Desi
Encyclopedia
Desi d̪eːsi or Deshi d̪e(ː)ʃi refers to the people, cultures, and products of the Indian subcontinent
and, increasingly, to the people, cultures, and products of their diaspora
. Desi countries include India
, Pakistan
, Bangladesh
. There are large Desi populations in the UK
, US
, Canada
, South Africa
, Mauritius
, Guyana
, Fiji
, Australia
, Trinidad and Tobago
and other countries.
This ethnonym
belongs in the endonymic category (i.e. it is a self-appellation). Desi originated from the Sanskrit
word ("region, province, country"). Its first known usage is in the Natya Shastra
(~200 BC), where it defines the regional varieties of folk performing arts
, as opposed to the classical, pan-Indian margi.
, many people from the then-undivided Indian subcontinent
emigrated to other British colonies, in search of education and opportunity. After immigration reform in 1965, the US
dramatically increased immigration from the Indian subcontinent
. Communities that have remained distinct in South Asia have tended to mix in diaspora. Some second or third generation immigrants do not think of themselves as belonging to a particular nation, sub-culture, or caste, but as just plain South Asians or desis, especially as intermarriage between different South Asian diaspora communities increases.
uses des(h)i or the related mades(h)i (मधेसी, मधेशी) to refer to people from the Terai
(Madhesh
) who are linguistically and culturally like people in adjacent India, as well as for people from India proper. In this way, both are differentiated from Pahari
s and others from the Middle Hills and higher mountains, who traditionally controlled politics in the Kingdom of Nepal. Since Nepal became a republic in 2008, attempts to fully enfranchise the Madhesi have led to conflict.
to launch their own television channel for Desis called mtv desi
.
refers to the regional varieties of folk dance and music elements as "Desi", and states that these are meant as pure entertainment for common people, while the pan-Indian margi
elements are to spiritually enlighten the audience. The medieval developments of the classical Indian dance
and music led to the introduction of Desi gharanas, in addition to the classical gharana
s codified in Natya Shastra
. The Desi gharanas further developed into the present-day adavus. There is raga in Indian classical music known as Desi.
.
It may also mean "native" or "traditional." Common examples are "desi ghee," which is the traditional clarified butter from India, as opposed to more processed fats such as vegetable oils. "Desi chicken" may mean a native breed of chicken. Heritage
varieties of vegetables and other produce can also be qualified as "desi". "Desi diet" refers to a diet and food choices followed by Indians around the world.
Indian subcontinent
The Indian subcontinent, also Indian Subcontinent, Indo-Pak Subcontinent or South Asian Subcontinent is a region of the Asian continent on the Indian tectonic plate from the Hindu Kush or Hindu Koh, Himalayas and including the Kuen Lun and Karakoram ranges, forming a land mass which extends...
and, increasingly, to the people, cultures, and products of their diaspora
Diaspora
A diaspora is "the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral homeland" or "people dispersed by whatever cause to more than one location", or "people settled far from their ancestral homelands".The word has come to refer to historical mass-dispersions of...
. Desi countries include India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
, Pakistan
Pakistan
Pakistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a sovereign state in South Asia. It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by Afghanistan and Iran in the west, India in the east and China in the far northeast. In the north, Tajikistan...
, Bangladesh
Bangladesh
Bangladesh , officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh is a sovereign state located in South Asia. It is bordered by India on all sides except for a small border with Burma to the far southeast and by the Bay of Bengal to the south...
. There are large Desi populations in the UK
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
, US
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
, South Africa
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
, Mauritius
Mauritius
Mauritius , officially the Republic of Mauritius is an island nation off the southeast coast of the African continent in the southwest Indian Ocean, about east of Madagascar...
, Guyana
Guyana
Guyana , officially the Co-operative Republic of Guyana, previously the colony of British Guiana, is a sovereign state on the northern coast of South America that is culturally part of the Anglophone Caribbean. Guyana was a former colony of the Dutch and of the British...
, Fiji
Fiji
Fiji , officially the Republic of Fiji , is an island nation in Melanesia in the South Pacific Ocean about northeast of New Zealand's North Island...
, Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
, Trinidad and Tobago
Trinidad and Tobago
Trinidad and Tobago officially the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago is an archipelagic state in the southern Caribbean, lying just off the coast of northeastern Venezuela and south of Grenada in the Lesser Antilles...
and other countries.
Etymology
, , , , , , , , , .This ethnonym
Ethnonym
An ethnonym is the name applied to a given ethnic group. Ethnonyms can be divided into two categories: exonyms and autonyms or endonyms .As an example, the ethnonym for...
belongs in the endonymic category (i.e. it is a self-appellation). Desi originated from the Sanskrit
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
word ("region, province, country"). Its first known usage is in the Natya Shastra
Natya Shastra
The Natya Shastra is an ancient Indian treatise on the performing arts, encompassing theatre, dance and music. It was written during the period between 200 BC and 200 AD in classical India and is traditionally attributed to the Sage Bharata.The Natya Shastra is incredibly wide in its scope...
(~200 BC), where it defines the regional varieties of folk performing arts
Performing arts
The performing arts are those forms art which differ from the plastic arts insofar as the former uses the artist's own body, face, and presence as a medium, and the latter uses materials such as clay, metal or paint which can be molded or transformed to create some physical art object...
, as opposed to the classical, pan-Indian margi.
History
During the height of the British RajBritish Raj
British Raj was the British rule in the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947; The term can also refer to the period of dominion...
, many people from the then-undivided Indian subcontinent
Indian subcontinent
The Indian subcontinent, also Indian Subcontinent, Indo-Pak Subcontinent or South Asian Subcontinent is a region of the Asian continent on the Indian tectonic plate from the Hindu Kush or Hindu Koh, Himalayas and including the Kuen Lun and Karakoram ranges, forming a land mass which extends...
emigrated to other British colonies, in search of education and opportunity. After immigration reform in 1965, the US
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
dramatically increased immigration from the Indian subcontinent
Indian subcontinent
The Indian subcontinent, also Indian Subcontinent, Indo-Pak Subcontinent or South Asian Subcontinent is a region of the Asian continent on the Indian tectonic plate from the Hindu Kush or Hindu Koh, Himalayas and including the Kuen Lun and Karakoram ranges, forming a land mass which extends...
. Communities that have remained distinct in South Asia have tended to mix in diaspora. Some second or third generation immigrants do not think of themselves as belonging to a particular nation, sub-culture, or caste, but as just plain South Asians or desis, especially as intermarriage between different South Asian diaspora communities increases.
Nepal
NepaliNepali language
Nepali or Nepalese is a language in the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family.It is the official language and de facto lingua franca of Nepal and is also spoken in Bhutan, parts of India and parts of Myanmar...
uses des(h)i or the related mades(h)i (मधेसी, मधेशी) to refer to people from the Terai
Terai
The Terai is a belt of marshy grasslands, savannas, and forests located south of the outer foothills of the Himalaya, the Siwalik Hills, and north of the Indo-Gangetic Plain of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and their tributaries. The Terai belongs to the Terai-Duar savanna and grasslands ecoregion...
(Madhesh
Madhesh
Madhesh is a term given to areas of the Nepali outer Terai or to the outer Terai as a whole inhabited by peoples who are racially, culturally and linguistically related to people on the Indian side of the border. These peoples are referred to or refer to themselves as Madheshi...
) who are linguistically and culturally like people in adjacent India, as well as for people from India proper. In this way, both are differentiated from Pahari
Pahari people
The Pahari people, ; also called Pahadi, Parbati, Khāsā, or Chhetri, are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group of the Himalaya living in Nepal, India, and Pakistan. In Nepal, the Pahari constituted the single largest ethnic group at about 20,000,000, or three-fifths of the Nepalese population through the 1990s...
s and others from the Middle Hills and higher mountains, who traditionally controlled politics in the Kingdom of Nepal. Since Nepal became a republic in 2008, attempts to fully enfranchise the Madhesi have led to conflict.
Culture
Some diaspora desis are creating what can be called a "fusion" culture, in which foods, fashions, music, and the like from many areas of South Asia are "fused" both with each other and with elements from Western culture. For example, urban desi is a new genre of music formed by the fusion of traditional Indian and Western urban music. The growing demand of popular programming for South Asians caused mtvMTV
MTV, formerly an initialism of Music Television, is an American network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs....
to launch their own television channel for Desis called mtv desi
MTV Desi
MTV Desi was a spin-off network from MTV that targeted Desis in the United States, as the name implies. The network featured various styles of music such as electronic tabla music and English-Gujarati hip-hop, interspersed among Bollywood videos...
.
Performing arts
The Natya ShastraNatya Shastra
The Natya Shastra is an ancient Indian treatise on the performing arts, encompassing theatre, dance and music. It was written during the period between 200 BC and 200 AD in classical India and is traditionally attributed to the Sage Bharata.The Natya Shastra is incredibly wide in its scope...
refers to the regional varieties of folk dance and music elements as "Desi", and states that these are meant as pure entertainment for common people, while the pan-Indian margi
Margi
Margi is village located in the Nicosia District of Cyprus. Before 1960, the village population was made up almost exclusively of Turkish Cypriots....
elements are to spiritually enlighten the audience. The medieval developments of the classical Indian dance
Classical Indian dance
Indian classical dance is a relatively new umbrella term for various codified art forms rooted in Natya, the sacred Hindu musical theatre styles, whose theory can be traced back to the Natya Shastra of Bharata Muni .- Definitions :...
and music led to the introduction of Desi gharanas, in addition to the classical gharana
Gharana
In Hindustani music, a gharānā is a system of social organization linking musicians or dancers by lineage or apprenticeship, and by adherence to a particular musical style. A gharana also indicates a comprehensive musicological ideology. This ideology sometimes changes substantially from one...
s codified in Natya Shastra
Natya Shastra
The Natya Shastra is an ancient Indian treatise on the performing arts, encompassing theatre, dance and music. It was written during the period between 200 BC and 200 AD in classical India and is traditionally attributed to the Sage Bharata.The Natya Shastra is incredibly wide in its scope...
. The Desi gharanas further developed into the present-day adavus. There is raga in Indian classical music known as Desi.
Food
In the U.S., "Desi food" (Desi cuisine) most often refers to dishes commonly served in Indian communities, especially westernized restaurant dishes such as chicken tikka masalaChicken Tikka Masala
Chicken tikka masala is a curry dish of roasted chicken chunks in a spicy sauce. The sauce is usually creamy, spiced and orange-coloured...
.
It may also mean "native" or "traditional." Common examples are "desi ghee," which is the traditional clarified butter from India, as opposed to more processed fats such as vegetable oils. "Desi chicken" may mean a native breed of chicken. Heritage
Plant breeding
Plant breeding is the art and science of changing the genetics of plants in order to produce desired characteristics. Plant breeding can be accomplished through many different techniques ranging from simply selecting plants with desirable characteristics for propagation, to more complex molecular...
varieties of vegetables and other produce can also be qualified as "desi". "Desi diet" refers to a diet and food choices followed by Indians around the world.