How is it that Indian people are referred to as Caucasian?

Question

I have heard this time and time before. I thought they were Asian?

P.S By Indian I mean from the country India

I am being absolutely serious. I have been corrected on more than several occasion when I refer to Indian people as Asians with people saying they are part of the Caucasian race. In fact if you go onto Wikipedia under the term "Caucasian" it has stated that Anthropologists class them as such.

BTW I agree that Indian people should not be classed as Caucasian but many opf them see themselves as such.. just look at the answers..

Answer 1

white people are reffered to as caucasian while indian people are refered to as asian. anyone who mixes that up is either stupid or blind

Answer 2

I don not know why we are referred to as Caucasian (yes, i am Indian).

I think people tend to mix up Caucasian with Indian. When people call someone Asian, they usually just generally mean China, Japan, Korea...basically the Oriental type.

Past thought, I honestly do not know. I am faced more with teh problem that people, when they take a glance at me, think i am Mexican, as i have very fair/light skin for an indian.

i hope i was helpful.

Answer 3

I would guess that by Anthropological definition, the Indian people have more physical similarity to what we typically refer to as Caucasian than what we typically refer to as Asian. This goes for obvious features such as the facial features but also refers to bone structure, particularly that of the skull.

Answer 4

Some indian tribal people are caucasians of european background.

I dont get the caucasian thing other than white people I have never heard anyone use it. Since most white people are european so it clashes with common sense to me.

Im from india & I just consider myself andhra/telugu(state & language I speak) since when I say indian(in america) people think native americans mostly & when I say asian they think of east/south east asia with asian with the slanty eyes.

Answer 5

The term Caucasian originated as one of the racial categories recognised by 19th century craniology — and is derived from the region of the Caucasus mountains.

Caucasoid race is a term used in physical anthropology to refer to people falling within a certain range of anthropometric measurements[citation needed]. The concept of a "Caucasian race" or Varietas Caucasia was first proposed under those names by the German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840). His studies based the classification of the Caucasian race primarily on skull features, which Blumenbach claimed were optimized by the Caucasian Peoples.

Blumenbach writes:
Caucasian variety - I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighbourhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian; and because all physiological reasons converge to this, that in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones (birth place) of mankind.

Populations, formerly called "varieties," are no longer distinguished by Latin names, according to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature.

The Caucasus was historically an area of fascination for Europeans. Prometheus and Jason and the Argonauts were myths featured in the Caucasus. Greek mythology considered women from the Caucasus to have magical powers.

The reason the Caucasus had such an attraction to Blumenbach and other contemporaries was because of its proximity to the ArmenianMount Ararat, today, the tallest peak in Turkey, where according to the Biblical account, Noah's Ark, eventually landed after the flood and the famed beauty of Caucasian women. The tribe of Japheth was supposed to have originated in the Caucasus, then spread north and westwards. Historically, the Russian borderlands of the Caucasus and Georgia were a source of sex slaves for Middle Eastern and Mediterranean peoples.

The beauty associated with these slave women from the Caucasus associated the word Caucasian with "enslaved embodiments of vulnerability" for Blumenbach. Blumenbach was enthralled by the beauty he claimed to see in exemplarary Georgian skulls, so he named his racial type after the famed beauty of the Caucasian peoples. After Blumenbach's time, the term Caucasian no longer was associated with peoples from the Caucasus but continued to be used as a racial indicator.

Another 19th century anthropologist, Thomas Huxley, considered the scope of Caucasian to be inaccurate and "absurd", claiming darker Caucasians such as Southern Europeans & Middle Easterns were actually hybrids of light-skinned Northern European Caucasians and indigenous dark-skinned Australians. The term Caucasoid (Caucasian-like) also came into use to encompass a larger grouping of populations with similar skull-shapes, including many North African, South Asian and Middle Eastern peoples. Carleton Coon did not use the term Caucasian and Caucasoid interchangeably. He used the term "Caucasian" or "caucasic" to reference the subrace of Caucasoids located around the Caucasus.

Answer 6

As far as the police are concerned Indian/Asian are IC4 and White Caucasian are IC1. i.e. not the same.

Answer 7

No I think they are referred to as "Aryan", which is just as baffling.

As a neo-nazi I have often wondered about this and I'd love to know the reason for this.

They invented the swastika too, the little devils. And it is NOT the other way round , as so often stated.

Answer 8

caucasion is one of the 3 types for discribing humans:

caucasian, negroid and mongoloid

it goes by head, eye, nose and lip shape not skin colour. asians have similar features to say english so we are both caucasian, negroid - self explanitory and mongoloid - oriental looking

hope I haven't upset any1

Answer 9

Because they originate from the Caucus area which overlaps with India?

Answer 10

Indian people are not referred to as Caucasian, and whoever refers to them as Caucasian, is wrong.