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.
