Moni Sawhney
“I live in the South, but my identity is not Southern.”
Dr. Moni Sawhney poses for a portrait at his home in Raleigh, N.C. / Photo by Maydha Devarajan.
For nearly 30 years, Moni Sawhney was a white man — or at least, he was designated by North Carolina’s public university system as one.
Sawhney, 86, is a former longtime faculty member at N.C. State University. He came to the university in 1963, moving from a postdoc to professorship to eventual associate dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences over the course of four decades.
But it wasn’t until 1991, when Nash Winstead, the provost at the time, knocked on his office door for a quick visit that he was informed anything was out of the ordinary.
“At the university, there were only two races: white and Black,” Sawhney said. “So the university decided that I was a Caucasian, and Caucausian meant white.”
He recalls the memory with a laugh.
“[Winstead] said, 'Moni, you look the same as yesterday. But this afternoon on the instructions given by the U.S. government, I have changed your racial designation to Asian Pacific Islander.’ So in the university's record...I was white for a number of years, then became Asian Pacific Islander.”
Similarly, the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles didn’t know what to do with the Indian immigrant when he first applied for a driver’s license in 1977. So the ID he carried in his wallet for several years was marked with a little “W.”
“They say, ‘Indian is not a category.’ So they decided that since I was not Black, I had to be classified as Caucasian,” he said. “And Caucasian meant a ‘W.’”
Moni Sawhney’s drivers license from 1977 that designated his race as white. / Photo courtesy of Moni Sawhney.
Moni Sawhney’s family in India. / Photo courtesy of Moni Sawhney.
As a child in New Delhi during the 1930s and 1940s, Sawhney says the idea of spending his life away from India was “unthinkable.” Sawhney grew up in a family of contractors, some of whom constructed the capital’s buildings that are still standing today. One of eight siblings, he was the only one to pursue an academic career in the humanities, completing a Ph.D. in rural sociology in 1962.
He married his wife Sharda a year later, whom he had met when they were both working as employees of the United States Department of Agriculture. After moving to North Carolina so Sawhney could work on his postdoc, the pair and their two children eventually moved into a house in North Hills in 1967. The family lived there through the 1990s, until they moved again to another neighborhood in Raleigh that Moni and Sharda still call home today.
Moni Sawhney at his college graduation in India. / Photo courtesy of Moni Sawhney.
Moni Sawhney and his wife Sharda Sawhney. / Photo courtesy of Moni Sawhney.
Despite arriving to the American South during a period of great racial turmoil in the 1960s, Sawhney said he would not associate his time in N.C. with personal experiences of overt or covert racial discrimination.
“I got the impression that all the negative energy was on the Blacks. And I never experienced anything negative. And I always remember one party of the faculty and they were asking if I had experienced any bad situation because of [my] Asian origin. And my answer was, 'No, never.' And my dear friends and colleagues, simultaneously, said the same thing. They said, 'Because you are not a Catholic or a Jew.' And these were my Catholic friends and Jewish friends.
They had experienced discrimination that I had not. So it was easier at that time, I think, to be an Indian than to be a Catholic or a Jew in the South. They had experienced ill will from people that I had not. So whether I was naive enough not to notice, but I never did.”
Moni and Sharda Sawhney and their two children. / Photo courtesy of Moni Sawhney.
At home, Sawhney said the desire to assimilate to American culture shaped things like the music and food that the family consumed and the languages he and Sharda spoke with their children — though that's changed in more recent years (“Now, in fact, every time they come in, they expect us to cook Indian food for them and they bring empty containers so that [they can store] the leftovers they want to take for another meal,” he said)
And despite an anxiety to “become a part of the local community,” the Sawhneys also partook in South Asian cultural activities, forming close bonds with the few other families in the area and holding frequent get-togethers. Sawhney is one of the original seven founders of the Hindu Society of North Carolina, though the family also regularly attended services at Pullen Memorial Baptist Church.
Moni Sawhney’s family in North Carolina. / Photo courtesy of Moni Sawhney.
When asked about Southern identity, Sawhney balks at the idea of calling himself a Southerner, saying he finds it “divisive.”
“My inclusive mindset prevents me from identifying myself in any divisive identity. So I'm Punjabi, but that's not my identity. I'm an American, I'm an Indian American — not a Punjabi, not a Southerner. So I live in the South, but my identity is not Southern. My mother tongue is Punjabi, but that's not my identity. My identity, growing up, was with Gandhi and Nehru, and not with the divisive force of RSS and Muslim League and Khalistan and so on.”
A newspaper clipping from a 1969 copy of The Raleigh News & Observer about an event headlined by Moni Sawhney. / Photo courtesy of Moni Sawhney.
But when Sawhney positions himself and the various identities he may take on, it’s with a certain decisiveness and complexity.
“I am aware that it is not a colorblind system. Within that system, where color is a relevant dimension, I am an Indian American,” he said. “And I don't want to hide it, I don't apologize, I don't brag about it existentially. That's it.”
Listen to Moni’s recollections of his early years in North Carolina and how he’s seen his community change below.