts, their categorization as whites amazed the leaders of Indian immigrant organizations, who had found out about it by accident in the process of approaching government agencies for statistics on the Asian Indian popula-

tion (118).

An umbrella group of Asian Indian organizations then launched a campaign for reclassification as minorities in order to become eligible for affirmative action programs and to benefit from civil

rights initiatives. The idea provoked strong controversy: the debates

were played out in the pages of community newspapers like India Abroad and in several conferences sponsored by the major Indian organizations. Finally, in 1977, Asian Indians lobbied for and won
reclassification as "Asian Pacific Americans" and were awarded the

category "Asian Indian" in the 1980 Census. It is important to note

that this debate took place during the recession following the 1973 were unable to find the positions for which they were qualified.

oil crisis, when sharp job cuts hit some immigrants, while others Uncertainty about the benefits attached to minority status in the US fed optimistic expectations about its likely advantages derived from their knowledge of such programs in India, which has one of the most extensive caste-based affirmative action programs in the world. There were also significant economic divisions within this group of recent middle-class immigrants. For certain upper strata of professionals, such as doctors and engineers with advanced degrees, whose jobs were still secure, the main concern was with acceptance by their American peers. In their minds, minority status jeopardized acceptance, already undermined by derogatory labels

like FMG (Foreign Medical Graduate). But among a larger number

of Indians, some in the lower tier of their professions, often stuck in technical niches and unable to move into managerial and executive ranks, and others, who were over-qualified for their jobs, minority status promised better prospects for access and mobility. The lack of referential density surrounding South Asian American identity, the chameleon quality that has marked its emergence,

and its belatedness on the US scene have produced an unusually inchoate formation. Despite their presence in this country for nearly
304

South Asian Americans, Race, and Ethnicity a century, this presence has hardly and then very unevenly registered on the public consciousness. For example, although there are similarities in the number and flow of immigrants from South Asia and Korea, Koreans are more visible today than their South Asian counterparts. Korean immigrants can be incorporated into the "common understanding" of Asianness in a way that South Asians cannot; hence their greater visibility. The question remains, though: How long will the inchoate status of South Asian Americans continue? Certainly, as time passes, the density of references and associations will accumulate and they will come to be positioned with more fixity in the American symbolic economy. Although their geographical dispersal has allowed them a degree of invisibility, in areas with concentrations of South Asian Americans, such as New Jersey and New York, their presence has prompted racist attacks. Most recently, in September 1998, a young Trinidadian Indian man, Rishi Maharaj, was set upon and beaten by a number of white men in Queens, New York. In recent years, they have also become the objects of the kinds of racial stereotyping heretofore reserved for other minorities. Although working-class South Asian Americans are in the minority, statistically speaking, the cab driver, the convenience store worker, and the newspaper vendor have come to represent all South Asian Americans in the media. Today, the most visible South Asian in America may well be Apu, the harried Kwik-E-Mart owner on The Simpsons. By contrast, the professionals with their degrees, Anglicized accents, and middle-class status fall outside these same stereotypes; they also seem to have disappeared into suburbia. Two exceptions to this class-specific representation of South Asian Americans in the mainstream media are figures who have drawn journalistic attentionthe motel owner and the computer programmerrepresenting the double-pronged threat of "foreign" capital and skilled labor. Computer programmers are usually represented to the public through the genre of the investigative report, where the narrative thrust is to expose their invisibility, which itself becomes a symbol of the surreptitious takeover of US institutions
or jobs.

In an ethnic formation where the minority position of South

Asian Americans is often constructed around and by business-

related concerns (the forming of the Asian American Motel Owners Association, the pressure to form Little Indias in various cities) while South Asian American organizations are largely relegated to the sphere of cultural activities, they have been slow to emerge and which largely occupies secure positions in fields like engineering,

respond as a political constituency. Moreover, the professional class, computers, and medicine, has been slow to acknowledge or identify
problems around which to formulate political solidarity. It is

Diaspora 7:3 1998 generally maintained within this group that problems ofdiscrimination or access that do crop up can best be tackled on an individual

basis. Thus, class stratifications have shaped their capacity and willingness to organize collectively around civil rights issues,
particularly as these issues have been strongly marked by color and race in the US. This deferral of the confrontation with race, particularly among the first-generation middle class, takes many forms, from emphasis on cosmopolitanism, the need for assimilation, the assertion of Indian cultural pride, to the affirmation of a color-blind citizenship. When there was an outbreak of racist attacks against South Asian Americans in New Jersey in 1987,

Johanna Lessinger reports, the leaders ofthe immigrant community

initially formulated the problem as an issue of cultural misunderstanding rather than of racism. The political protests that followed the New Jersey attacks were slow in developing, hesitant in forming cross-racial alliances with other groups, and also met with apprehension and opposition within the South Asian American community. When demonstrations were eventually organized to protest the racist attacks, critical support to the organizers came from the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence (140-1). This episode reveals the difficulty of organizing politically around a bourgeois platform of model ethnicity, but it also illustrates the possibility of addressing problems of race through the formation of strategic alliances with other groups. The latter move would involve rethinking the self-image as anomalous minority not in terms of culturalist explanations (our culture equips us to succeed better than other minorities) but in terms of structural explanations (how are we positioned in relation to other groups within American society?). It would also involve surrendering the faith in a meritocracy that the successes of South Asian Americans purportedly testify to. Generally, South Asian Americans negotiate the US multicultural terrain by circumventing a confrontation with race, stressing instead ethnicity and class position. Many South Asian Americans are positioned in the most hallowed and euphemistic of locations, the middle class. Furthermore, their ready employability as engineers, lab scientists, computer scientists, and doctors is often taken as proof of a color-blind meritocracy, when in actuality it reflects the demand for skilled labor that made possible their entry into the country in the first place. The seduction of the rhetoric of
a meritocracy is that it affirms the value of their achievements

while simultaneously coding these successes as quintessentially American. Ofnecessity, such a rhetoric positions their achievements
against those of other minorities. The irony here is that America

takes the credit for achievements that are partly the product of the subsidized education of many South Asian Americans in their
306

South Asian Americans, Race, and Ethnicity homeland, while highlighting the dismal performance of other minorities, many of whom pass through an underfunded and inadequate public school system in the US. Within this rhetoric, South Asians
can be solicited to think of themselves as value-added Americans.

Dinesh D'Souza's arguments in The End of Racism are probably a classic example of this position. As long as there are other minorities to wear the sign of race, we have the alibi of ethnicity.
South Asian Racialization in Britain

In the United States, Indians were originally classified in the Census as "Hindu," then once as "White" in 1970, but after 1980, they have been categorized as "Asian Indian." In Britain, they were originally termed "coloured" or "black" but more recently have been referred to as "British Asian." In Britain, the Census has not played a central role in categorizing and labeling minority populations as it has in the US, since ethnic group membership was not recorded in the British Census until 1991. The only question from which ethnic origin could be derived in the 1961 British Census was one on an individual's place of birth. Thus, the early labeling of South
Asians and Afro-Caribbeans as "coloured" or "black" derived from

political and populist discourse on immigration and social policy in the 1950s and 1960s; for instance, in the absence of Census counts, the Home Office published estimates of the numbers of "coloured immigrants." The 1971 Census gave currency to the terms "New Commonwealth" (South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean) and "Old Commonwealth" (Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) immigrants; figures for these categories were compiled in the Census by adding a question on the parents' place of birth (Fenton 147-8). According to Fenton, this terminology reinforced the "vulgar distinction between white and coloured" (148). Finally, in the 1991 Census,

after much controversy,15 a question on ethnic group membership

was added that listed Whites, Blacks (subdivided into several

categories), several Asian groups by national origin, and Other categories. However, even as South Asians were being labeled in the political discourse of the host society, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, some of them began to mobilize around a political identity as blacks. This self-designation came under critique within the community in the 1980s and was gradually superseded by the notion of a British Asian identity. In Britain and the US, "Asian" is not merely a geographical referent but a metaphor shaped by particular geopolitical relations. In the US, since Asia has been historically
identified with East and Southeast Asia (an association reinforced

by the currency of Pacific Rim discourse), and the image of the

Asian American derives from that association, South Asians are
307

Diaspora 7:3 1998 often not identified as Asian Americans. But if South Asians are the

invisible Asians in the US, in Britain, the long history of British involvement in the subcontinent and their significant numbers in the minority population have led to the popular conflation of Asian with South Asian identity.16
produced an influx of workers from colonial and ex-colonial territories, mainly from the Caribbean and South Asia. These

only after 1950. Labor shortages in an expanding post-war economy

South Asians began to arrive in Britain in substantial numbers

migrants faced discrimination in housing and employment; most were forced to take jobs as dishwashers, foundry and mill workers, domestic workers, and street-sweepers (Layton-Henry 44-6). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, their numbers were supplemented by East African Indians from Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda (the latter
were political refugees expelled from Uganda in 1972; the other two

groups had left in the wake of post-Independence Africanization

policies). Parminder Bhachu explains that unlike the direct mi-

grants from the subcontinent, who were rural, unskilled workers, ers, public sector employees, and businesspeople, many of whom had transferred capital out of Africa before leaving. The early subcontinental migrants had been largely male, while the East African Indians arrived in tri-generational family units, unique in international migration (33-7). In Britain, they set up restaurants,
grocery shops, and ethnic boutiques or moved into civil service and factory jobs. The East African Indians were similar to the small teacherswho had entered under the preferences for skilled workers. After 1983, approximately 17,000 Sri Lankan Tamil asylum in Britain, joining an established middle-class Tamil "twice migrant" East African Indians were urban, skilled work-

group of migrants from the subcontinentdoctors, engineers, and

refugees (McDowell 5), displaced by the effects of war, sought community; the refugees formed a heterogeneous group, middleand lower-middle-class, and took jobs as accountants, shop owners, and gas station attendants. To white Britons, however, the arrivals appeared to be an undifferentiated mass, variously referred to as "coloureds," "blacks," "wogs," and "Pakis." The perception of AfroCaribbeans and South Asians within a common "blackness" was

produced by racist attitudes, their common position as immigrants, nation with little ideological space for nonwhite immigrants, both groups were concentrated in the underclass, lived largely in segregated neighborhoods, and were conspicuous by their dress, food, cultural symbols, religious practices, and accents. To a
segment of the public, their mere presence constituted a threat to British national identity. and their shared history as colonial subjects. Minorities in an island

South Asian Americans, Race, and Ethnicity

need for cheap labor declined, erupting in racist riots that led to the passage of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1962. This Act

Public and media hostility to "coloured" immigration rose as the

reversed the established tradition of treating all Commonwealth and colonial people as British subjects with equal rights of citizen-

ship. The Act restricted the entry of Commonwealth citizens by

Subsequent legislation systematically targeted and impeded nonwhite immigration while simultaneously keeping open the immigration of certain whites. In fact, the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, passed in the wake of the Kenyan Asian crisis, invented a new category of British citizenshipthe "patrial," based on parents' or
grandparents' British origins or on an individual's birth or naturali-

giving preference to those with a specific job or skill. The entry of Kenyan Indians in the late 1960s, a contingency overlooked in the

1962 Act,17 reignited populist hysteria about Asian immigration.

zation in Britainthat facilitated this racially selective entry to the country (Layton-Henry 71-97). The 1971 Immigration Act cut off further immigration from the "New Commonwealth," with the exception of the Ugandan Asians who were admitted in 1972 and a family reunification (Mason 29).

limited number of immigrants who entered under provisions for

The majority of South Asians drew on extensive community networks, often organizing family, work, and cultural life around them
and operating within locales of ethnic concentration. These net-

works also enabled them to mobilize effectively in local politics. In the US, Asian Indians constitute only 0.33% of the population and rank seventh among the minority groups according to the 1990 group, forming 2.9% of the total population ("Labour" Force Survey, 1996). Ethnic minorities make up just under 6% of the total popu1.5%. Hence, because of their numbers and concentration, South Asians have been successful in electing candidates for office at the local and national levels and in mobilizing politically. Responses to British racism have produced other strategic
identities. From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, as South Asians

census;18 in Britain, however, South Asians are the largest minority lation, with Afro-Caribbeans, the next largest group, constituting

increasingly became the targets of racist attacks, were subjected to

racist immigration laws, and organized against discrimination in

housing, employment, and education, black British identity offered

rights movement in the US gave efficacy and power to the label "black" and served as an inspiration to minorities fighting racism
in Britain. "Black caucuses" representing both Asians and Afro-

them an important vehicle for resistance. The successes of the civil

Caribbeans sprang up in trade unions and cultural organizations.

Feminist groups such as the Southall Black Sisters and OWAAD

309

Diaspora 7:3 1998

(Organization of Women of Asian and African Descent) also formed

cross-racial alliances. Public funding of multicultural projects

encouraged the growth of a black identity in independent filmmaking, theater, and literature. Black workshops like Retake and special programming on Channel 4 have been crucial to the emergence of filmmakers such as Ahmad Jamal, Pratibha Parmar, and
Britain.

Gurinder Chadha. In the academy, too, South Asians as well as Afro-Caribbeans have become the subject of studies on black

Despite the crucial importance of "blackness" in the politicization of South Asians in Britainespecially among activists, academics, artists, and intellectualsit was superseded in the eighties by the idea of a British Asian identity. Some have argued that South
Asians constitute the largest minority group and, therefore, should not be subsumed within a black identity but should establish a

separate identity. Other South Asian critics of blackness argue that Black Power ideology derives from the historical experiences of people of sub-Saharan African descent and thus can accommodate a cultural and political identity for Afro-Caribbeans in Britain. By contrast, within blackness, South Asians gain a political identity
but lose their cultural identity (Hazareesingh; Modood, "'Black,'" "Political"). This shift to culturalist definitions of British Asian

identity has been challenged by other South Asian critics. They point out that the institutionalization of multiculturalism by state

and local authorities led to a diversion of community struggles from sciousness (Brah; Sivanandan). The valorization of British Asian cultural identity and the rejection of black identity also assumes

issues of racial oppression to group-specific problems, thus promoting the growth of cultural difference at the expense of race con-

that British Asian identity is autonomous from Afro-Caribbean

cultural forms. But as critics in the recent collection Dis-Orienting

Rhythms (Sharma, Hutnyk, and Sharma) argue, the meanings of

British Asian cultural identity cannot be exhausted by defining it racism. For instance, British Bhangra draws on Reggae, Dub, and

as a product of a South Asian "tradition" or as a response to white

Soul, using Punjabi musical forms and Western instrumentation. Since the ongoing struggle against racism requires the formation of
multi-racial coalitions, the internal contestation of blackness would be more constructive than outright rejection. It is also becoming clear that British Asian identity can create as

many problems as it solves. The use of culture as the primary or exclusive ground for defining a minority position poses particular problems for South Asians, since the emphasis on cultural identity also opens up the prospect of further fission along religious, linguistic, and regional lines. It is not surprising, then, that the 1990s have seen a resurgence of ethnic particularisms and signs of

310

South Asian Americans, Race, and Ethnicity growing conflict between various British Asian groups. Since the move to a British Asian identity was linked to the emergence of a South Asian middle class, the claim to ethnicity has also served as a class strategy to dissociate South Asians from the working-class associations of blackness. For this reason, British Asian identity is serviceable to both conservative and progressive political agendas.
The mobilization of South Asians and Afro-Caribbeans in Britain around blackness was viable because of their shared structural

position in British society, their simultaneous arrival in Britain, and a shared subjection to British colonialism. Moreover, the British racial hierarchy operated around a more straightforward white-colored polarity than its US counterpart. In the United States, however, the history of slavery had developed the meanings of the black-white binary prior to the arrival of immigrant groups like South Asians. The subsequent racialization of South Asians, like that of other Asian Americans, was fundamentally shaped by immigration and naturalization legislation and by their positioning at an intermediary level in the racial hierarchy. Moreover, the distinctive histories of racialization of other groups such as Mexican Americans and Native Americans have further complicated patterns
of racial stratification within the US. Thus, in the United States,

the appropriation of blackness by South Asians is politically problematic because it obscures the important differences in the trajectories of the two groups. On the other hand, the South Asian American strategy of using ethnicity and class to resist racial identification leaves no avenue for identifying and mobilizing around problems of race when these do occur. Since their small numbers and settlement patterns work against the formation of an efficacious independent political bloc, as in Britain, a major question that faces South Asian Americans is what kind of coalitions they will form. Whereas in Britain ethnicity has offered a viable though still problematic means of politicization, in the US the emphasis on ethnicity, in the absence of other affiliations, tends to become an isolationist and apolitical move. The Louise Woodward Case: Racial Invisibility and
Public Silence

Finally, I will examine a case that brings out the differences in

the racialization of South Asians in Britain and in the United

States and highlights the limitations of the middle-class minority strategy of refusing racial identification within the United States. Speaking of South Asian racialization, critics define the problem by citing instances of racial violence such as the beating death of Navroze Mody on 27 September 1978 in Hoboken, New Jersey, and
the related Dotbuster incidents (Misir). Another much more

Diaspora 7:3 1998 publicized case has, however, never been discussed in this context.

But the very invisibility of race in this case involving a South Asian American is as revealing as the swirl of publicity surrounding it and the hysterical emotions generated by some of the major
protagonists.

On 4 February 1997, Louise Woodward, an English au pair, dialed 911 and told the dispatcher that an eight-month-old infant in her care was barely breathing. The following day, Woodward was arrested, and when the baby died of head injuries a few days later, she was charged with murdering the child. The victim was eightMassachusetts. The baby's mother, Deborah Eappen, was a white American, and the father, Sunil Eappen, was of Indian origin. When the case went to trial, the defense opted for an all-ornothing strategy. They rejected the prosecution's offer to add only the option of finding Woodward guilty of murder or that of acquitting her. Judge Hiller Zobel warned Woodward that she month-old Matthew Eappen, the son of two suburban doctors from

manslaughter to the indictment, deciding instead to give the jury

would get no second chance if her strategy failed. The prosecution's medical experts argued that Woodward had killed the baby by resulting in a two-and-a-half-inch skull fracture and brain swelling.
shaking him violently or hitting his head against a hard surface, The defense's medical experts contended that the skull fracture was

probably an old one and that Woodward's "rough handling" may only have restarted bleeding in the old wound, leading to the
infant's death.

On 30 October 1997, the jury found Woodward guilty of seconddegree murder; the charge carried a mandatory life sentence, with no possibility of parole for fifteen years. A few days later, in an astonishing turnaround in the case, Woodward was set free. On 10 November Judge Hiller Zobel, exercising a rarely used judicial power, set aside the jury's verdict and reduced Woodward's charge to manslaughter. (Involuntary manslaughter carries a maximum sentence of twenty years and no minimum sentence.) He then set her free, sentencing her only to the 279 days she had already served. From the outset, the au pair's cause mobilized supporters in her

hometown of Elton in England. The hometown crowd raised money

for her and congregated at the local pub to follow the televised court proceedings; they turned her ordeal into a compelling national symbol. After the murder conviction, sympathy for Woodward reached a fever pitch and outrage at the murder verdict found voice
in printed pages and on the airwaves in the US and Britain. In a

surreal reversal, the convicted au pair became the center of an outpouring of public support, while the bereaved young couple were vilified for pursuing their careers and leaving their two children in the care of a nineteen-year-old.
312

South Asian Americans, Race, and Ethnicity To many in Britain, the Woodward case signified the inversion of colonial order. The same immigration laws that made it difficult for an unskilled English woman like Louise Woodward to move to the US, except as an au pair, had enabled the entry of highly skilled Indians like Sunil Eappen's parents. Sunil Eappen himself represented a kind of Indian unfamiliar to many in Britain, where immigration restrictions had created a less affluent Indian community. An article in The Los Angeles Times noted that "the case came to symbolize ... a resentment in England over a class system that exports working-class girls to serve in the homes of upwardly mobile Americans" (Mehren Al). Eappen's ability to employ a young English woman to care for his mixed-race children overturned colonial relationships, and this inappropriateness was displaced onto media representations of the US legal system in Britain. Within this narrative, Woodward's innocence became a metaphor for pristine English goodness framed by the media-driven legalities of an errant ex-colony. This perversion was racialized by characterizing the American legal system as the system that set O.J. free, despite the fact that the flamboyant Simpson lawyer Barry Scheck was leading Woodward's defense team: "many people have seized on the conviction as a national affront to Britain by the same justice

system that acquitted Simpson" (Montalbano A6).19

The perverse coupling of two former colonies and the incoherence it engendered were embodied in the figures of the Indian male
reincarnated as an affluent American citizen and his white Ame-

rican wife. Interviews with a former au pair of the Eappens were used to suggest that Sunil Eappen ogled the young white women he employed, resurrecting the familiar figures of the lecherous Indian man and the innocent English rose. Unlike the specter of threatening hypermasculine sexuality associated with stereotypes of AfroCaribbeans, stereotypes of South Asian masculinity are often linked to furtiveness, treachery, and sexual repression in Britain. At the
center of many stories was Deborah Eappen's unnaturalness, her

failures as a mother. Although she had cut back her working hours to three days a week and came home to nurse Matthew at lunchtime, she was accused of not loving her children enough. Supporters of Woodward carried signs reading "Free Louise, Jail the Mother" and "One Less Kid, One More Volvo." By contrast, when the Zoe Baird nomination for Attorney General was dropped because she had not paid taxes for her nanny, there had been widespread support in the US for Baird's difficulties in balancing maternal responsibilities and professional ambitions. Deborah Eappen's motherhood was certainly the site of scandal, but not the one that
was named. Speaking of the unnaturalness of her motherhood in terms of her class was a way of not talking of the unnaturalness of her motherhood in terms of her racial transgression.

Diaspora 7:3 1998 In Britain, the Woodward case was widely read as a national allegory pitting English against American ways: the conservative columnist Alice Thompson opined that "we invented the concept of the efficient Mary Poppins, so it's obvious we would feel insulted when an American mother accused a sweet-looking British girl of murdering her child. The coverage of the trial has gone beyond mere anger of America seemingly snubbing the motherland. This is war" (qtd. in Montalbano Al). Across the Atlantic, however, many Americans took up the Woodward cause and denounced their own national institutions when the jury found her guilty of murder ("Americans"). In a highly unusual move, the Boston Globe and the New York Times ran editorials urging Judge Zobel to reduce the charge to manslaughter. Why was the public so vociferous in their support of the convicted killer of an American babya foreigner
who showed little contrition? The British embraced Woodward as

British, but Americans seemed aloof from the idea of the Eappens as Americans. Where, Larry King asked Sunil Eappen, did he come from? From Chicago, replied Eappen. No, where was he originally from? King persisted. His parents were from India, Eappen answered. As an interracial couple, too, the Eappens mobilized no
constituency.

According to a news report that appeared prior to Zobel's ruling, Woodward's best hope for having the verdict set aside lay in the personality of the judge, "who is known for his independence of spirit and pronounced anglophilia" (Varadarajan 3). Interestingly, Judge Zobel's ruling largely accepted the version of events offered

by Woodward and the defense's medical experts.20 Since the defense's medical evidence was inconclusive and the prosecution's
medical evidence very strong, Zobel's decision to favor the defense's

version of events clearly rested on his judgment of Woodward's

personality.21 The judge's ruling offers extraordinary extenuation for

her culpability in the infant's death: "Frustrated by her inability to quiet the crying child, she was a 'little rough with him' under circumstances where another, perhaps wiser, person would have sought to restrain the physical impulse. The roughness was

sufficient to start (or restart) a bleeding that escalated fatally."22

Then he added: "I view the evidence as disclosing confusion, fright and bad judgment, rather than rage or malice." Zobel's benign reading of the events stresses her youth, inexperience, and incapacity for violence. The Woodward case reveals the extraordinary protection available to whiteness within the legal system and the multiple levels at which it operates in presumptions about behavior, capacity for malice, and susceptibility to suffering. Responding to the judge's ruling, Deborah Eappen said: "I think there is something in him [the judge] in all of us, that does not want to believe people who
314

South Asian Americans, Race, and Ethnicity

look like Louise could do what Louise did. But the truth is Louise

killed Matty and Judge Zobel at once admits that and does not make her take responsibility for what she did. Would he do that for a poor black or Hispanic defendant?" (Coles 5). But framing the issue in this way avoided another equally salient question: Would Woodward's responsibility be so mitigated if the dead baby and both its parents had been white? The popular vilification of the Eappens cannot be understood apart from their racial identities, and yet no discussion of the case highlighted the issue. On the contrary, Sunil Eappen's affluence not only turned public sympathy against him but was also viewed as exempting him from the problems of race. Moreover, his racial identity as a South Asian carries an ambiguity that requires public naming in the US, or else its effects operate invisibly. But the Eappens themselves never invoked race in relation to his identity, only to Woodward's. It is significant that when Deborah Eappen talks of hypothetical defendants who might have received a different ruling from the judge, the two categories she cites are "black" and "Hispanic." Is the category "Asian American" not perceived as negatively racialized within the justice system? Can an
Asian American identity not support such a rhetorical appeal? Or

is it that "Asian American" is the same category occupied by her husband? The Eappen case elicited charged and polarized public responses in the US and Britain and generated innumerable letters to the editor in leading newspapers. But while other Americans were vociferous in stating their opinions, people who were identifiably South Asian by name remained curiously silent about this case in the press. This is in strong contrast to other issues such as Hindu nationalism, the Kashmir issue, and misrepresentations of South Asian culture, which invariably provoke a rash of letters to the editor. Watching the story unfold on TV, I knew there must be many other South Asian Americans like me across the country, following it closely, but as a public voiceless about its racial meanings. A silent, spectatorial community. The Eappens' story as a racial story disappeared in the public arena; if it lived briefly as a racial story, it was in the hidden spaces of private conversations and silent witnessing. Thus, if the Eappen case offers a parable about race for middle-class South Asian Americans, it is precisely
because of the absence of reference to race.

Notes

1. This article is for the many students who have taken my South Asian American classes, for their provocative questions, intense engagement, and wonderful humor. A version of this paper was first presented at the Center for South Asian Studies Conference at the University of CaliforniaBerkeley in February 1997. My gratitude to David Kurnick and Mike Vazquez for

315

Diaspora 7:3 1998

first getting me started on this project, and to Michael Hsu for researching the Census classification of South Asian Americans. Sylvia Curtis, the reference librarian at UCSB, was immensely resourceful and patient in guiding a humanist through the mazes of Census data. I would like to thank Lauren Berlant, A. Yvette Huginnie, Vinay LaI, Ritty Lukose, Mae Ngai, Rosane Rocher, Parama Roy, Sandhya Shukla, Amritjit Singh, and Henry Yu for their generous encouragement and support. Tanya Koshy provided in-house editorial expertise and excellent insights. To Khachig Tllyan, my greatest debt, for his wise counsel and peerless editorial skills.
2. The term "racial formation" was first used by Omi and Winant.

3. 1 do not discount the role of racial minorities in contesting the racial categories to which they are assigned, but I am stressing that their maneuvers take place within a limited space and that the constraints within which they operate are largely established by the dominant society. I would also emphasize that the idea of assertion needs to be historically contextualized. The racial
system into which the early, largely working-class immigrants entered allowed them fewer options than that faced by post-1965 immigrants.

4.Several scholars have discussed the effects of the model minority position on South Asian
Americans (Bhattacharjee; George; Rajagopal; Visweswaran).

5.Maira examines the emergence of an Indian American youth subculture through music and
fashion.

6.In 1952, legislation was passed removing all racial prerequisites for naturalization.
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, 311, ch. 2, 66 Stat. 239. 7.The reason that women did not show up as petitioners in the naturalization cases is that their

claims to citizenship or naturalization derived from the status of their husbands. However, the Supreme Court had ruled in 1868 that only "white" women could gain citizenship by marrying a citizen. Moreover, if a non-citizen woman was married to a man racially ineligible for citizenship, she herself was similarly debarred, whatever her own racial qualifications for naturalization. Similarly, American women were stripped of their citizenship if they married an alien after 1907, or, in a partial retraction of this law, if they married an alien ineligible for citizenship after 1922. This provision was only finally repealed in 1931 (Lpez 46-7). 8.In re Cruz was the only reported case where a plaintiff sought naturalization as a "black" person. The petitioner had an African-Native American mother and a Native American father, but the court rejected the petition, stating that a person who was one-quarter African and threequarters Native American was not eligible for naturalization as a person of African descent. 9.For a more detailed elaboration of this argument see Koshy, "Morphing."

10.Hellman-Rajanayagam explains that the word "inam" has multiple meanings ranging from type, division, and ethnicity to identity. These meanings have shifted historically, but it was only in the early twentieth century that the meaning of "inam" as "race" developed. This shift can be traced back to the nineteenth century, when race science exercised a great deal of influence in intellectual life. During that time, under British rule, "dictionaries of Indian languages were compiled, and both European and Tamil scholars endeavoured to find equivalent native
translations for European concepts" (113-6).

11.In a recent Anthropological Survey of India report of the communities in India, KS. Singh writes that the Indian population derives from four racial stocks, but that biologically, most Indians are "a highly mixed people." He continues, "We no longer talk of racial classification of Indian populations. Instead we now talk of morphological and genetic variations among populations which, it is stated, are more so within a community than between communities" (qtd.
in Rajagopal).

12.Satellite TV, visiting rock stars, Hollywood films, and syndicated foreign newspaper columns have introduced new ideas of beauty and glamour. Gossip columnists and newspaper reporters

are learning to accommodate the whims of visiting fashion luminaries like Zandra Rhodes or Pierre Cardin, who occasionally select "exotic" dark-skinned models for their shows. The terms 316

South Asian Americans, Race, and Ethnicity

"dusky" and "black beauty" are emerging in very select cosmopolitan circles as terms of bemused praise, less as a sign of changed tastes than as testimonials to the international savvy of a new metropolitan elite. 13.See Usha Jain's study of the Gujaratis of San Francisco and Celia W. Dugger's report on the Jain community of gemstone merchants. 14.See Hess; Jensen; Leonard; and Misrow for historical accounts of the early immigrants. 15.Controversy broke out over the framing of the question and because of suspicion among some minority groups about the reasons for soliciting this data. As a result, the question was dropped from the 1981 Census. However, the Labour Force Survey, which was started in 1979, had regularly included a question on ethnic group identity (Fenton 149). 16.South Asians constitute 49.5%, Afro-Caribbeans 26.46%, and Chinese and Other Asians 8.68% of the total non-white population. Other ethnic minorities, including those of mixed origin, make up the remainder of the non-white population ("Labour"). 17.The 1962 Act controlled the entry of Commonwealth citizens, but there were a significant number of British passport holders living abroad, who were not covered by the Act. Among them were people of Indian origin whose forebears had lived in British East African colonies for several generations. When the African countries gained independence, they were given the choice of citizenship in either Britain or the African state. Those who chose British citizenship gained the right of entry and abode in Britain (Mason 28). 18.These percentages are based on population figures listed in Gall and Gall 569. 19.The report by Frances Gibb, the legal correspondent for The Times, presents numerous negative comments from British lawyers about the US legal system. 20.Zobel posted his sixteen-page ruling on the Web site for the Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly (www.lawyersweekly.com), making it the first time a court decision has been handed down on
the Internet.

21.A day after Woodward was set free, the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children circulated a letter, signed by fifty medical experts in child abuse, challenging the defense's medical evidence supporting Woodward's claim of innocence: "The prosecution put forward well-established medical evidence that overwhelmingly supported a violent shaking/impact episode on the day in question." Dr. Jan Bays, chairwoman of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Child Abuse and Neglect, stated that the symptoms displayed by Matthew Eappen were characteristic of shaken baby syndrome: "It's violent shaking, so violent that anyone witnessing it would know that this was very dangerous to this baby" (qtd. in Goldberg Al). 22.Woodward's lawyers had called on the medical community to establish a blue-ribbon panel to investigate the possible over-diagnosis of shaken-baby syndrome, the alleged cause of Matthew Eappen's death. Dr. Randall Alexander, a leading expert on the syndrome, responded by saying that it was a well-established syndrome that had been the subject of over 200 research papers (qtd. in Goldberg). In an article published in the New England Journal ofMedicine, Duhaime et al. call for renaming "shaken-baby syndrome" as "shaking-impact syndrome" to clear up misapprehension and ambiguity about the cause of the injuries in such deaths. They state that nearly all, if not all, the injuries in these cases are the result of a violent impact to the head. The theory that Matthew's death was caused by somewhat rough handling was accepted by Judge Zobel, although Duhaime et al. note that the kind of impact necessary to produce the injuries associated with shaking-impact syndrome are equivalent to a fall from a two-story building.
Works Cited

Adinarayan, Samuel Pondipeddi. The Case for Colour, An Analysis of the Causes, Manifestations and Effects of Colour Prejudices. New York: Asia Pub. House, 1964. 317

Diaspora 7:3 1998

"Americans Apologise for Judicial System." The Times [London) 1 Nov. 1997: 5. Bernai, Martin. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Vol. 1. London:
Free Assn., 1987.

20, 1925. London: Theosophical Soc. Pub. House, 1925.

1985.

Besant, Annie. The Problem of Colour: Being a Lecture Delivered at the Queen's Hall, September

Bhachu, Parminder. Twice Migrants: East African Sikh Settlers in Britain. London: Tavistock,
Bhattacharjee, Annanya. "The Habit of Ex-Nomination: Nation, Woman, and the Indian Immigrant Bourgeoisie." Public Culture 5 (1992): 19-46. James Donald and Ali Rattansi. London: Sage, 1992. 126-45.

Brah, Avtar. "Difference, Diversity and Differentiation." "Race," Culture and Difference. Ed.
Caldwell, Dan. 'The Negroization of the Chinese Stereotype in California." Southern California Quarterly 53 (1971): 123-31. Coles, Joanna. "I Did No Harm to Matthew, Au Pair Tells His Parents." The Guardian (London!
12 Nov. 1997: 5.

Cornell, Stephen, and Douglas Hartmann. Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge P, 1998. De Gobineau, Arthur. The Inequality of Human Races. Trans. Adrian Collins. London:
Heinemann, 1915.

D'Souza, Dinesh. The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society. New York: Free P,
1995.

Dugger, Celia W. "In India, An Arranged Marriage of 2 Worlds." New York Times 20 Jul. 1998:
Al, AlO.

Duhaime, Ann-Christine et. al. "Nonaccidental Head Injury in InfantsThe 'Shaken-Baby Syndrome.'" New England Journal of Medicine 18 Jun. 1998: 1822-9. Fenton, Steve. "Counting Ethnicity: Social Groups and Official Categories." Interpreting Official Statistics. Ed. Ruth Levitas and Will Guy. London: Routledge, 1996.
Civilizations Review 25 (1991): 1-27.

Figueira, Dorothy M. "Aryan Ancestors, Pariahs and the Lunatic Fringe." Comparative
Fisher, Maxine P. The Indians ofNew York City: A Study ofImmigrants from India. New Delhi: Heritage Pub., 1980. Gall, Susan B., and Timothy L. Gall, eds. Statistical Record of Asian Americans. Detroit: Gale,
1993.

George, Rosemary Marangoly. "'From Expatriate Aristocrat to Immigrant Nobody': South Asian Racial Strategies in the Southern Californian Context." Diaspora 6 (1997): 31-60. Gibb, Frances. "Trial Exposes Worst Traits of US Justice." The Times [London] 31 Oct. 1997: 4. Goldberg, Carey. "Pediatric Experts Express Doubt on Au Pair's Defense." New York Times 12
Nov. 1997: Al.

Harris, Cheryl I. "Whiteness as Property." Harvard Law Review 106 (1993): 1709-91. Hazareesingh, S. "Racism, Cultural Identity: An Indian Perspective." Dragon s Teeth 24 (1986):
4-10.

318

South Asian Americans, Race, and Ethnicity

Hellman-Rajanayagam, Dagmar. "Is There A Tamil 'Race"?" The Concept of Race in South Asia. Ed. Peter Robb. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1995. 109-45. Hess, Gary. 'The Asian Indian Immigrants in the United States, 1900-1965." From India to America: A Brief History of Immigration; Problems of Discrimination; Admission and Assimilation. Ed. S. Chandrasekhar. La Jolla, CA: Population Review, 1982. 29-34. In re Cruz. 23 F. Supp. 774 (E.D.N.Y. 1938). Jain, Usha. The Gujaratis of San Francisco. New York: AMS P, 1989. Jensen, Joan. Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America. New Haven, CT:
Yale UP, 1988.

Jones, William. The Works of Sir William Jones. Vol. 3. Ed. Anna Maria Jones. London, 1807. Kaplan, Charles B. Census '80: Continuing the Factfinder Tradition. Washington, DC: Bureau
of the Census, 1980.

Koshy, Susan. "Morphing Race into Ethnicity: Asian Americans and Critical Transformations of Whiteness." Forthcoming. "Labour Force Survey 1996." Social Trends 27. Ed. Jenny Church et al. London: Govt. Statistical
Service, 1997.

Layton-Henry, Zig. The Politics of Immigration. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

Lee, Sharon M. "Racial Classifications in the US Census: 1890-1990." Ethnic and Racial Studies 16 (1993): 75-94.

Leonard, Karen. Making Ethnic Choices: California's Punjabi Mexican Americans. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1992. Lessinger, Johanna. From the Ganges to the Hudson: Indian Immigrants in New York City. Boston: Allyn, 1995. Lpez, Ian Haney. White by Law: the Legal Construction ofRace. New York: New York UP, 1996. Maira, Sunaina. "Identity Dub: The Paradoxes of an Indian American Youth Subculture (New York Mix)" Cultural Anthropology 14 (1999): 29-60. Mason, David. Race and Ethnicity in Modern Britain. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Mazumdar, Sucheta. "Race and Racism: South Asians in the United States." Frontiers ofAsian American Studies. Ed. Gail M. Nomura et al. Pullman, WA: Washington State UP, 1989. 25-38. McDowell, Christopher. A Tamil Asylum Diaspora. Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1996. Mehren, Elizabeth. "Au Pair Freed; Conviction Cut to Manslaughter." Los Angeles Times 1 1 Nov.
1997: Al, A16.

Min, Pyong Gap. "Korean Immigrants' Marital Patterns and Marital Adjustments." Family Ethnicity: Strength in Diversity. Ed. Harriette P. McAdoo. Newbury Park, CA: 1992. 287-99. Misir, Deborah N. "The Murder of Navroze Mody: Race, Violence, and the Search for Order."
Amerasia Journal 22.2 (1996): 55-76.

Misrow, Jogesh C. East Indian Immigration on the Pacific Coast. Stanford, CA: Robert Reed,
1915.

Modood, Tariq. "'Black' Racial Equality and Asian Identity." New Community 14 (1988): 397-404. 319

Diaspora 7:3 1998

"Political Blackness and British Asians." Sociology 28 (1994): 859-76. Montalbano, William D. "The Land of Mary Poppins Stands Behind Its Nanny." Los Angeles
Times 10 Nov. 1997: Al, A6.

Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the US: From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge, 1994. Rajagopal, Arvind. "Better Than Blacks? Or, Hum Kaale Hain To Kya Hua." South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection 5 (1995): 4-9. Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class.
New York: Verso, 1991.

Saxton, Alexander. The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1971. Sharma, Sanjay, John Hutnyk, and Ashwani Sharma, eds. Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music. London: Zed, 1996. Sivanandan, A. "RAT and the Degradation of Black Struggle." Race and Class 26.4 (1985): 1-33. Takaki, Ronald. Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-century America. New York: Oxford UP,
1979.

---------. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. New York: Penguin,
1990.

Thapar, Romila. A History of India: From the Discovery of India to 1526. New Delhi: Penguin,
1990.

---------. Interpreting Early India. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1992. Trautmann, Thomas R. Aryans and British India. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. United States Bureau of the Census. Population: General Report and Analysis. Vol. 1 of Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910. Washington, DC: US Govt. Printing Office, 1913. ---------. "United States Summary." Characteristics of the Population. Vol. 2 of U.S. Census of Population: 1950. Washington, DC: US Govt. Printing Office, 1953. ---------. "United States Summary." Characteristics of the Population. Vol. 1 of U.S. Census of Population: 1960. Washington, DC: US Govt. Printing Office, 1964. United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind. 261 U.S. 204 (1923). Varadarajan, Tunku. "'He Will Not Strike Down Jury Verdictm The Times [London) 3 Nov. 1997:
3.

Visweswaran, Kamala. "Diaspora by Design: Flexible Citizenship and South Asians in U.S. Racial Formations." Diaspora 6 (1997): 5-29. Zobel, Hiller B. 'The Louise Woodward Judgment." The Times [London) 11 Nov. 1997: 12.

320