USA

jAti

  • Roughly half of all Hindu Indian Americans identify with a caste group. Foreign-born respondents are significantly more likely than U.S.-born respondents to espouse a caste identity. The overwhelming majority of Hindus with a caste identity—more than eight in ten— self-identify as belonging to the category of General or upper caste.
  • private surveys show that 25% of indian americans are brahmins. that’s .25 of 3 million, so 750,000 brahmin americans. skewed to south indian brahmins and perhaps bengali brahmins. 4.31% of indian pop in 1931. conservative to assume 4% of hindus today, 33 million in india

Indian affiliation

While 86 percent of Hindus report identifying with some kind of “Indian” identity, 71 percent of Christians and 52 percent of Muslims do the same. Relative to Muslims, Christians and Hindus are equally likely to self-identify as “Indian American” (47 percent each versus 32 percent for Muslims), and Hindus are substantially more likely to self-identify as “Indian” (32 percent versus 17 percent for Christians and 12 percent for Muslims). On the other hand, Muslims are much more likely to self-identify as “South Asian” (27 percent compared to 7 percent of Christians and 5 percent of Hindus). Finally, Christians are more likely to self-identifyas “American” without any hyphenation (9 percent versus 6 percent for Muslim and 4 percent for Hindus).

Region and language

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home-states
  • Language Percentage
  • Hindi 19%
  • Gujarati 14%
  • English only 10%
  • Telugu 10%
  • Tamil 9%
  • Punjabi 7%
  • Bengali 7%
  • Malayalam 6%
  • Urdu 5%
  • Marathi 4%
  • Kannada 3%
  • Other 7%
  • N = 1,200 U.S. adult results

Religion

  • While nearly three-quarters of Indian Americans state that religion plays an important role in their lives, religious practice is less pronounced. Forty percent of respondents pray at least once a day and 27 percent attend religious services at least once a week.
religion
religion
religion-importance
religion-importance

Politics

  • Across nearly all metrics of civic and political participation, U.S.-born citizens report the highest levels of engagement, followed by foreign-born U.S. citizens, with non-citizens trailing behind.
  • partisan polarization — linked to political preferences both in India and the United States—is rife. However, this polarization is asymmetric: Democrats are much less comfortable having close friends who are Republicans than the converse. The same is true of Congress Party supporters vis-à-vis supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Marriage

  • While eight out of ten respondents have a spouse or partner of Indian origin, U.S.-born Indian Americans are four times more likely to have a spouse or partner who is of Indian origin but was born in the United States.
  • Indian Americans exhibit high rates of marriage and low rates of divorce. Data from the ACS show that the share of married couple households in the community is 50 percent greater than the U.S. average.

Social circles

  • Indian Americans’ social communities are heavily populated by other people of Indian origin. Internally, the social networks of Indian Americans are more homoge- nous in terms of religion than either Indian region (state) of origin or caste.

Racism complaints

  • One in two Indian Americans reports being discriminated against in the past one year, with discrimination based on skin color identified as the most common form of bias. Somewhat surprisingly, Indian Americans born in the United States are much more likely to report being victims of discrimination than their foreign-born counterparts.