Two years ago I made the choice to begin my journey at Northeastern University during the peak of the pandemic. I made the move across the world, from Singapore to the United States, entirely alone. 

Given the circumstances with the pandemic, the first friend I made at college was through instagram. His name was Ravi Bhatia. He had seen one of my introduction posts on a Northeastern instagram page and started following me. We snapchatted all summer.

When I first arrived in Boston, Bhatia drove 40 minutes to come and give me a tour of the city. We spent hours talking about how different our upbringings were. I was raised in India and Singapore, and he was raised in a small suburb in Massachusetts. He’d never really gotten the chance to see much outside of the States.

During the first week of classes Bhatia asked me if I wanted to hang out with a couple friends he had made. When he later told me that they were all members of a bollywood dance team he was planning on auditioning for, I ended up bailing on the plans. 

First impressions at college were key. I didn’t want Bhatia’s friends to think I was in any way ashamed or against bollywood dance, but I had no experience or interest in joining.

It didn’t take me long before I realized that Bhatia was predominately only following brown people on social media. With the pandemic, our instagram accounts were equivalent to Tinder profiles, but for making friends. I had specifically put the American, Singaporean, and Indian flags in my bio to express my diverse background. Regardless, to people like Bhatia who viewed my profile, I was simply a brown girl with some highschool and traveling pictures. I was terrified that if the basis of friending me was because I looked brown, meeting me in real life would possibly be disappointing if I wasn’t into bollywood. 

I grew up in Mumbai for the prime years of my childhood. Although I was born in Pittsburgh, my parents didn’t wait long before they moved back to India, largely because they feared my sister and I would lose exposure to our heritage. When I turned 9 years old we moved to Singapore for my dad’s job. But every long weekend and vacation was spent back in Mumbai. Proving my connection to my Indian culture was never a task I needed to complete. To me, my upbringing was enough. My focus was simply moving to the States for college and experiencing everything I’d hoped it would be. 

College is a pinnacle point of most adolescents' search for identity. Everything from the past that’s shaped you, like the way you were raised, comes into contact with the outside world for the first time. The search for identity may never truly be complete, but college is the place where you get to decide – which parts of yourself you wish to keep, which parts can be left behind, and which parts you’d like to explore. 

My dilemma for the longest time here was realizing that college was complicating my understanding of who I am, more than I thought it could. I used to think moving here would free me from all the expectations and strings attached from my past. But in reality I’ve found myself feeling pressure to take on paths that have already been paved for me, even if I don’t have the right footwear for the journey. 

In simpler words, the South Asians in America have come to define and express the ways in which they believe one should connect to the community. They’ve taken all the uniqueness and variability that falls under the dozen languages, religions, and subcultures that make up a landmass that covers one quarter of the world’s population, and compressed it into a singular digestible culture that white Americans can best comprehend. 

The South Asian region typically covered the countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. But with the rise of transnational movements in the late 80s, the term was coined to be more inclusive as large numbers of Indo-Caribbeans and East Africans migrated to the States. 

However, for the most part being South Asian in the States is associated with being Indian. 

To the western world the community is largely represented by the Hindi language, Bollywood music, butter chicken and naan – all of which come from North India. When people see the latest season of Bridgerton, casting two dark skinned Tamil women as leads, “South Asian” is the term used to describe the progressive representation. 

The multicultures that make up the entire South Asian region gets washed away with the use of the singular term. Some could argue instead of calling it the South Asian community, we should be saying South Asian communities, plural. 

Over the last two years, I began to realize that simply relying on my upbringing was not going to be enough to be considered a part of the American South Asian community. If I didn’t live up to the expectations and norms in which the culture is expressed here, I was going to be considered whitewashed. And that to me didn’t feel representative of a community I could call home. 

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Navigating my South Asian identity became a lot more complicated the day I moved to the United States. Since my first week of freshman year, my mom has made sure to call me every night before I go to bed. And as I recount the details of my day and the things my friends and I do, she never fails to point out that none of their names sound remotely brown.

As frustrating and embarrassing as it is, the fact that most of my friends are white shouldn’t take away from the fact that I am still Indian. I’ve had a childhood and upbringing in the heart of our family’s culture regardless. 

When I interviewed Vedantini Bhogilal, a childhood friend I grew up with in Mumbai, we both reminisced about the days we’d dream of moving to America for college.  

We grew up speaking English, watching American TV shows, and dreading the few days of the month when we’d have to be wearing tight and itchy lehengas with heavy jewelry around our necks for traditional holidays. We had an innate desire to be more Western. 

Before Bhogilal transferred to Boston University this year, she spent her first two years at Bryant University. She didn’t go to the States expecting to have a lot of Indian friends in college. She said she used to look down upon kids from her school that went to NYU and Babson and only hung out with the Indians. Bhogilal was confident, “I’m never gonna do that.” 

But once she got to Bryant University and realized that everyone was predominately white, Bhogilal began to crave her Indian roots. 

“They didn’t really know anything about the world other than the little towns that they were from,” she said. “Automatically I found comfort in the Indians there and then.”  

She’s noticed not just within the Indian community, but with other racial and ethnic groups people tend to get drawn to one another, with the cultural familiarity of speaking the same language and growing up in the same area, “finding people just like you, where you can have a normal conversation and just be yourself.”  

The human need to feel a sense of belonging is largely why my mother continues to be persistent on commenting about my slow progress in finding brown friends. For the longest time I used to think it was her criticizing me for becoming Americanised and whitewashed. Although that might be true, my mom’s intentions are largely also because she simply wants me to have at least a couple people in my life that can truly make me feel like home, especially because I’m miles and miles away from my family. 

* * *

In Bhogilal’s experience, she said that coming to the States made her a lot more Indian than she ever expressed the desire of being when she grew up in Mumbai. Similarly, a lot of Indian kids in India aren’t actually all that Indian. Parents might be less concerned with sustaining cultural traditions when they’re raising their children in the center of it. In fact, most of Indian society in India is trying to keep up with the western influences, to fit in with the rest of the changing world. 

Take Ananya Bhaskara for example. She’s a freshman at Northeastern I met in one of my classes this semester. Her parents originate from Tamil Nadu but raised Bhaskara and her sister in Jericho, a suburb in Long Island, New York. Until second grade she was one of the only brown kids in her town. 

Bhaskara described how her parents are the conservative and traditional type. They were strict and forced her to wear a braid all her life up until college. Every day when she’d go to high school, she’d take out the braid in the bathroom before class. She hated wearing it. 

“It was just my house that was Indian. And everyone else wasn't,” Bhaskara said. “I think when my parents moved here after they got married, they were away from everything they’ve ever known. They wanted to sustain it. That’s the way they coped with moving away – sticking to what they know.”  

Being children of immigrants growing up in a dominant culture that your family does not identify with is confusing, especially during the prime adolescent years of identity formation. As much as Bhaskara struggled to assimilate and fit into her white neighborhood, since coming to college she’s come to understand why her parents were so adamant on raising her the way they did. 

As Bhaskara has met a larger South Asian population she no longer introduces herself as Indian, but now she’s Tamil. 

There are around 5.4 million South Asians in the States, of which 4.2 million are Indians. Within the Indian community, there are subcultures associated with different states, castes, religions, and languages. Gujaratis make up over 1.5 million Indians. Tamils make up around 4.5 percent of the total South Asian population. 

Smrithi Ram is a Tamil writer and psychologist and says she hates being labeled as Indian. In a recent article, “My Struggle with the Term Desi,” she explains the identity erasure that takes place with the South Asian movement in the States.  

The term is “a misrepresentation of my beautiful, rich Tamil culture that I come from,” said Ram. 

Unlike Bhaskara, Ram grew up in Dallas, Texas surrounded by South Asians. She grew up dancing from a young age. But she complained that in her neighborhood, the only teams she could join were Raas and Bhangra, where everyone spoke Gujarati or Punjabi. 

“It really felt like I was the one assimilating to their culture,” Ram said. “It felt one sided.”  On weekends when the minority population of Tamils celebrated Pongal, none of her friends joined. But when Holi or Navrathri were celebrated, she’d participate. 

Even later when Ram went on to study at the University of Cincinnati and was looking to join a dance troupe, she saw that most of the people on the teams and the dances they did were all Bollywood and North Indian. 

“The vibe of it wasn’t a place where I necessarily felt included because my people weren’t being represented,” said Ram.

* * *

When looking at universities, it’s easy to assume from international student statistics or simply even how many brown faces you see on campus, that they are reasons to check off the box of great diversity. 

Mishal Nawaz, one of my high school best friends, moved to Boston last fall to attend Simmons College. International students make up around 2.1 percent of their student population. To Nawaz that was motivation to find friends outside of campus. 

By the time her father came to visit her, a couple months ago, she introduced him to her entire social circle, a group of brown kids none of which went to Simmons. 

She met most of them through her boyfriend who introduced her to the Boston University Indian Dance Club. Although they’ve all made her feel more at home than any of the people she met at Simmons, Nawaz still thinks that she’s the most whitewashed of the group. 

Because Nawaz’s father is Pakistani and her mother is Indian, their mixed backgrounds meant that she never grew up speaking Hindi, watching Bollywood movies, and cooking with Indian spices. Not being versed in this knowledge according to Nawaz has labeled her. 

“To the extent I am whitewashed, that automatically excludes me [from the group],” Nawaz said.

Much like Nawaz, students come to college with the shared dilemma of searching for someone to tell them how to explore this large cultural aspect of their identity. 

When I interviewed Prakriti Seltur, a member on the E-board of UTSAV, Northeastern’s Undergraduate South Asian organization, she said, “everyone has their own way of connecting with their culture.” It’s important to acknowledge that this process is going to be unique, especially in regards to how you were raised. 

As the ways we define gender and sexuality have become more liberated and fluid, our connection and ways in which we define our ethnicities and cultures we feel most connected to need to be treated the same way.  

I think there’s a slight fear that immigrants have when they come to a western world. It’s hard enough being seen as a foreigner by white people, so complicating our culture, especially when there’s a lack of representation of it in the media, feels like we’re asking for too much. That’s why it’s easy for brown kids to go to college and decide – I’m going to go all whitewashed or all mainstream brown. I chose the first, but I don’t want to continue to hold myself back and regret expressing who I truly am. And I continue to search in this school for people like me, or others who want to learn about my culture and home. Because if diversity and inclusion is what the South Asian community is preaching, they need to be more aware of the reality of the situation.  

Difference isn’t encouraged. Simplicity is. And our cultural identities in this century aren’t simple. They are complicated and colorful; they are mixed and vibrant. Some days I choose to tell people I’m from Singapore; with others I’m from India; and with a few I’m from Pittsburgh. I embrace all of those aspects. 

Bhogilal represents the experiences of being raised in Mumbai, Nawaz being a mixed South Asian raised in Singapore, Bhaskara and Ram Tamils living in American society. And each and everyone one of us has been figuring out how we uniquely wish to stay connected and express our cultural identities. 

Acknowledging the fluidity and variability that exists now is crucial. Because the only thing that has been holding me back from finding communities that I feel a sense of home and belonging with, is how the South Asians have complied with the narrow expression of cultural identity in the States. The labeled boxes and limited options need the push to be wider, with enough space and freedom to explore the many ways in which we can choose to express our connection to our roots.