In his latest Smokers’ Corner column, writer Nadeem F. Paracha traces the century-long evolution of South Asia’s uneasy relationship with the West — from early attempts to claim kinship with “Aryan” Europeans to today’s competing narratives of cultural pride, nationalism, and spiritual superiority.
The piece opens with the 1923 U.S. Supreme Court case of Bhagat Singh Thind, an Indian Sikh who argued he should qualify for U.S. citizenship as a “Caucasian.” Thind’s claim — rooted in pseudo-scientific racial theories popular at the time — was ultimately rejected, but it illustrated how many South Asians sought legitimacy by aligning themselves with Western ideas of racial hierarchy.
Paracha notes that during the late colonial period, sections of India’s Hindu and Muslim elite embraced European racial concepts to justify their own social status. Some upper-caste Hindus internalized notions of Aryan supremacy, claiming shared ancestry with Europeans, while Muslim elites emphasized Persian and Arab lineage to link themselves to civilizations that had once inspired Europe’s own.
As Western dominance grew, so did South Asia’s ambivalence. When competing with Western modernity proved difficult, many turned instead to “spiritual conquest.” Between the 1960s and 1970s, waves of Hindu gurus and Muslim Sufi teachers headed West, presenting Eastern mysticism as a cure for the moral emptiness of materialist societies. For a time, they became cultural celebrities — until conservative Christian movements reacted by reclaiming their own moral frameworks, depicting these imported spiritualisms as alien or decadent.
By the 1980s and beyond, South Asian diasporas began to diverge in their strategies of belonging. Hindu communities, Paracha argues, largely assimilated into Western economies, blending success with an increasingly assertive cultural identity. Muslim communities, facing suspicion and marginalization, often retreated into more conservative interpretations of faith, seeking moral purity as a defense against perceived Western decadence — a move that later fueled Islamophobic backlash.
In recent years, however, Paracha observes a reversal: while Hindu diaspora groups have prospered materially, their growing alignment with Hindu nationalism and the BJP’s ideology has generated new tensions abroad. Displays of cultural pride and assertions of ancient civilizational superiority are being interpreted by many Western observers as arrogance or ethno-chauvinism.
Paracha closes with an anecdote from Seattle: a white sociology professor recalls an Indian friend who once preached Eastern spirituality to him, later becoming a wealthy BJP donor whose son now boasts in class about descending from a “superior race.” The professor, Paracha writes, sees this as evidence of how Hindu nationalism’s rise has infused some diaspora communities with a “regressive and reactionary cultural ethos.”
Ultimately, Paracha argues that the South Asian search for identity in the West — whether through imitation, spiritual inversion, or nationalist pride — remains unresolved. The question lingers, as relevant today as it was in Thind’s time: Can one ever be both insider and outsider at once?