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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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"Mother Teresa lived in Asia?" asked the incredulous voice on the other
end of the telephone line. "I thought she lived in India."http://sree.net/stories/newswatch.html
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Aug 2000
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Indian
Reaction: One from the subcontinent
Response: Wondering if I still have family living there. Having a friend here who is of Native American descent, it would no longer even occur to me that the word Indian would be used to describe Native Americans. That, and the fact that my entire life has been spent around people who were either Indian, Anglo-Indian, or Indiaphiles.
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Joined: Jun 2000
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addict
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addict
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Interesting that every single response so far has both assumed that the word was used as a noun, and a noun describing a person at that.
Indian to me has connotations with the Indian sub-continent or something that originated there. Nothing to do with Native Americans at all. That's the easy bit.
After that, I find myself sympathising with whoever it was who says the way the question was posed is manipulative - sorry Shanks, I don't mean this as a negative, but how often do you get asked what a word means to you, then have the word presented in isolation? When this happens to me I feel as if someone is going to try and trip me up, and I'm prety sure my reactions/responses are no longer 'pure instinct', which I think is what you are trying to explore.
A strong connotation for me is 'let's go for an Indian' - meaning Indian food. Well, my earliest memories are of Bangladesh, where we lived for a year, and I also spent three and a half years in Hounslow, London, for over a year of which time I had a regular date every Wednesday night at our favourite local Indian restaurant. Now sadly closed down and much missed. (Without trying to trivialise, if any of the Sydneysiders know a really good Indian restaurant here, please advise... Or Max, Shanks, others, do you know and have a recipe for Begum Bihar?)
The other point for me about this word is hinted at in my comment about living in Bangladesh. When applied to people, I've heard it used so often to mean someone from India, Pakistan or Bangladesh, or someone who looks like that's where they came from, rather than specifically about people from India. (I see MAx said that too.) In that context, I have never thought of it as particularly derogatory - uninformed, perhaps, but if you want to be derogatory, try 'Paki'.
..I also thought fleetingly (wistfully - daylight saving has just ended down under and 'winter' is on the way) about Indian summers. Which to me is nothing but positive.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Syncronistically speaking... I am wearing an Oxford shirt with the word "Indian" scripted on the pocket.
That would be the Indian Motorcycle Company.
My reaction and response - in one.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Interesting that every single response so far has both assumed that the word was used as a noun, and a noun describing a person at that.
Indian to me has connotations with the Indian sub-continent or something that originated there.
Touché! I guess my perceptions had been "manipulated" by the link with a thread discussing an Indian person, and went from there. As to "Indian" meaning "subcontinental" rather than "from the Republic of India", my answer was shaped by at least two factors. Most signifcantly, my own family history. My father, all his siblings, and their parents were all born in the India that was "the jewel in the Crown", when there was no Pakistan or Bangladesh, and so my father was born in what is now India but grew up in what is now Pakistan. The other factor that influenced my use of the term is that I lack the skill to distinguish Aryan from Dravidian, unless I saw them together, and even then I would hesitate. If I met someone from the subcontinent, I would never ask, "are you Indian?", but would ask "where are you from?", as the majority of ethnic Indians here are from Fiji, many never having been to India. Shanks' use of Europe as somewhat analogous to India was particularly helpful to me, in reinforcing the fact that "Indian" is one of those fragile categories he talked about elsewhere.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Bridget, Bridget, Bridget--WELCOME BACK !!!!!
Oh, MERCY I've missed you! And I don't give a hoot if this a "gratuitous post"!
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Indian - someone of Aryan or Dravidian origins. Although personally, I have no problem with the idea of native Americans also being called "Indians" from the point of view of clarity.
Feelings - none, really, associated with the word itself. The fact that two of our closest friends are Sri Lankan and Fijian Indian means, I guess, that there is some warmth there, but then I only think of their origins when something (like Shanks' question) brings it to mind. Friendship has nothing to do with race or colour, per se. If I think about the country itself, I have three very clear memory-pictures which sum up the amazing contrast that one encounters on the sub-continent.
I guess the noun/adjective point brought up above has little meaning for me in practical terms. Most country names can either be noun or adjective, as in "He comes from New Zealand" and "He bought New Zealand butter".
FWIW
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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The word Indian brings to mind my friends Lalitha, Sridhar, Vishva, Umakant, Sundar, Shankar and Praveen. The delicious tea they make for me and how I feel that they love me and how I feel so at home with them. They are kindred spirits.
My response
If you had asked me this question in 1969 when I deplaned at Logan International Airport, and for the very first time, all 87 pounds of me, touched foot on what is to become my second country, my one and only thought then would be the "Indians" of the American movies that we watched a lot of in our native country.
Now that I am older and wiser (debatable) the Indians of my youth are now Native Americans, and I do not associate the word Indian to them any longer. It seems so archaic now.
chronist
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old hand
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OP
old hand
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Thanks for all the replies so far. For those who think the question was manipulative, I offer no apologies. This was not meant to be quantitatively sound research and analysis, but a thumbnail sketch of reactions. In all such issues, particularly with words possessing strong and varied connotations, the connotations themselves can often provide the 'manipulation'. If, instead of 'Indian', the word I chose had been 'and' or 'the', would you have felt as manipulated? If not, then my question was valid, simply because I am/was trying to explore the range of connotations that the word has - and using as my base the amazingly varied membership of AWADtalk. One point I didn't anticipate, which Jackie noted, was the fact that, since the post was by me, there would be certain connotations, or associations, pre-attached, as it were, to the word. For my inability to correct for that, I apologise. My hypothesis, if there was one, was that in the US, the word 'Indian' is primarily associated with Native Americans (or Amerinds, or Aboriginal Americans, or Native Persons, or whatever is the current politically correct label for that group of people), whereas for anglophones outside the US, the word seems to be associated primarily with people/objects from either the Republic of India, or the South Asian sub-continent. This seems, so far, ot have been borne out by the replies. Your indulgence in this matter has been greatly appreciated. Namaste  the sunshine ("wandering between two worlds/one dead, the other powerless to be born") warrior
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Indian
My reaction: I was immediately split in twain.
My response: I felt equally drawn by the denotation of those to whom we refer in a PC manner as Native Americans and those of the Asian sub-continent. This mental rending seems to have masked any other reactions I may have had to the word and I am usually fairly good at noticing these things if I am prepared to do so. I know some people who are at least partly Native American and they seem to be anything but unanimous about the use of the word Indian to refer to them. US'ns normally do go through some verbal gyrations when using the term in a way that we feel may be ambiguous.
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