American Indian
I talked to Vivek about the whole "India" thing while waiting for Nacho Libre to start yesterday. You know, my contention that there's no such thing as India, or it's a very weak post-colonial construct, at least.

I'll just restate it. A Punjabi has much less in common with a Goan than an Alabama trailer home dweller has in common with a Hollywood movie mogul. Across America, there is at least a shared mythology. The myth of the self-made man, like Iacocca or Sam Walton. There is George Washington and his cherry tree, there is Abraham Lincoln rising up from poverty, hiking miles to the library and coming home to read by candlelight, there is Rosa Parks spontaneously deciding that enough is enough and sparking an insurrection, etc., etc., etc.

India has no such common mythology. There's no common language (unless you count English--I've read, and believe, that English will allow you to cover more ground in India, geographically, than any native Indian language), there's no common history (some consider Aryans invaders, others brag about their Aryan ancestry. Likewise Mughals.)

Westerners might point to the myth of Ghandi, but even that does not carry all across the sub-continent.

"But we have a shared experience," argued Vivek. "A common set of experiences that unites us."

"Maybe in the diaspora," I halfway agreed. "When outsiders look at us, they see the same thing. So we are treated the same, and you can argue that we share those experiences...but only in the diaspora. And do we want others to define who we are, anyway?"

I mean, I was raised to be proud to be a Sikh, a Punjabi jat. Within that identity construct, we definitely have have a common mythology--mostly involving martyrs who were killed at the hands of the cruel Mughals for not converting to Islam, like Bhai Taru, who allowed his scalp to be removed rather than cut his hair, or Bhai Mani Singh who's body was severed, one joint at a time, or the fifth Guru, Arjun Dev who was forced to sit on hot iron sheets while burning sand was poured on him, or the ninth Guru, Teg Bahadur, who was beheaded, and the list goes on and on...Not to mention the women like Sardarni Sada Kaur, and Mai Bhago who PROVE, beyond a SHADOW of a DOUBT, that Sikhs treat all women fair and equal (that's sarcasm, y'all)...

Anyway, I digress. My point is that, although the people of the subcontinent have a rich and ancient history, "India" is a young nation and has not forged much of a national identity, yet, and regional identities are much stronger, in my experience.

So I hung up the phone and met Tish and Iris and Patrick and Tiffany, and as we headed toward the escalator, Tiffany, who is West Indian (raised in England), turned to me and asked, "So, where are you from? I mean your people."

"India," I answered...

...which led to a whole big discussion about this same thing with Tiffany...