Mixed desis long to belong
Until 1967 when the Lovings made history, inter-racial marriages were outlawed in the United States of America. This development, in combination with amendments to the Immigration Act of 1965, which lifted race-based barriers to immigration, slowly led to an increase in inter-racial marriages and, consequently, mixed-race children. Today, belonging to more than one race is common. Yet, ironically, “belonging” is exactly what members of this racial subculture crave.
Rahul Yates, 19-year-old Harvard student and Bharatanatyam dancer, has an Indian mom, a white dad, and a strong identity as a person of mixed-race. He, along with his mom Punita Khanna, 62, have collated in a book – Mixed Desis: Stories of Multiracial South Asians– the stories and experiences of 70 contributors who are either mixed-race or have raised mixed-race children.
While most contributors are from the U.S., some are based overseas. Rahul and Los Angeles-based Punita – who was born in Delhi and moved to Chicago in 1966 at the age of 4 – also share their own story.
It all began with a call for stories on social media. Then, after an initial survey, people were invited to either be interviewed or write their own essays. While some have disclosed their full names, others have participated anonymously.
The book, which is self-published by the authors’ community platform HumSub GLOBAL, is now available on Kindle in the U.S. and globally.
India Currents interviewed the mother-son duo over a Zoom call recently. Edited excerpts:
India Currents: What prompted the idea to write this book?
Rahul Yates: Through high school I was very involved with multicultural awareness efforts through my own platform and programs at school. I noticed there was a lack of multiracial, South Asian representation. There was not a lot of literature about them. That was where we saw a need. My mom proposed the idea.
Punita Khanna: His identity unfolded as a teenager and he started with his own website; the book was a culmination of that, because we weren’t seeing anything in the public about multiracial South Asians.
IC: Why is being a mixed-race child so challenging?
RY: The reason multiracial identity can be such an issue is the incessant lack of belonging. Everybody encounters that in some way, whether at a workplace or at an event – they will not always walk into a space and feel like they belong there. With multiracial identity, that is extremely heightened because so much of our society is based on race and ethnicity and that kind of classification.
Two Indian people can walk down the street and greet each other and that’s normal, but if you’re like me and you don’t look Indian, people might look at me and not necessarily know what I am. The brain makes judgments about people based on their physical appearance.
That’s why it is a struggle. That’s when things like microaggressions start happening, sometimes within the Indian community.
IC: How so?
RY: As Indians we’re very proud of our culture and customs. But as soon as someone like me, who’s not obviously Indian, tries to claim that, it creates some kind of reaction – there are questions, jokes. Culturally I am very Indian, more than many others here, like my fully Indian cousins for example, who’re Indian only in name and face.
Being mixed-race is not the worst struggle in the world but can be tiring. It’s also hard to find belonging within the multiracial South Asian community – we can relate to each other in our experiences but we all look different; some of us look more Indian, some look more white, some look very ambiguous. That’s another struggle in itself.
IC: Did any common themes emerge across these 70 stories?
PK: There were anti-miscegenation laws in the U.S. till 1967. So the earliest marriage we talk about was in 1970. At the time, there was very little Indian community here. The immigrants were mostly men who met girls here. One of the themes is – ‘How do I tell my parents I met a non-Indian/non-South Asian girl?’, ‘My mother doesn’t know what to make of this’ and ‘How does she show up being white in 1970 India?’
There’s a whole socio-economic aspect to being Indian in America. The first couple of generations of immigrants from India were all (highly educated) professionals; someone spoke about how it became a very ostentatious, money-minded community. If you were not of that background, as a non-South Asian spouse, you were not accepted.
IC: What about themes in stories from more recent times?
PK: In the last two to three decades, the discussions were about what type of wedding to have, how to name the children, their religion, also about cooking and clothes, about the struggle of whether to go to temples or not. Mothers who were non-South Asian in some cases did not make the effort to embrace the culture. They also talk about colorism and white-passing.
IC: What similarities stood out among the mixed-race children?
RY: Themes include a lack of representation of the mixed-race identity. In past generations, nobody was really represented; it was just white people. But right now, more diverse identities are being represented in schools and in the media. Yet, for multiracial people, there’s still very little representation, and that’s a really big frustration we saw among respondents. That also fuels the lack of belonging.