Becoming Indian: performing identity in the American multicultural curry

What is Indian-ness and who gets to claim it?

i. I was never “Indian”

Before college, I wasn’t Indian, but a Vaishnav, one of Hinduism's three major sects. I didn’t have a racial identity paradigm from which to articulate my experience. From entering college until thirty-five, I thought of myself instead as Indian-American, until I realized that the identity is more about social performance for the professional managerial class rather than anything innate. One is not born, but instead becomes, Indian-American, and even more importantly for the PMC, South-Asian American.

And you should care, dear reader, because Americans of Indian descent (AIDs; also me) and Indian-origin Americans (IOAs) have quietly reshaped corporate America in our image, regardless of naturalization. This is an astounding feat for a population our size. And before someone calls me a nativist, I’m not making a judgment about it, but I'm going to parse it because you probably can’t see it.

Personalities reflect the traits best distributed in the population, and cu…