Vivek Ramaswamy loves his heritage. Just don’t call him Indian American.

Vivek Ramaswamy does not shy away from his Indian origins.

It’s present in his name (his first name rhymes with “cake,” he explains) and his Hindu faith. He explained during the campaign that he is a vegetarian because of his family’s tradition. And during a breakthrough Republican debate in August, he introduced himself as a “thin guy with a funny last name,” echoing former President Barack Obama.

Yet Mr. Ramaswamy recently said in an interview that he does not identify as Indian American. Being Hindu and Indian is “certainly part of my cultural identity, and I’m proud of that and very comfortable with that,” he said after a campaign stop in Marshalltown, Iowa. “But I am an American first.”

Mr. Ramaswamy, 38, a first-time presidential candidate and conservative author, is at the same time deeply in touch with his Indian roots and convinced that America’s growing focus on diversity and racial inequality has come at the expense of national unity.

His message is aimed at a Republican electorate that is predominantly white and Christian, and he has tailored his personal story to his audience. For example, when voters ask him about his Hindu faith, he is often quick to emphasize that it allows him to maintain “Judeo-Christian” values.

Full of energy and brash talk, Mr Ramaswamy attracted enough attention during the party’s first debate in August to bump in the polls — some briefly vaulted him to second place, albeit well behind former President Donald Trump. He has since fallen behind Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, and Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and ambassador to the United Nations under Trump.

Still, Mr. Ramaswamy has won enough support to qualify for the third Republican debate Wednesday in Miami.

Many Indian Americans, even those critical of Mr. Ramaswamy’s political beliefs, have said in interviews that they are particularly proud to see him on the national stage — more so than for other Republican presidential candidates of Indian descent, like Bobby Jindal. and Mrs. Haley, who converted to Christianity in their youth and adopted Anglicized names.

Mr. Ramaswamy’s story is emblematic of many Asian-American millennials whose parents came to the country after immigration laws were liberalized in 1965 and migration from outside Europe grew dramatically. Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial group in the country, and Indian Americans now make up the group largest independent group in the United States among them.

As a child, Mr. Ramaswamy was enmeshed in a small but close-knit Indian community in a region of Greater Cincinnati that was largely white. He belonged to a Hindu temple but attended a private Catholic high school, where he said he was the only Hindu student in his class. As a teenager, he co-founded an India Association at school and also worked for a local Indian radio station, according to a 2002 report. article in The Cincinnati Enquirer.

As a student at Harvard University, Mr. Ramaswamy seemed comfortable moving between worlds, his classmates said in interviews. He studied biology, was president of the Harvard Political Union, and was a libertarian alter ego known as ‘Da Vek.’ (At the time, he told The Harvard Crimson that Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” was the theme song of his life, that he unexpectedly resumed this summer at the Iowa State Fair.)

At Harvard he took a comic turn in the annual cultural show organized by the South Asian Association and was active in Dharma, the Hindu student association. And he served as a student liaison to Mr. Jindal, then a rising political star Visiting colleague at the Harvard Institute of Politics in 2004 before becoming governor of Louisiana and the first American of Indian descent to run for president.

“If you had asked me when we were in college whether being an Indian American was a big part of his identity, I would have said yes,” said Saikat Chakrabarti, Mr. Ramaswamy’s Harvard classmate and former chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria . Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York.

Mr Ramaswamy went on to make a fortune as a biotech entrepreneur. After the 2020 police killing of George Floyd galvanized the movement for racial justice, Mr. Ramaswamy made a name for himself in conservative circles by speaking out against identity politics and the corporate commitment to diversity and inclusion, which he called “wokeism” . Mr. Ramaswamy has since said he believes liberals are fixated on skin color and race in ways that have contributed to divisions in the country.

Like many Republican candidates of color, he has sometimes spoken about his own experiences with discrimination, but he has said there is no systemic racism in the country.

“I am confident that the white supremacist exists somewhere in America,” Mr. Ramaswamy told voters at an event in Pella, Iowa, in late August. “I’ve just never met him, never seen him, never met one in my life.”

At a late August event with voters at Legends American Grill in Marshalltown, 37-year-old David Tracy, an entrepreneur, asked Mr. Ramaswamy to explain what it meant to him to be a Hindu with “Judeo-Christian” values. Mr. Ramaswamy responded by explaining that he had gone to a Christian school and shared the same values, and he wove in a Biblical story as if to prove it.

“Maybe I’m not qualified to be your pastor,” Mr. Ramaswamy told the packed crowd of mostly white, older voters. “But I believe I can be your commander-in-chief.”

Mr. Tracy, who lives in Des Moines, said in an interview last week that he understood why Mr. Ramaswamy has sometimes downplayed his Indian and Hindu roots in his efforts to appeal to Republican voters. But he also said that this has caused Mr Ramaswamy to lose some authenticity. “He speaks more like a conservative white man than a Hindu son of immigrants,” Mr. Tracy said.

Mr. Tracy said he did not think Mr. Ramaswamy was against diversity, but that the candidate thought too many Americans focused on their individual identities.

“I think the point Vivek is making is that there is a personal identity and there is a national identity, and I think young people right now collectively don’t know what that national identity means,” he said.

Susan Kunkel, 65, an undecided Republican, said last week at a campaign event for Ms. Haley in Nashua, N.H., that she did not like Mr. Ramaswamy’s continued pandering to the Trump base. But she appreciated that he was a new face in the party and agreed with his opposition to affirmative action.

“It’s nice to have all different ages and sexes and genders, and you know, minorities, but it has to be based on merit,” Ms. Kunkel, a practice administrator for a medical office, said of recent diversity efforts in corporate life.

On the stump, Mr. Ramaswamy has often cited his family’s bootstrap story as an example of how one can achieve the American dream and not blame racism for holding them back. “My parents came to this country 40 years ago with no money,” he has said. “In one generation I created multi-billion dollar companies.”

But many immigrants from India arrived after 1965 with advantages that other people of color lacked, noted Devesh Kapur, professor of South Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of the book “The Other One Percent: Indians in America.” Mr. Ramaswamy’s parents had advanced degrees; his father was an engineer at General Electric and his mother was a geriatric psychiatrist.

“It is a serious underestimation and underestimation of his privileged background,” Mr Kapur said of Mr Ramaswamy’s backstory.

In October, Mr. Ramaswamy agreed via social media posts to a debate with Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, held last Wednesday at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics in Manchester. Mr. Khanna’s team had framed the event as a civil conversation between two children of immigrants who were an emerging Indian-American political voice.

In an interview, Mr. Khanna, who grew up in a Philadelphia suburb, said that recognizing America’s history of racism and discrimination was crucial to building a cohesive, multiracial democracy. He said not everyone in America “could have the opportunities that people like Vivek and I had,” referring to their middle-class upbringing.

Until “everyone has that opportunity, we can’t say race and class don’t matter,” he added.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Ramaswamy campaign, said Mr. Ramaswamy’s decision to debate Mr. Khanna had little to do with their shared Indian identity.

It was more about Mr Ramaswamy being Mr Ramaswamy.

“Vivek does pretty much everything,” she said.

Jonathan Weisman And Jasmine Ulloa reporting contributed.