Disenchanted with the ‘Asian’ label
Over recent years ‘Asian’ has been the term used in Britain to refer to all people from the Indian subcontinent. Of course, ideally, Asian should also refer to Chinese, Malaysian, Arabs, Japanese, Vietnamese and many other groups, but that is not so in Britain. Hence, if you notice, ‘British Asian’ newspapers, such as Asian Age, Eastern Eye, Asian Express, and Asian Voice deal almost exclusively with matters relating to communities originating within the subcontinent. The famous line from the radio station Sunrise radio proclaims itself as the ‘greatest Asian radio station in the world’, but it deals exclusively with people and cultures of the subcontinent. Of course, this is pretty poor use of the word ‘Asian’. But it is not too unreasonable or at least understandable because it is difficult to call a newspaper something like ‘People of the Indian Subcontinent Express,’ and since in Britain it has become accepted that ‘Asian’ means precisely this - we can understand the use of this short and convenient term.
September 28th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
I completely agree with the article that labels ‘anyone with brown skin’ asian. The problem is that I just quailified as a pharmacist and began work in a mainly white area. The patients all used to comment that ‘ it must be hard fasting for Ramaddan’. After a while I got a bit sick of this, knowing that the media dubbed all the people from asia, regardless of origin, as asian.
So one day this gentleman approached me and I was advising him on diet. And so the topic of Ramaddan came up and how ‘it must be difficult for me to talk about food when I’m fasting’ also came up. So I said to the man ‘No sorry, I’m not fasting because I’m Indian. So what religion do you think that would most likely make me?’ The man stuttered for a while then came up with ‘Hindu’. I responded ‘Yes, now lets hope you never get confused like that again’ in a very condescending tone.
I just wish the media would distinguish beween different types of asian.
September 30th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
Sir, This is a baffling problem. We may have many common genetic factors but we are economic migrants in this country and the people of Indian irigin have done well for themselves. On the other hand the Pakistanis and the Bangladeshis follow the same pattern that any Islamic community follows no matter where they are i.e. non achievers, eternally discontented, mostly doing blue collar jobs, piling up griviences some real some imaginative, eventually making their presence felt through Jihad of some sort. I think we should make every effort to make it clear wherever possible and appropriate that we are Hindus and from India Devinder Thakur