Two YouTube Videos About South Asians In The Caribbean And An Article Excerpt About Why The Referent "East Indians" Was Changed To "South Asians"

CaribNation TV, Apr 29, 2015
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Click https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qeM2BecjNI for Part II of that documentary.

The beginning of that televized discussion talks about social problems South Asians have in New York. Starting at 15:36 the panel discusses the interactions that descendants of Indo-Caribbean people have in the United States with South Asians who have just recently come to the USA. After that discussion, the panel talks about South Asians identity in the United States and their relationships with Afro-Caribbeans and African Americans.
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The summary for these documentary videos is found below.

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Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post showcases Part I of a 2015 YouTube series entitled "The Caribbean East Indians". This post also includes the summary that was given for that video. as well as a definition for the referent "South Asians".

This  pancocojams post also showcases a 2014 video about race and "East Indians" in Guyana.

A definition of South Asians is presented in this post along with an excerpt of an 2017 article entitled "The Complicated and Sometimes Racist History of Referring to South Asians as “East Indian".

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This post also includes information on that subject from Wikipedia.

The content of this post is presented for historical and cultural purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to the ancestors from South Asia (formerly referred to as East Indians). Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post and thanks to the publishers of these videos on YouTube. 

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SECTION A: THE SUMMARY FOR THE FIRST SHOWCASED VIDEO
byCaribNation TV, Apr 29, 2015

"The “East Indians” of the Caribbean and Caribbean countries are the descendants of immigrants from the Indian sub-continent. Despite their name they are no relation to the indigenous aboriginal “Indians” who inhabit or formerly inhabited the area. The East Indians are, along with Black Afro-Caribbeans (“West Indians”), one of the two major ethnic groups in Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and Suriname. There are also East Indian communities in Jamaica (one estimate for 1980 gives the East Indian population as 50,000), Grenada and the French islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe.

Indians were first brought to the Caribbean from the mid-1840s to work on white-owned sugar plantations as indentured labour to replace newly freed African slaves. The majority of immigrants were young men; later disturbances on the plantations forced the authorities to try and correct the imbalance. Indenture was usually for five years and the labourer was subject to restricting and paternalistic regulations which were sometimes described as “a new system of slavery”. After an initial number of years it was possible for the labourer to return to India but since many were offered land in order to entice them to stay near the estates, most stayed in their new country.

The racial tensions and stereotypes of later years were formed during the colonial period. Indians worked for less than Africans and were regarded as cheap and malleable labour. There were differences of culture between the Hindu and Muslim Indians and the Christian Africans. While the Africans, who were more likely to be literate in English, filled the jobs in the urban and commercial sectors, Indians were most likely to remain labourers and small farmers."

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SECTION B:  SHOWCASE VIDEO #2 - How Britain Used India To Replace Slave Labor

 

AJ+, Jan 18, 2023

After abolishing slavery, Britain looked to India to replace the labor on its plantations. The British Empire has since gone to great lengths for history to forget how it created the world’s largest diaspora.

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SECTION C: DEFINITION FOR SOUTH ASIANS
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Asia
"South Asia is the southern subregion of Asia, which is defined in both geographical and ethnic-cultural terms. As commonly conceptualised, South Asia consists of the countries Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka,[7] with Afghanistan also often included.[8]

Topographically, it is dominated by the Indian subcontinent … South Asia is bounded by Central Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and West Asia."

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SECTION D: ARTICLE EXCERPT
https://www.sezin.org/2017/01/26/complicated-sometimes-racist-history-referring-south-asians-east-indian/ "The Complicated and Sometimes Racist History of Referring to South Asians as “East Indian"
January 26, 2017, Sezin Koehler
..."Since Europe was the geopolitical center of the world at that time, the term “East Indian” has been used at least since 1661, and became code for the country of India — evidenced by organizations such as the British East India Company, which primarily traded goods out of India to Europe. “West Indian” eventually took on three meanings: one referring to the Caribbean as a whole, another to the country of West Indies and yet another for the Native American populations of North America. Soon, Natives would be referred to as Red Indians or American Indians in order to distinguish between these other ethnically, socially and culturally distinct peoples whose names had been conflated into the blanket term of “Indian.”

Indian-American podcaster Ashok Kondabolu told The Mash-Up Americans about being Indian from India and growing up in Queens, New York:

“I mean, there wasn’t even a racial slur for Indian kids, and I don’t know if that’s good or bad. ‘East Indian’ was a phrase I heard all the time growing up. When I was younger I was like, what is East Indian? In Queens, there were so many people from the West Indies that mostly socialized with blacks and Latinos. So Indians from India were East Indians, where people from West Indies were West Indians.”

[…]

During a discussion I initiated in a Facebook group populated with women writers of color writer, Chryselle D’Silva Dias says, “That distinction between West Indian, American Indians and “Indian” Indians must be so confusing for some folks. We all look the same, after all,” ending her statement with an ironic winky face. However, D’Silva Dias’ says her experience of the term “East Indian” isn’t “racially derogatory at all. Catholics in India are largely divided by their origins, so we have Goans, the Mangaloreans and the East Indians, who are native to Bombay.” D’Silva Dias is an East Indian in the true geographical sense of the phrase, and this is the only appropriate way to use the term.

On the other hand, writer Shubha Bala tells me: “Growing up in a suburb outside of Toronto, I often got called East Indian (weird because of how many Indians lived there). When I first heard it I thought like Chryselle, that they meant I was from the eastern part of India, but when I corrected them, ‘No, I’m South Indian,’ they would get really confused. They definitely meant as compared to the West Indies. I don’t ever remember anyone using it in a derogatory way, but just ignorant like they would laugh at me for saying I was Asian.

[...]

In our current cultural context, being Asian is specifically coded as being Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Filipino, Burmese, etc. and not Indian, Bangladeshi, Nepali, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Tibetan, etc., even though we are all part of the same Asian continent.

[…]

Ultimately, the term “East Indian” is a remnant of archaic geopolitical Eurocentric positioning and shouldn’t be used at all in a modern context, unless you are talking about people from the eastern part of India. To use it in any other context is playing to Orientalist — and yes, racist — othering of not only people from India, but also Native American populations throughout North America who shouldn’t still be called “Indian” at all."
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Along with the contemporary use of the referent "South Asian" instead of "East Indian", the term "West Indies" has largely been replaced with "the Caribbean" and the referent "West Indian" has largely been replaced with the general term "Caribbean people".

The referents "Indo-Caribbean" (meaning people from the Caribbean who have some South Asian ancestry) has been used since at least 2003* although it appears to have been most widely used since around 2019.

The term "Afro-Caribbean" (meaning people from the Caribbean who have some Black African descent) is also used.as a synonym for Black West Indians. However, it should be noted that people who are Indo-Caribbean can also be Afro-Caribbean and vice versa (meaning you can not tell people's ethnic backgrounds just by looking at them).
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*Here's a citation for a 2003 journal article that includes the term "Indo-Caribbean":
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41850233
" Reviewed Work: Arising from Bondage: A History of the Indo-Caribbean People by Ron Ramdin

Review by: Rosemarijn Hoefte
NWIG: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 
Vol. 77, No. 1/2 (2003), pp. 130-132 (3 pages)

Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia that indicates that the term "Afro-Caribbean" was used as early as the 1960s:
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Caribbean_people
"Afro-Caribbean people or African Caribbean are Caribbean people who trace their full or partial ancestry to sub-Saharan Africa. The majority of the modern African-Caribbeans descend from Africans taken as slaves to colonial Caribbean via the trans-Atlantic slave trade between the 15th and 19th centuries to work primarily on various sugar plantations and in domestic households. Other names for the ethnic group include Black Caribbean, Afro or Black West Indian or Afro or Black Antillean. The term Afro-Caribbean was not coined by Caribbean people themselves but was first used by European Americans in the late 1960s.[7]

People of Afro-Caribbean descent today are largely of West African ancestry, and may additionally be of other origins, including European, South Asian and native Caribbean descent, as there has been extensive intermarriage and unions among the peoples of the Caribbean over the centuries."

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