No, I don't speak Hindu

As an Indian/South Asian in the U.S., I get asked this question all the time - 'So, do you also speak hindu?'

There is going to be a time 20 years later where someone, somewhere is going to wonder, 'Hmmm, that's odd. Despite being Indian-American dominated county, they voted for this weird person instead of the of that weird person. That is so out of the ordinary.' This is just a time capsule for that. Not a full main course to dive in, just an appetizer to get your palette started. I don't have the ability, resources or the patience to get into the nuances of the story.

To begin with, there are now 1% of Indian-Americans living in the United States of America. That is around 3.2 million people. That comes out to be on the lower end of other asian immigrants like Chinese, Korean and Filipino. And mainly, nowhere close to affect any electoral outcomes. At the moment. But it's expected to change. By 2060, it is expected that, it will at least double if not go higher.

Secondly, Indian-Americans do not have common origin. There are 28 states and 8 union territories in India. Almost each of those speaks their own language, eats their own cuisine, worships according to their own god fearing rituals and most importantly, votes on their own political ideologies. It is kind of impossible to track the immigration to the U.S. by Indian states because, we all know that one thing we hate in India is collecting data. But, we have some data of the languages spoken by people in the U.S. Because the states in India are based on languages, I am making a very lazy assumption that the languages spoken and the states of origin have a positive correlation.

Let's start. We have U.S. population census data of everyone above 5 years old and the languages they speak. It does not discriminate between citizens/1st gens/GC holders/students etc. There are over 15 Indian languages represented in the U.S. Hindi is obviously the most dominant one with around 650 thousand people speaking it but Gujarati and Bengali are also prominent despite being confined to a smaller population in India compared to Hindi which is widely spoken in the central and northern parts of India and is well adopted in the western states of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Goa.

Urdu's presence comes from the Pakistani presence in the U.S. which is very hard to distinguish from the Indian presence in a lot of areas in the U.S. You know how you fight with someone in your high school and you both end up at the same college and everyone assumes you both are friends and invites you both to parties? Just that.

Now what do I speak? I come from a city called Pune which is a few hours away from Mumbai which is in Maharashtra. Despite being a diverse state, Marathi is the state language and that is my mother tongue. I understand and can communicate in Hindi because we share the same script, pretty much the same grammar and considerable vocabulary. And that's the case with a lot of folks. Hence, the high number for Hindi. So in the census, I would tick both Marathi and Hindi.

But then there are all those other languages which share neither with Hindi. Like Telugu or Tamil or Malayalam which are the southern languages in India. Bengali is widely spoken in the east and Punjabi is spoken in, you guessed it, Punjab (and parts of Delhi according to Honey Singh songs but I have no 1st hand experience).

So how are the people who speak these languages spread across the U.S.? Well, that is where the fun begins. The Indian diaspora is not evenly spread as you might know. I am going to share a few case studies here. First, I wanted to compare the immigrants from the neighboring states of Maharashtra and Gujarat.

It is was absolutely insane for me to believe that there are so few Marathi speaking Indians in the U.S. I always believed that Marathi speaking populous was extremely wide spread and a very flourishing community. Turns out, I was wrong. There are more people dancing in the streets of NJ for garba in Navratri than there are Marathi speakers on the continent. 50% of all Marathi speakers are concentrated in California, NJ, Texas, Illinois and Georgia.

Second, I was taken aback by the Bengali speaking population in New York. 40% of all the Bengali speaking folks in the U.S. live in one state, and mostly one city, New York. There are close to 100k Bengalis in New York.

So with all that, I wanted to find out which Indian language is most spoken in each state other than Hindi.

There are 15 states where Gujarati and Telugu are the most spoken Indian languages. It was really interesting to see Gujarati dominate the south and north east and Telugu dominating the midwest. In fact in NJ, Gujarati is the most popular Indian language even beating Hindi. It was also surprising to se Punjabi's presence in California and Washington. Punjabi is twice as likely to be spoken than Tamil & Telugu, and 8 times likelier than Marathi in California.

We are not a monolith. We never were. No one ever is. The same way Cubans and Mexicans shouldn't be clubbed as Latinos, by 2050, Indian-Americans can no longer be bucketed so broadly. For example, (apologies to generalize here) but people from the Bengali origin traditionally have had a a completely different outlook towards practically everything compared to Marathis and Gujaratis. So I don't think when the time comes, we should really be surprised if the sizable vote-bank of Indian-Americans from NY, NJ and California all vote in different directions. It is easy to say that 'but it was their parents' or 'everyone who comes to the U.S. is pretty much the same'. Agreed, and even though there will be similarities which are currently amplified due to the small population, the inherent biases and priors acquired through upbringing and culture will always exist. And they will show when the subpopulation reaches a critical mass.

In the meanwhile, the most common denominator that currently exists is singing to 'Om Jai Jagadeesh Hare' at every event from Diwali to Holi. Hope that one ends soon too. Cannot wait.