By Achal Mehra

Almost one in eight Indian Americans are multiracial.

A recently released census report reveals that almost 12 percent of Indian Americans — nearly 221,000 individuals — identified themselves as multiracial in the 2000 Census. That proportion is growing rapidly as independent government data discloses that almost a fifth to a quarter of all childbirths involving an Indian parent are to multiracial couples.
Interracial coupling is even higher among other South Asian groups: 28 percent of Bangladeshis, 25 percent of Pakistanis, 16 percent of Nepalese and 14 percent of Bhutanese recorded themselves as multi racial in the 2000 Census.
Indians are sure dissolving quickly into that all embracing American melting pot.
This blending of the Indian identity is seemingly a stealth phenomenon within the community. Multi racial Indians and intercultural couples are invisible from Indian public life. One has to wonder why? There is a great irony here. Within the community, both Indian and South Asian, there is a subtle to blatant prejudice against interracial marriages. I recall vividly the reaction some years ago of a friend whom I congratulated soon after he informed me that his daughter was getting married. “It’s not like that,” he responded sheepishly. “She’s marrying a white guy.”
He was oblivious to the fact that many, many fellow Indians were also marrying white guys and white gals, and African Americans and Hispanics and other Asians too. Indeed Indians and Asians as a group have among the highest proportion of interracial marriages in the United States, far higher than other racial groups.
Little India picked up on this phenomenon long before the census data did when we did a cover feature five years ago in April 1996 on interracial marriages. At the time, many people within the community were startled, even skeptical, of our findings. But there can be no disputing the census data.
Indians have worked hard to impress the Indian identity upon their progeny, establishing religious institutions, cultural organizations, and the like. Their commendable efforts have provided a vibrancy and vitality to Indian culture in the rich and teeming colonies of Little Indias in Jackson Heights and Flushing, New York; Edison, NJ; Decatur, Ga.; Chicago, Ill.; Anaheim, Calif., and elsewhere.
At the same time, the Indian experience in America is also being shaped by their adopted homeland. The rapidly multiracial character of the Indian community is an element of that reformulation of the Indian American identity. We did after all migrate and so opened ourselves to the winds of change in our new environment.
The face of the new Indian American is to be found in the thriving Indian cultures of Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa, Mauritius, Trinidad, Guyana, Senegal, Fiji, and Surinam, where Indians migrated almost a century earlier and forged a multiplicity of new blended identities.
The Indian identity in America similarly is evolving along multiple paths: for some it takes the form of a stronger affinity to Indian culture; for some others it involves a deep immersion in their adopted culture; for yet others the two cultures offer a potpourri of choices to mix and match at will.
It is time to celebrate and embrace all of these multiple expressions of the Indian American identity. So say a special welcome to our new family of multiethnic twice migrants Indians from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean and the multiracial children and interracial couples within the Indian American community.

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