This issue of Hyphen magazine focuses on the word “Desi”. The word “Desi” is defined as “a person of South Asian birth or descent who lives abroad”1 by the Oxford Languag-es dictionary. The challenge with this definition is that it combines many different cultures into one singular identifying culture.

Having this single identity to group individuals from various different cultures poses many challenges. One such challenge is that many individ-uals may lose their culture, which would include their own language. It also leads to misunderstanding of cultures and in part religion.

To begin, I think we need to under-stand what desi culture is. One of the biggest influences of ‘desi’ culture is Bollywood, which has shaped most of the ‘desi’ culture. Bollywood movies have always been centered around a single culture, which many identify with Indian culture (although I be-lieve that this is a misrepresentation as India has multiple different ethnicities and cultures within it). The language depicted in Bollywood movies is typi-cally Hindi and thus the musical num-bers for those movies are mostly sung

in Hindi. This influence can be seen when you attend ‘desi’ functions. Most of the ‘desi’ weddings play Bollywood music, and most events organised for ‘desis’ will have Bollywood music playing.

As mentioned previously the ‘desi’ culture represents people from many different cultures such as the Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil, and many more. Yet most ‘desi’ functions only represent the dominant Indian cul-ture that is depicted in Bollywood. It seems that many in the ‘desis’ in West identify with this Bollywood culture even though it might not fully repre-sent their own.

This issue of the magazine will look at what it means to be ‘desi’, which is partly based on the discussions with some young adults when they were invited to discuss their understanding of ‘desi’ and its various implicatoins. n

Photo: Abu Haque