East Indians

The LCSH East Indians has colonialist bias and is outdated. The term lacks literary warrant; Google Ngram viewer which tracks frequency of word usage over time in the digitized Google books corpus shows a decline in usage of East Indians. Additionally, the scope note for East Indians includes references to political concepts of citizenship which can make it challenging for catalogers to assign this heading to works that are not about Indian citizenship in particular. 

The South Asia Funnel submitted proposals in June 2024 for changing East Indians to Indians (India). Indians (India) is currently a Library of Congress (LC) Demographic Group term. The term Indians cannot be used to replace East Indians as it is a current LCSH for the indigenous peoples of the Americas. We identified a total of 48 related headings that will be impacted by this proposal. Additionally, we proposed a change in the scope note removing the concept of citizenship, broadening it to include inhabitants of India, and clarified how catalogers can use the heading to describe Indians living outside of India. 

The proposals are under consideration by LC.