My Indian-Americanness Amrutha Reddy

As I sit in psychology class and learn about Social Identity Theory, I reflect on my cultural identity. I moved from California to Karnataka when I was six. My Abba decided we had to go back to our home, hence my parents started filling suitcases and shipping items. "Why are we leaving home and going to a country unknown to me?" I thought to myself as I boarded the flight. I did not understand why my parents were leaving my birthplace to settle in a country I had only visited twice. How was I to know what profound effect India would have on my identity?

As a dark-skinned South Indian girl with an American accent, Bangalorean parents, and a grandmother from Tamil Nadu, I joined a Christian Missionaries' school. In school, I earned odd looks for talking with a weird accent, and for calling myself an American when I had black curly hair with a dark complexion. In my classmates' minds, an American had light skin, blue eyes, long straight blond hair, but I looked nothing like that. During those first few years in India, I considered myself an American, so I stuck to what I knew. When my grammar textbook proclaimed, 'We are all Indians', I scratched it out and wrote, 'I am an American'. I would not sing the Indian national anthem...