Are you Indian?

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"Are you Indian?"

That's the latest among a long list of ethnicity questions I've received over time. Previously, I've been mistaken (outside the Philippines) as Canadian, Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese. I think that in cases in which I was mistaken as East Asian, the people who made mistakes were not exposed enough to Southeast Asians. Those who thought I was Vietnamese found it difficult to differentiate among Southeast Asians (yes, that group includes me because I'm also stumped at times). And that one time I was mistaken as Canadian was the most surprising yet... because the man who insisted that I was Canadian said that my accent sounded Canadian (not stereotypical Filipino).

In school (UC Berkeley Data Analytics and Visualisation boot camp), a classmate asked if I'm Indian. When I said no, he then asked if I had relatives or ancestors who were Indian. Still replying in the negative, I was then asked if I understood Hindi. I said that I was able to pick up a few words when I went to India last year. That caught my classmate by surprise. I then shared that I've been to New Delhi, Agra, Bhubaneswar, Kolkata, and Hyderabad.

My answer about having Indian ancestors might not be accurate... I actually don't know if I have Indian ancestors; there is a possibility that there are because Indian influence is deeply embedded into Filipino culture. Tagalog is known to have words borrowed from Indian languages; such as puto (from Tamil 'puttu'), pitaka (from Sanskrit 'pitaka'), and Bathala (from Sanskrit 'Bhattara'). Indians from the subcontinent must have arrived to the Philippines in pre-Hispanic times through the trade routes with the kingdoms culturally linked with India (like Ayutthaya in Thailand). Moreover, when the British gave up its occupation Manila and Cavite in the late 18th century, Sepoy troops from Tamil Nadu (British India) decided to stay in the Philippines. Hindus were among the non-Filipino traders who set up businesses in Lipa, Batangas before (and during?) the Spanish colonial period... a few kilometres from where my paternal grandparents hailed from. However, I doubt that Indians entered my family tree in the early 20th century because my grandparents were born before 1920 to Filipino parents (as far as my mom and dad know). So, perhaps, if I do have Indian ancestors, they would have been around before the 1900s.

If only I can trace my family's genealogy that far back. At present, I've only found names of my grandparents' parents.

This is a good project if I've ever seen one.

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