South Asia is the name given to the region of the Indian subcontinent that includes (in alphabetical order) the countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldive Islands, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. This naming is subject to change, based on shifting political affinities, alliances, or occupation. E.g., some consider Afghanistan to be a part of Central Asia, Western Asia, or the Middle East. Myanmar, once a part of the British Raj, is now seen as a Southeast Asian country. Tibet may be seen as an outlier, with cultural ties to South Asia, linguistic ties to Myanmar, and an East Asian geographical location.

People have different reasons to claim regional identities and those reasons also change with time. Who I include as “my” people says more about me than either the place I came from or the place I live in. Many immigrants from South Asian countries to North America call themselves “desi,” from the Hindi word "desh," meaning "country."  "Desi" means "of or from my country."  It’s become an insider term claimed by those who want to proclaim a pan-South Asian identity. It’s the opposite of the word vilāyati, which became Anglicized as "blighty" during colonial times.

South Asians in North America

Turns out people from South Asia have been on this continent for a while. The first Asian writer to win the Newbery Medal for the most distinguished contribution to American children's literature was Dhan Gopal Mukerji, in 1928. The first Asian American elected to Congress, Dalip Singh Saund, was from India. Fazlur Rahman Khan, the architect who designed the Sears Tower in Chicago, was born in Dhaka, in present-day Bangladesh. The Barbour Scholarships for Oriental Women, endowed in 1917, brought young women from India to the University of Michigan beginning in 1929. SAADA, the South Asian American Digital Archive, works to document the rich history of South Asians in the United States. The Archive of the South Asian Diaspora at UC Berkeley contains publications printed and distributed by the Gadar Party, a nationalist organization founded in 1913 by South Asian immigrants on the Pacific West Coast of the United States and Canada.

Why does any of this matter? Just compare today's anti-immigrant sentiments with the Asiatic Barred Zone of 1917.

South Asian Voices in Children’s Literature

There was a time when I had a web page titled “Common Errors in American children's books with South Asian content.” That was back when there were maybe 5 of us writing from any kind of South Asian perspective for the North American market. Mostly, the region and its emigrants were being written about by people who didn’t really know us at all. In my public library in Maryland in the early 1990s, Kipling represented India.

For years, I wore a kind of unofficial neighborhood watch badge. I’d call out books when it was clear that editors didn’t know their Hindi from their Hindu. I’d push back when they had no idea that all of the subcontinent wasn’t one big undifferentiated group of people. I’d point them to my list of common errors.

But look at us now! I can click my way to so many titles by American and Canadian writers with a variety of regional perspectives, linguistic and cultural, and religious backgrounds, all with links to various South Asian countries. I need no longer weep over awards when they went to books whose Indian content felt as if it had been plucked out from a tourism video. I may be ready now to retire my compendium of errors and my error-seeking glasses.