Stereotypes of South Asians

Stereotypes of South Asians are oversimplified ethnic stereotypes of South Asian people, and are found in many Western societies. Stereotypes of South Asians have been collectively internalized by societies, and are manifested by a society's media, literature, theatre and other creative expressions. However, these stereotypes have very real repercussions for South Asians in daily interactions, current events, and governmental legislation.

Historical

Indomania

Friedrich Schlegel wrote in a letter to Tieck that India was the source of all languages, thoughts and poems, and that "everything" came from India.^[1] In the 18th century, Voltaire wrote that "I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc...^[2]

Mark Twain put it rather eloquently, describing India as:^[3]

“The land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendour and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of traditions, whose yesterday's bear date with the moderate antiquities for the rest of nations-the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the world combined.”

Indophobia

The term "Indophobia" was first coined in western academia by American Indologist Thomas Trautmann to describe negative attitudes expressed by some British Indologists against Indian history, society, religions and culture.^[4] Historians have noted that during the British Empire, "evangelical influence drove British policy down a path that tended to minimize and denigrate the accomplishments of Indian civilization and to position itself as the negation of the earlier British Indomania that was nourished by belief in Indian wisdom."^[5]

In Charles Grant highly influential "Observations on the ...Asiatic subjects of Great Britain" (1796),^[6] Grant criticized the Orientalists for being too respectful to Indian culture and religion. His work tried to determine the Hindu's "true place in the moral scale", and he alleged that the Hindus are "a people exceedingly depraved".

One of the most influential historians of India during the British Empire, James Mill was criticised for being prejudiced against Hindus. .^[7] The Indologist H.H. Wilson wrote that the tendency of Mill's work is "evil".^[8] Mill claimed that both Indians and Chinese people are cowardly, unfeeling and mendacious. Both Mill and Grant attacked Orientalist scholarship that was too respectful of Indian culture: "It was unfortunate that a mind so pure, so warm in the pursuit of truth, and so devoted to oriental learning, as that of Sir William Jones, should have adopted the hypothesis of a high state of civilization in the principal countries of Asia."^[9]

Lustful Indian male

Stereotypes of Indians intensified during and after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, known as "India's First War of Independence" to the Indians and as the "Sepoy Mutiny" to the British, when Indian sepoys rebelled against the British East India Company's rule in India. Allegations of war rape were used as propaganda by British colonialists in order to justify the colonization of India. While incidents of rape committed by Indian rebels against English women and girls were generally uncommon during the rebellion, this was exaggerated to great effect by the British media in order to justify British colonialism in the Indian subcontinent and to violently suppress opposition.^[10]

At the time, British newspapers had printed various apparently eyewitness accounts of English women and girls being raped by Indian rebels, but with little physical evidence to support these accounts. It was later found that some of these accounts were false stories created in order to paint the native people of India as savages who need to be civilized by British colonialists, a mission sometimes known as "The White Man's Burden". One such account published by The Times, regarding an incident where 48 English girls as young as 10-14 had been raped by Indian rebels in Delhi, was criticized as false propaganda by Karl Marx, who pointed out that the story was written by a clergyman in Bangalore, far from the events of the rebellion.^[11]

Despite the questionable authenticity of many colonial accounts regarding the rebellion, the stereotype of the Indian "dark-skinned rapist" occurred frequently in English literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The idea of protecting English "female chastity" from the "lustful Indian male" had a significant influence on the policies of the British Raj in order to prevent racial miscegenation between the British elite and the native Indian population. While most of these discriminatory policies were directed against native Indians, some restrictive policies were also imposed on British females in order to "protect" them from miscgenation,^[12][13] similar to the purdah in Indian society.^[14]

In 1883, the Ilbert Bill, which would have granted Indian judges in Bengal the right to judge British offenders, was opposed by many British colonialists on the grounds that Indian judges cannot be trusted in dealing with cases involving English female memsahib.^[15] The British press in India even spread wild rumours about how Indian judges would abuse their power to fill their harems with white English females. The propaganda that Indian judges cannot be trusted in dealing with cases involving English females helped raise considerable support against the bill.^[16]

The stereotype of the lustful Indian male led to disastrous consequences with the rise of the Indian independence movement in 1919, when an assault on Miss Marcella Sherwood by an Indian mob motivated Reginald Dyer to order the Amritsar massacre, where over 1,000 Indians were killed and more than 2,000 injured.^[17] In the aftermath of this massacre, the long-held stereotype of Indian males as dark-skinned rapists lusting after white English females was challenged by several novels such as E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924) and Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown (1966), both of which involve an Indian male being wrongly accused of raping an English female.^[18]

Ignorant and neglected women

During the Ilbert Bill controversy in 1883, English women who opposed the bill argued that Bengali women, who they stereotyped as "ignorant" and "neglected" by their men, and that Bengali babu should therefore not be given the right to judge cases involving English women. Bengali women who supported the bill responded by claiming that they were more educated than the English women opposed to the bill, and pointed out that more Indian women had academic degrees than British women did at the time, alluding to the fact that the University of Calcutta became one of the first universities to admit female graduates to its degree programmes in 1878, before any of the British universities.^[19]

Contemporary stereotypes

Both South Asians and East Asians were subject to stereotypes of exclusion, especially during the late 1800s and early 1900s with the advent of what Americans called the Yellow Peril and Hindu Invasion. American newspaper headlines illustrating stereotypes of exclusion towards South Asians include: "The Tide of Turbans" (Forum, 1910) and "The Perils of Immigration Impose on Congress a New Issue: the Hindoo Invasion - a new peril" (Current Opinion, 1914).

Violent fighting over securing an Indian wife

"The shortage of Indian women resulted in violence committed by jealous lovers and husbands, creating a stereotype of East Indian men, which gained in infamy^[20]... coolies reputation with the police was bad and significantly while the Negroes use their tongue in argument, the Indian commit murder, and given the scarcity of Indian women, without hesitation.^[20] Thus the stereotype is reinforced ascribing to the Indian husband a frantically jealous discposition."^[20]

Irrationality

"[I]n the Western popular consciousness the Indian subcontinent... is denounced for its irrationality^[21]...Hindu beliefs and traditions are often represented as a superstitious localized collection of archaic cults^[21]...During the impressionable teenage years, these negative portrayals [of Hinduism] can cause shame and embarrassment among Indian-American students regarding their ancestry and can engender a dislike for India^[21]... Negativities may persist in classes at the University level [in the United States], in which Hinduism is represented as myth,"^[21] (this refers only to those following the Hindu religion, and another stereotype is presented here: most people think that all Indians are Hindu)

Monkey brain eaters

"The wholly fictional depiction of India in the Steven Spielberg film, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, seems to have been taken as a valid portrayal of India by many teachers, since a large number of students surveyed complained that teachers referred to the eating of monkey brains." ^[21]

Tech support

There is prevalent stereotype of Indians being responsible for handling tech support and is deeply involved in the IT industry in general.

Intelligence

Especially in Japan, Indians are often represented as extremely smart people. In many cases, they are depicted as doctors, engineers or mathematicians, and believed to have extremely high IQ. ^[22]

Pakistanis

Pakistanis are often stereotyped as taxi drivers in America. Their stereotypes are mostly similar to Indian stereotypes, but also tend to overlap with the stereotypes of West and Central Asians and the stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims. In Britain, the word "Paki" is a derogatary ethnic slur for British Pakistanis, and the slur is sometimes used against British Asians in general. For example, the "Paki shop" stereotype is due to South Asians being stereotyped as being a majority of newsagent and convenience store shopkeepers.

Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans

Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans are often stereotyped similarly. This is mainly because of their ethnic features which is similar to that of Indians. In addition, Bangladeshis are often stereotyped in a similar way to Pakistanis due to the majority being Muslims. Also, as it is not typically understood that a majority of Sri Lankans are Buddhists, they are typically assumed to be either Muslim or Hindu. There is also the stereotype of that Bangaldeshis are fervent consumers of fish though there is no proof of this.

See also

• British Asian
• South Asian American
• Indo-Canadian
• Stereotypes of East and Southeast Asians
• Brown people
• Dhalsim

References

1. ^ Ludwig Tieck und die Brüder Schlegel, Briefe. Edited by Lüdecke. Frankfurt/M. 1930.
2. ^ Voltaire, Lettres sur l'origine des sciences et sur celle des peuples de l'Asie (first published Paris, 1777), letter of 15 December 1775.
3. ^ A collection of 'quotes on India' from famous personalities. http://www.pratheep.com/quotes.htm
4. ^ Aryans and British India By Thomas R. Trautmann
5. ^ Trautmann 1997:113
6. ^ Grant, Charles. (1796) Observations on the state of society among the Asiatic subjects of Great Britain, particularly with respect to morals; and on the means of improving it, written chiefly in the year 1792.
7. ^ Trautmann 1997:117
8. ^ H.H. Wilson 1858 in James Mill 1858, The history of British India, Preface of the editor
9. ^ Mill, James - 1858, 2:109, The history of British India.
10. ^ Beckman, Karen Redrobe (2003), Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism, Duke University Press, pp. 31-3, ISBN 0822330741 
11. ^ Beckman, Karen Redrobe (2003), Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism, Duke University Press, pp. 33-4, ISBN 0822330741 
12. ^ Kent, Eliza F. (2004), Converting Women, Oxford University Press US, pp. 85-6, ISBN 0195165071 
13. ^ Kaul, Suvir (1996), "Review Essay: Colonial Figures and Postcolonial Reading", Diacritics 26 (1): 74-89 [83-9] 
14. ^ Webster, Anthony (2006), The Debate on the Rise of the British Empire, Manchester University Press, pp. 132-3, ISBN 0719067936 
15. ^ Carter, Sarah (1997), Capturing Women: The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada's Prairie West, McGill-Queen's University Press, p. 17, ISBN 0773516565 
16. ^ Reina Lewis, Sara Mills (2003), Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, p. 444, ISBN 0415942756 
17. ^ Vinay Lal. "The Incident of the 'Crawling Lane': Women in the Punjab Disturbances of 1919". [[UCLA College of Letters and dhraserhjwrajhfds Science]]. http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/History/British/Crawling.html. Retrieved 2008-12-26. 
18. ^ Loomba, Ania (1998), Colonialism-postcolonialism, Routledge, pp. 79-80, ISBN 0415128099 
19. ^ Reina Lewis, Sara Mills (2003), Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, pp. 451-3, ISBN 0415942756 
20. ^ ^{a b c} Ramdin, Ron. Arising from Bondage: A History of the Indo-Caribbean People.Published by NYU Press, 2000 ISBN 0814775489
21. ^ ^{a b c d e} Rosser, Yvette. Missouri Southern State University. Teaching South Asia. 2001. Accessed July 18. [1]
22. ^ (Japanese)"NY niche Geki column" (Mag Mag) October 2, 2006 Keiko Tsukada, Yukiko Nakahachi [2] (Yomiuri Shimbun)