First things first, my mother was shot during the Bangladesh Liberation War. Though, as upper-middle-class Muslims who tended toward being in technical professions (medicine, engineering, etc.) honestly I don’t think we bore the brunt of the violence (I qualify technical, because an uncle-in-law who comes from an artistic family had several relatives shot by the Pakistani army due to their possible propaganda creating skills).
I was born in Bangladesh. That being said, my parents spent more time as Pakistani citizens than Bangladeshi citizens. And they’ve spent the most time as American citizens. I grew up nearly my whole life in the United States of America.
When I was a kid people would often assume I was Arab, Iranian, or, most often, Indian. Sometimes I would correct them, and explain my family was from Bangladesh..but then I would have to explain what and where Bangladesh was. So often I would just let it stand, as “Indian” is good enough for government work.
That being said, some people have objected to my relaxed attitude on this. Mostly, these are Indians and Bangladeshis. People born and raised in India and Bangladesh. Though a few people I know from Nepal or Pakistan or Sri Lanka also are perplexed at my relaxed attitude toward national identity. I think the major issue is that as an American, there is clearly brown provenance to my origins, but the crystallizing national identities in the subcontinent are detached from my own family’s historical experience, which hasn’t experienced much of the last 40 years.
Of course religion and such matters. People of Muslim origin from the subcontinent who are irreligious are very different in their attitude toward being brown from people who are religious, and these are very different in their attitude toward those who are very very religious (in some ways, the irreligious and the very very religious are more similar than to the group in the middle).
