(This article is part of our upcoming print quarterly 'Diaspora: Southasia Abroad' and is also featured in our web-exclusive series.)
In March 2012, eight years after its debut, Sepia Mutiny, the popular Southasian American blog, announced its retirement. The reason given was that the blog was simply no longer "able to keep up" in a changing sphere of corporatised (read better-funded) blogs as well as with the advent of privatised spaces for online debate, namely Facebook and Twitter. But the individual reflections of Sepia Mutiny's bloggers suggested that its closure was tied to a mounting sense of the inadequacy of Southasian identity as an organising category for the content of an American media outlet. Contributor Amardeep Singh wrote, "South Asian America is a big enough, and mainstream enough, world that it does seem a little forced to presume it all goes together anymore." Abhi, another contributor, offered this reflection: "I also truly feel that the mission of Sepia Mutiny is complete… Back in 2004 there was very little brown representation in the media and very little 'voice' representing us. There was not a single loud speaker for the South Asian American community. Now there is quite a bit more and brown is everywhere. There seems much less need for a 'Mutiny' given our strides."
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Despite its Subcontinental rubric, Sepia Mutiny was responding in part to the inauguration of country-focused blogs like the New York Times' 'India Ink', which debuted in September 2011 (the blog was folded into the Times' world section in June 2014), and the Wall Street Journal's 'India Real Time', which continues to take "the daily pulse of the world's largest democracy". These mainstream outlets had begun to encroach on Sepia Mutiny's territory: the role of curating and commenting on all things Southasian, or desi, in American politics and culture, from the election of South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, to the need for bone marrow donors within the Southasian community, to the reductive representations of non-white Americans in the public sphere.