In my experience, south asians and middle easterners can easily tell I’m Bengali/Bangladeshi rather than (non-Bengali) Indian or Pakistani. Growing up in America I always assumed I looked Indian, but that’s because my reference point was european americans so I didn’t have sufficient data points in my mental model to work out aggregate tendencies.
There are plenty of Indians who in a literal sense could be classified as white (as in extremely fair pale skin), not just from Kashmir but even from South India. But if you’re Indian you can instantly pick them out as Indian, their entire facial structure etc is different from Europeans. In a sense, it is true, categories like “white”, “black” are social constructs that are meaningless at a genetic standpoint. But categories like, European, Nordic, Indian etc are not, if you put in some effort you can very easily distinguish between because of thousands of years of separate genetic evolution.
Yup! And many Americans would guess some north Indians are white because of convergent selection and shared ancestry. It's just that most prominent Indians tend to be south indian or Bengali in America. For example, most of the big name Indian ceos
