What does gori mean?

The following was derived from Aditya’s lengthy comments on the etymology of the word gori – be thankful that I’m sparing you all of the tangential diatribes that developed during our conversation.

Gori is a Hindi adjective that literally means “fair” or “light-complexioned”. The i at the end of the word is a feminine conjugation, so gori is often used as a noun, with the subject being understood without explicit reference. In this slightly looser interpretation of the word, gori can mean “pale female”, “fair woman”, or even “white girl”. The masculine version of gori is gora, which can be translated as white man. Since I’m awfully pale-skinned, at least in the winter, gori can be rightly used as an adjective to describe me, or as a noun in reference me.

How is gori used in real life?

In the comments section referenced above there was a bit of discussion on the connotations that “gori” carries. I’m not Indian, I don’t speak Hindi, and I’ve not spent much time in India, so I can’t answer this question adequately from personal experiences alone. I’ve heard the word used in a positive manner to reference the female lead of a Bollywood film. I’ve also heard both gori and gora used in a neutral manner to describe white Europeans and Americans. Aditya occasionally uses it (positively, I hope!) as a pet name for me, particularly when we’re looking over old photos where the camera flash has emphasized the differences in our skin tones.

I’ve also heard that gori or gora can have some negative connotations. Aditya maintains that, without context attached, it’s a neutral word – I think he compared it to the profession of engineering, which can be seen as a great job with wonderful prospects, or a career which only boring, socially-stunted people are attracted to, but is really just, you know, a job. Another Indian friend wrote to me about gori, saying that

In Indian context it refers sorta playfully/even a little pejoratively at times to a pretty or attractive girl, depending on context. Otherwise it becomes a euphemism for white people or foreigners, also perhaps a little pejoratively.

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about the connotations, if any, that gori might have – like I said above, I don’t have the background to present myself as any sort of expert on this.

Finally, in any discussion about the word gori as used by Indians, it should be pointed out that in India (like in many other countries), fair skin is considered beautiful or ideal by many people. The image attached to this post is from an advertisement for a bleaching cream that Indian woman use to lighten their skin. For a good discussion of this issue (I personally don’t want to get into it right now), check out this blog post.

The reasons why I chose Gori Girl

There were a few main reasons that made me think that gorigirl.com would be a good choice for this blog.

The domain name was available

Finding a short, easy-to-remember domain name that is somewhat related to your website topic can be a difficult prospect in the current internet economy. We’re no longer in the good ol’ days of 1998 where most words – or at least phrases – were available. Nowadays the rights to a good domain name can be sold for a lot of money (pizza.com recently went for $2.6 million), so speculators purchase names en mass in the hopes that some company will eventually buy it off them. When I was in the planning stages for this blog Aditya and I bounced a few names around, and Gori Girl, as the first name we thought of that was still available, won out.

“Gori Girl” is a good signal of the blog’s content

The name might be a bit confusing, but, then, navigating intercultural relationships can be too! First off, the gori sounds foreign to English ears, because it is, of course. People familiar with Hindi (or other Indian languages) will realize that the content has something to do with India. But by attaching “girl” to the gori (and yes, essentially saying girl twice), the title becomes a little slangy, and more than a little Western. This blog is about the mingling of cultures, so it seems appropriate that the title mingles languages. Plus, at least to my ear, “gori girl” rolls off the tongue in a way that sounds casual and fun – which is the attitude I try to project here (when I don’t let the little academic in me run wild talking about theory).

Being “the white girl” has been a big – and confusing – part of my life

For those of you who haven’t read the relevant sections of this blog, I grew up in Silicon Valley, California, which is an incredibly diverse area, with a lot of first and second-generation immigrants from Asia. I’m used to being the only white person around – “the white girl” if you will. The shopping center around the corner from my house? All Chinese or Taiwanese shops, except for the British pub. The high school “academic-y” crowd I hung out with? There were three other people besides me who were white Americans – and two of them were guys. Everyone else was Asian or first-generation Eastern European immigrants. And this wasn’t because I just liked hanging out with “the ethnic people” – it was because there were only “ethnic people” in the honors or AP classes I took. Even the extracurriculars I took – marching band, math club, volunteer tutoring at a local elementary school, Junior Engineering Technical Society (yes, nerdy, I know – I once aspired to be a boring, socially-stunted engineer) – were filled with non-white people.

This upbringing has made me quite aware of race, but in a way that’s different from what you’d expect. For instance, I’m more comfortable being the “token white person” than being surrounded by other white Americans. (It took me a couple of months to figure out why I was feeling slightly on edge at my predominantly white Midwestern college.) My white friends and I would joke about becoming eggs – white on the outside, yellow on the inside – but, frankly, if you didn’t incorporate part of the pan-Asian culture of the schoolyard, you were going to be left out of a lot of conversations, events, and fun times.

But the oddest part of this all is that I’m not even entirely white. Yes, my skin is quite pale in the winter – to the point where I look a bit ill if I don’t make sure to regularly put on tanning moisturizer. But in the summer I can get pretty good tan going – which comes from my Mexican grandfather and the bit of Native American blood sloshing around from both sides of my family. Unfortunately, my grandfather and grandmother (who is a French-Canadian immigrant) didn’t want to their children to be anything other than American born-and-bred. The end result is that the cultural part of my heritage from their side was wiped out in a single generation.

Writing as Gori Girl reminds me that, while I’m seen as white by strangers, I’m really a rather mixed-up person, just like the name. Yes, I’m white, but I’m also brown on the outside when the sun shines (enough that I get chatted up in Spanish during the summer), and I’ll always have a yellow-brown tinge on the inside.

So how does this relate to intercultural relationships?

A person in an intercultural relationship is going to pick up some of his partner’s culture, just like I picked up on the culture of my friends’ as a child. It’s inevitable – I touched on this idea briefly in a post a couple of day’s back. However, how much is picked up will depend on a lot of a factors, including each person’s personality, comfort levels, the surrounding dominant culture, and, of course, each person’s desires. Some couples will end up creating a relationship where one culture is dominant, while others will work towards some sort of compromise, picking from the best of each.

Personally, I think that a compromise is the way to go – but it’s a careful balancing act. My grandparents’ actions, while quite typical for the time, went way too far in one direction – they submersed themselves in the American culture surrounding them, leaving my mother, aunts, and uncles with very little to connect them to their family history. And my grandparents lost a little part of themselves too.

I don’t want that to happen with Aditya – and it’d certainly be easy enough, given that we live in the US, and are not particularly involved in any Indian community. Although he is quite Indian in outlook, he “passes” very well as an American, even though he’s only been in the US for six years – so well, in fact, that I can often forget that I’m in an intercultural relationship. He speaks with an American accent, knows most of the cultural references (his English Lit major and love of TV helps big time here), and appreciates a lot of American things. Case in point: it took over a month for him and his coworkers to realize that his avatar for their office wii (yes, I know…) was white, while the other Indians in the office had dark brown avatars.

So I’ve made efforts to incorporate Indian things into our household to keep “US-ness” from running us over. And, in some ways, this is an expression of my own Asiannified background too. But just like my grandparents, I need to be careful to keep from throwing everything into of myself into his culture – and that means keeping around those both the American AND pan-Asian things from my childhood that I appreciate and enjoy. And I share them with Aditya, just like he shares his culture with me.

So for all of you who are embracing your partners’ cultures: I absolutely applaud your efforts, but do be careful to not forget yourself in the process.