In 1923, an Indian migrant to the United States, Bhagat Singh Thind, went to the US Supreme Court to argue that he should be treated as a ‘Caucasian’ (white person). 

Thind had arrived in the US in 1913 for higher studies. He was granted US citizenship in 1918, but it was revoked under a 1906 law that only allowed “free white persons” to be eligible for US citizenship. Five years later, Thind and his lawyer, S. G. Pandit, went to the court, where they argued that the law did not apply to Thind because he belonged to the “Aryan race.” Even though a Sikh, Thind described himself as a high-caste Indian whose ancestors were Aryan.

At the time, various pseudoscientific theories about race were popular among many white Europeans and Americans. These theories placed the white race on top of the “Great Chain of Being.”

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According to the legal scholar Ian Haney López, Thind tried to prove that, by being a “high-caste, of full Indian blood”, he was a Caucasian as per certain anthropological definitions of the time. But Thind lost the case.

This case highlights the intriguing manner in which many South Asians often tried to come to terms with the Western cultural and political ethos of the early 20th century. In his 2006 study of the Indian middle class milieu in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the German academic Markus Daechsel demonstrated that many Hindu and Muslim notables were smitten by racial theories developed in the West.

From colonial racial theories to Hindu nationalism and Islamophobia, South Asians’ struggle for identity in the West remains as complex — and revealing — as ever

They claimed that the roots of these theories (which they accepted as “scientific truths”) could be found in the genealogy of South Asian people. For example, some Hindu Indians, especially those from higher castes, internalised the colonial idea of Caucasian supremacy to elevate their social status. They insisted they were part of the original Aryan people, of which Western Caucasians were a branch.

Similar claims were also aired by many Indian Muslims. However, the Muslims evolved the claims to mean having Arab and Persian ancestries that built great civilisations, which then went on to inspire the rise of modern Western civilisation.

South Asian Hindus and Muslims who adopted ‘Western ways’ were severely criticised by those who claimed to be the original Aryans, or from civilisations that had inspired the growth of modern Western civilisation. This was their way of coming to terms with Western political, economic and social dominance in a world in which Hindu and Muslim empires had long collapsed.

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Then, unable (or unwilling) to compete with the technologies and ideas driving modern Western civilisation, many Indian Hindus and Muslims turned to filling the ‘spiritual void’ that they believed Western civilisation had plunged into in its pursuit of materialistic goals.

From the mid-1960s till the mid-1970s, Western countries were flooded with South Asian Hindu preachers and gurus, and Muslim ‘Sufi’ masters. They wanted to spiritually enrich (for a fee) the ‘spiritually bankrupt’ West. To the South Asian gurus and the ‘Sufis’ in the West, this began to signify the overcoming of amoral Western superiority through the ‘moral/spiritual superiority of the East.’

This did not go unnoticed, though. From the 1980s onwards, right-wing Christian groups in the West started to formulate their own strands of spiritualism and morality that, to them, were at odds with ‘Eastern spiritualism.’ They viewed the practices of the gurus and ‘Sufi’ masters as products of the ‘perversities’ of the 1960s’ counterculture in Europe and the US, and at odds with the West’s ‘white Christian heritage.’

South Asian Hindu and Muslim diasporas in Europe and the US responded by detaching themselves from the ‘perversities’ and becoming more active components of ‘Western materialism.’ Hindu diasporas were more successful in doing this than Muslim diasporas. 

The latter retreated and ghettoised themselves within the confines of more puritanical (and less esoteric) variants of Islam. This retreat signified a desire to overcome ‘amoral’ Western environs and ideas with the moral superiority of the puritanical and highly ritualised variants of Islam that the South Asian Muslim diaspora in the West began to adopt.

Right-wing Christian groups and white nativists/nationalists saw this as a threat to the ‘Western way of life’, its Christian heritage, and a refusal by Muslim migrants to become part of the dominant culture.  This resulted in increasing cases of Islamophobia. Muslims who had seamlessly adopted Western culture saw the adoption of puritanical Islam by their contemporaries as a defeatist ploy.

Recently, Hindu interest groups in Europe and the US have reported an increase in attacks against Hindus and their places of worship. Unlike the South Asian Muslim diaspora in the West, the Hindu diaspora successfully became a more vital component of Western economies. So what has triggered cases of what is now referred to as Hinduphobia?

In the last three decades, the Indian Hindu diaspora rose to become an enterprising lot. They then began to couple this with Hindu nationalism. In the 1990s, Hindu nationalism came to the surface with great force in India. This nationalism — strengthened by the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India — promoted a strong, prosperous and ‘culturally proud’ India. This resonated immediately with the Indian Hindu diaspora’s economic aspirations.

Yet, the increasing displays of this cultural pride, backed by newfound wealth in the West, have begun to be viewed by many white Westerners as a show of arrogance and an unwillingness to get assimilated — especially during a time when many Western economies and democracies have begun to struggle.

Last week, I came across a middle-aged white American in Seattle. He’s an assistant professor of sociology at a university. He said that, when he was in his early twenties, an Indian friend of his used to mock him as a spiritually bankrupt person who had lost all contact with his soul. Decades later, the friend became a prosperous businessman in Seattle and a leading overseas donor to the BJP. His son now sits in the sociology class of the assistant professor. The professor said that the son does not hesitate in telling him that he (the son) belongs to a superior race that gave birth to the Caucasian races of the West.

According to the assistant professor, “Due to the embracing of Hindu nationalism, the economic advancement of the Indian diaspora in the US has been offset by a regressive and reactionary cultural ethos, mostly within the higher caste, middle-class Hindu communities.” 

He then added: “This is not going down well with a lot of Americans, who have begun to see many such Indians as arrogant, crass and antagonistic towards Western culture.” 

Published in Dawn, EOS, November 2nd, 2025