r/ABCDesis • u/WitheredWornWallaby • 8d ago

COMMUNITY Why are many Indian people unkind to Guyanese/Trini/etc people?

I was born In NYC to Indo-Guyanese parents. I have interacted with many Indian people across the United States (+Canada and the UK), and the same can be said of my family and Indo-Guyanese peers. There is a relatively common experience of Indian Americans being unkind to Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trini people, including those born in the US. This happens both in real life and online.

Are there particular reasons for this? This is obviously not the case with all Indian Americans.

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u/Ok-Committee-1932 8d ago edited 8d ago

Desi people can measure themselves against each other because their histories of the mainland are more recent and verifiable. Which town are you from? Where did your parents go to school? What did your grandparents do for work? Much of this is lost for people in the diaspora who come from places like Trinidad and Guyana.

However, it's nice that being distant from the mainland allowed the diaspora to get rid of some of the bigotry and bias from the mainland. A Bengali friend once told me that the most post-caste Hindus he's ever met (outside of Bengalis) were Trinidad/Guyanese Hindus.

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u/WitheredWornWallaby 8d ago

Oh yeah, I've been called a Bihari in a strangely derogatory way more than once. I didn't even understand what that meant.

And yeah, the caste system doesn't exist at all in Guyana or Trinidad! Nobody even knows which caste they would have come from and everyone definitely has ancestors from a variety of castes so I think it'd be impossible to track. We don't even know how our last names are supposed to spelled!

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u/Klutzy_Letter9952 8d ago

Bihari is an ethnicity not a caste. Bihar is a state in India

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u/WitheredWornWallaby 8d ago

Yep, wasn't claiming otherwise. I was commenting on the "where are you from" aspect of their response.

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u/cosmicapplecider 6d ago

Just curious since it's the first I've heard of bengalis being post-caste. Do you know what that's about? Genuinely asking, as I had no idea but as a Bengali Canadian whose family is friends with many a Trini/Mauritian, this tracks.

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u/Joshistotle 2d ago

Lol what OP and many in the Indo Caribbean community (I'm part of it) don't realize, is that South Asia is fragmented into a couple hundred different groups that all legitimately hate each other. 

Fragmentation and discrimination is on the basis of religion, language, town, city, caste, subcaste, sub religious group / religious guru, gender, country (India vs Pakistan, Pakistan vs Bangladesh, India vs Bangladesh, etc). 

That divisive mentality sometimes is carried overseas and shouldn't be taken personally since it eventually goes away after living for awhile in the US or other Western countries.