Digesting the Dichotomous Journeys to our Similar Destinations: Being/Becoming “Indian” in US Higher Education

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Being/Becoming a Par/Desi (i): Making Sense of Higher Education as Borderlands

Proposal

As the Asian population in the United States continues to grow in notable rates, individuals from India alone represents the second most populous Asian identity making up 21% of the 22 million Asian individuals in the US in 2019 (Budiman & Ruiz, 2021). This representation of Indian individuals finds its way into United States institutions and colleges as expectations, affirmations, and culture of institutional attendance remains consistent throughout Indian communities (Dheshi, 2001). While dismantling stereotypical tropes seen in the model-minority myth, which perpetuates an uninvolved and uninterested Asian student (Park, 2008), Indian students continue to develop their academic and personal in US institutions. Conflating Indian student stories, though, monumentally harms and undermines individual Indian experiences and further inflates colonial and capitalist cultures.
The presenters of this paper are both Indian individuals attending the same institution, yet both have significantly different pathways that have led them here. For both, higher education has been the borderlands embodying certain privileges and marginalizations for them as Par/Desi(i) (Bhattacharya, 2019). In this paper, the presenters engage with the (un)making of this Par/Desi identities as shaped by the US higher education landscape through storytelling and intentional interrogation. While both authors were born in India, one has been raised there while the other was raised in the United States. Our educational pathways led to pursing a master’s and doctoral degree in a large public Southeast US institution, where one author faces immense challenges as an international Indian student, while the other faces challenges as a domestic Indian American student. Regardless of our backgrounds, though, what both authors find is a culminative pattern of exclusion and inclusion based on our racial identity.
In this paper, we also critically engage with the making of the term “Indian” not only in the US but also in India through showing how we both faced the inside and outside phenomenon of our Indian identities in the United States, but even in India itself. Described as the tenet, “Home is permanently deferred,” (p. 190) within the Bhattacharya (2019) Par/Des(i) framework, both authors have experienced deep-rooted existence and erasure simultaneously given their Indian identity in multiple contexts. Existing in systems that conceptualize identity by birthplace and physical appearance have led to a preconceived understanding of our personality, behavior, and values. This piece highlights the lived experiences of two Indian individuals navigating predetermined identities as Indians, as an international student, and as individuals whose identities beyond racial are often trivialized. These experiences perpetuate a feeling of never belonging based on one’s changing physical contexts, synthesized through the deferment of home (Bhattacharya, 2019, p.190).
Coinciding a discussion on the ways United States educational systems speculate our identity based on our Indian identity, this piece will also explore the ways our additional identities are silenced or hidden. In a system where racism undergirds institutional practices (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995), this piece will explore how additional identities of our, and any Indian student, will be flattened to fit models that provide comfort to the Majoritized identity.

Authors

• Ravi Bhatt

• Priyanka Prasad, Florida Sate University