American Karma

Race, Culture, and Identity in the Indian Diaspora

Sunil Bhatia

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780814709191
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

The Indian American community is one of the fastest growing immigrant communities in the U.S. Unlike previous generations, they are marked by a high degree of training as medical doctors, engineers, scientists, and university professors.

American Karma draws on participant observation and in-depth interviews to explore how these highly skilled professionals have been inserted into the racial dynamics of American society and transformed into “people of color.” Focusing on first-generation, middle-class Indians in American suburbia, it also sheds light on how these transnational immigrants themselves come to understand and negotiate their identities.

Bhatia forcefully contends that to fully understand migrant identity and cultural formation it is essential that psychologists and others think of selfhood as firmly intertwined with sociocultural factors such as colonialism, gender, language, immigration, and race-based immigration laws.

American Karma offers a new framework for thinking about the construction of selfhood and identity in the context of immigration. This innovative approach advances the field of psychology by incorporating critical issues related to the concept of culture, including race, power, and conflict, and will also provide key insights to those in anthropology, sociology, human development, and migrant studies.

1

American Karma: Race, Place, and Identity in the Indian Diaspora

I remember one significant moment in my ethnographic research when I asked Rani,¹ a first-generation Indian who has lived in America for the last three decades, to define “American culture.” Acknowledging that it was difficult, Rani quickly rattled off two points as though she had thought about them for a long time.

American culture, as I understand, stands for individuality, but it doesn’t really know what individuality is. It says we are nonconformist, but it is the most conformist. It says that we are very free, but I think you can have freer opinions in a “Third World” country such as India than you can … over here.²

Her second point emphasizes that the description of American culture changes in accordance with the culture being discussed: white culture or minority culture. I asked Rani to elaborate on and clarify this distinction. She answered, “Yes, it’s the majority white culture. So either you’re part of it, or you’re not part of it. If you’re white, you’re part of it. If you’re not white, then you’re not part of it.”

Rani’s oversimplified definition of American culture is racialized through the asymmetrical power relationships between white and nonwhite groups, majority and nonmajority cultures, and “First World” and “Third World” countries. Framing the concept of culture and identity in terms of power, race, identity, and belongingness, Rani sees American culture through her own marginal eyes and describes it as a culture that excludes her. It is made up of a center where she does not belong. Her brown skin, gender, Indian accent, bindi,³ sari, and cultural rituals reflect a culture that is not part of the majority. Rani’s view of American culture as being synonymous with whiteness is an attempt to define it as made up of contested codes, symbols of power, and clearly marked boundaries and locations.

Rani’s effort to see culture through a racial lens has forced psychologists to rethink how they define culture, community, and identity in a world where international borders are becoming porous and where travel and migration between geographical spaces are commonplace. But Rani’s negotiations of self are filtered through the prism of race and nationality. These kinds of identity negotiation are commonplace in the migrant communities of, for example, Mexican Americans, Arab Americans, Chinese Canadians, Turkish Germans, French Maghrebi, and British Indians across the First World metropolitan areas.

There is a small, but growing, body of research being done on the formation of racial and cultural identity in the post-1965, middle-class Indian diaspora in the United States (Bhattacharjee 1992; Ganguly 1992; Gibson 1988; Helweg and Helweg 1990; Khandelwal 2002; Kumar 2000; Maira 2002; Maira and Srikanth 1996; Prashad 2000; Purkayastha 2005; Rangaswamy 2000; Rudrappa 2004; Shukla 2003; Visweswaran 1997). Similarly, a few scholars in Britain are exploring the South Asian identity and its complex intersections between race and ethnicity (Bhachu 1993; Brah 1996; Hutnyk and Sharma 2000; Raj 2003; Vertovec 1999; Werbner and Modood 1997). Susan Koshy writes that a “significant amount of research so far has been produced by literary scholars, but much empirical, and ethnographic work in anthropology, sociology, and history remains to be done on South Asian American racial identification” (1998, p. 287). My ethnographic study of the Indian diaspora builds on this research, especially on South Asian racial and cultural identity. In particular, I show how the Indian middle-class professional community regards the various ways in which their bodies, accents, cultures, and selves are racialized and marked as different. What kinds of narratives do they construct to understand their racial assignation? This book captures the lived experiences of diaspora and the contradictory and conflicting voices making up their identities.

The Indian Diaspora in Yankee Land

In what ways is the “Indianness” imported from the diaspora tied to the geography and the physical space of the homeland? How are these cultural importations of self and identity reconstituted in the diasporic space by their contact with suburban America? Approximately 1.7 million Indians live in the United States, and according to the 2000 U.S. census, the Indian American community is one of this country’s fastest-growing immigrant communities. From 1990 to 2000, the number of Indian Americans grew by 106 percent, compared with the average 7 percent growth rate of the general population, and is the fastest-growing Asian American community.

Questions about the construction of “Indian identity” in the Indian diaspora are inevitably tied to questions about how India is incorporated in the imagination of the diasporic community. The migrant community imagines and stitches together diverse notions of “Indianness,” which are shaped by the members’ class positions back home, nostalgia, memories, emotions, and longing for the original desi⁴ nation and culture of their homeland.⁵

By all accounts, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act fundamentally changed the background of Indians migrating to the United States. Within a very short time, Indian migrants in the United States changed from being “pariahs to elite” (Rangaswamy 2000, p. 40). Unlike the first wave of the Punjabi Sikh diaspora, the second wave of Indian migrants were highly skilled professionals, trained as medical doctors, engineers, scientists, university professors, and doctoral and postdoctoral students in mostly science-related disciplines like chemistry, biochemistry, math, physics, biology, and medicine. Prashad writes that between 1966 and 1977, 83 percent of Indians who migrated to the United States were highly skilled professionals composed of about “20,000 scientists with PhD’s, 40,000 engineers, and 25,000 doctors” (2000, p. 75). These professional Indians have made their “home” in suburban diasporas in town and cities all across America.

One such Indian diaspora can be found in the suburbs of southeastern Connecticut and is the subject of this ethnographic study. With the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, the class and socioeconomic backgrounds of the second wave of Indian migrants changed significantly. Instead, the post-1965 Indian migrants who participated in this study come from middle-class families who use their economic success and wealth to overcome the hardships often associated with low-skilled, migrant labor. Their membership in competitive, exclusive professions such as medicine and engineering put them in the company of some of the most elite members of American society. Their economic success, educational accomplishments, and membership in professional societies have propelled them straight into Connecticut’s middle- and upper-class suburbs. Since the 1960s, these migrants have lived in small cities and suburbs of southern Connecticut, such as Groton, Ledyard, East Lyme, Norwich, Norwalk, New London, Old Lyme, and Waterford.

Most of the professional Indians who participated in this ethnography lived in the suburban town of East Lyme and were part of the post-1965 highly skilled, professional migrants. Of the thirty-eight first-generation men and women whom I interviewed, twenty-six had PhD’s and the rest had master’s or an equivalent professional degree. The majority worked at a large multinational company called ABC Computer Corporation,⁶ in various professional positions as directors, computer scientists, chemical engineers, biochemists, mid-level managers, and directors.

The members of the local diaspora who were not affiliated with the computer company were university professors, medical doctors, architects, school counselors, teachers, and social workers. There also was a group of women who had advanced degrees in the sciences but had decided to become full-time caregivers. Almost 80 percent of the families I interviewed were dual-income families with yearly earnings between $65,000 and $200,000. It is important to mention that the Indians in southeastern Connecticut are not very different from Indians in other middle-class communities across America.

Many of the professional Indian migrants who came to the United States after 1965 were medical doctors who took the Educational Council for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG) exams that allowed them to work as interns and residents in U.S. hospitals. While doing research on the history of Indian migrants in New York, Khandelwal found that in one month in 1965, about two thousand Indian doctors were preparing to take the ECFMG exams so they could work in U.S. hospitals. She notes that from “1961 to 1968, 67% of Indians employed in the United States were in professional categories, and from 1969–1971, the figure jumped to 89%. Ninety-three percent of Indians who migrated to the U.S. in 1975 were ‘professional/technical workers’ ” Furthermore, the “situation was so serious in the late 1960s that the Association for Service to Indian Scholars was formed to persuade Indian professionals to return home” (Khandelwal 2002, p. 93).

Most of the Indian professionals that I interviewed initially came to the United States determined to go back to India to “serve” the needs of the country. But once they earned an advanced doctoral degree, they were able to move quickly into the workforce and postponed indefinitely their return home. In some cases, the men made their first trip back home to find a wife, whose family members had arranged for them to meet. Most of the men in my study married professional Indian women with educational skills that could be used to obtain a good job in the United States. These women had advanced doctoral degrees in medicine, computer science, chemistry, and counseling, but they entered the United States as the wives of professional Indian men. A few of these women, however, came to the United States in the 1970s and 1980s to study in graduate school and then found their partners there. Generally, both the men and women of the diaspora had had a solid undergraduate education in the sciences and engineering at prestigious, competitive universities in India, which prepared them to meet the challenges of graduate school in the United States.

Destiny’s Children: “After I Joined IIT … There Was No Other Option”

Many of the Indian professionals in my study had their basic training in engineering at prestigious Indian universities like the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). Indeed, many now look back and marvel at the good science and engineering education they received in India. I asked Kishore, who worked at the ABC Computer Company and had graduated from one of the IIT universities, “What was unique about the IIT education in India?” Kishore told me that IIT provided a very good foundation and basic training in science, engineering, and mathematics. He admitted that graduate school in America was easy for him.

I had a very good sort of fundamental basis, for the education. To me, graduate school was very easy, so I really didn’t have to stretch too much in order to get the A grades and, you know, to do well. I think in those things, I probably lived up to the expectations that I might have had for myself coming out of India.

The exportation of these brilliant minds from India to the United States also was documented in an episode of CBS’s 60 Minutes in June 2003. As Leslie Stahl, who oversaw the feature, explained, “Put Harvard, MIT and Princeton together, and you begin to get an idea of the status of IIT in India.” She pointed out that IIT has an extremely rigorous curriculum and that IIT graduates are known to be exceptional chemical, electrical, and computer engineers. With an acceptance rate of less than 2 percent, IIT is now one of the most competitive schools in the world. Stahl noted that not only is IIT’s reputation impressive, but most of its graduate students go on to have illustrious careers in the United States. “While some of the IIT grads stay and have helped build India’s flourishing high-tech sector, almost two-thirds—up to 2,000 people—leave every year, most for the U.S.” Vinod Khosla, the founding executive officer of Sun Microsystems, graduated from IIT about thirty years ago. In the 60 Minutes program, he proudly announced to American viewers that IIT graduates had played a major role in the software development of blue-chip companies like Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and Sun Microsystems.

In India, the status of IIT among middle-class families is almost mythical.⁷ Accordingly, students who pass the IIT entrance tests are seen as geniuses who are guaranteed instant success. Since the rise of the city of Bangalore as a global hub of software development and a provider of low-cost technological services and call centers, IIT has begun to acquire a global brand name. IIT undergraduates are seen as destined to work and succeed in America. Over the decades, the massive exportation of IIT graduates—the cream of the crop—to the United States has also been the subject of much controversy. Toward the end of the 60 Minutes feature, Stahl emphasized that the “brain drain” from India had hurt its economy and research and development and had benefited the United States. Although the participants in my study also were aware of the “brain drain” issue, for them there was no other option but to migrate to America.

Anil, a fifty-one-year-old IIT graduate whom I interviewed, came to the United States in the 1980s.

I:⁸ I came to America because …

A: I don’t know, I went to IIT, I don’t know if you …

I: Of course!

A: And pretty much everybody came …

I: You went to IIT, Madras?

A: Yes, so in 1984 that was one of the things you did, and I came. So after the time I joined IIT, I never thought I’d come to the United States because I never thought about what happens afterwards. After I joined IIT, it was almost, you know … there was no other option.

I: Yeah, in fact I’ve heard that.

It is interesting that Anil felt he had no options in India after he graduated from IIT. In fact, he told me that out of his graduating class of twenty-eight chemical engineers, about twenty-two came to the United States in the mid-1980s.

Anil emphasized that the IIT system made it very easy to be admitted to graduate school in the United States. “It never occurred to me not to come, but I cannot say I came here because of my love for chemical engineering or something.” After IIT, Anil got his PhD from a well-respected engineering school in Massachusetts and then moved on to a multinational computer company in Norwich, so he could get his green card and become a permanent legal resident in the United States.

The personal stories of the post-1965 migrants in this book show that before they arrived in the United States, they already had amassed enough cultural and linguistic capital to succeed here. In one sense, their career paths and life trajectories in the United States had already been determined in India. Their educational stopovers at places like Yale, Stanford, University of California, University of Michigan, Indiana University, and Rutgers ensured that they would be able to compete for the best jobs in the most competitive organizations and multinational companies in the United States. Their middle-class upbringing in India, their excellent foundations in the sciences, their fluency in English, and their good work ethic propelled them into an elite segment of U.S. society. Many of these university graduates had grown up being “America conscious” and knew what they needed to do to get into U.S. graduate schools. While it is true that their individual qualities—such as intelligence, merit, and hard work —ensured their passage to the United States, their social-class positions, world-class undergraduate education in science and engineering, and familial networks also had a great impact on their decision to come to study in the United States.

Cultural Identity and Model Minority Status

The success story of the post-1965 migrants of the Indian diaspora makes them model minorities in the United States, and the language of the model minority discourse becomes the yardstick by which the Indian immigrants measure their relatively rapid success in America. In this vein, Koshy observed, “The model minority position has increasingly come to define the racial identity of a significant number of South Asian Americans; it depends on the intermediary location of a group between black and white and holds a particularly powerful appeal for immigrant groups” (1998, p. 287). Many Indian immigrants were consumed by their own success story as a model minority in the United States, and the American public and politicians also conferred this status on the Indian community (Khandelwal 2002).

One point that many South Asian academics made is that the myth of model minority, which positions the Asian community as a highly qualified, professional, and successful group of immigrants, also can work against them. Both professional and nonprofessional Indian immigrants tend to be ambivalent about the racial and ethnic discrimination they face at work and in their daily lives, an ambivalence also experienced by other members of the Asian American diaspora. Kibria writes:

The model minority stereotype has a highly fluid and multidimensional set of meanings. I found my second-generation Chinese and Korean American informants to be struggling at times to resist the label of model minority, to ward off its limitations and dangers; they considered it part of their experience of racial marginality in the dominant society. But they also drew on the model minority stereotype in affirmative ways, in their efforts to make sense of and define the position of Asian Americans within the racial hierarchy of United States. (2002, p. 132)

One important part of this model minority discourse is that it reifies the idea that through hard work, family values, and educational qualifications, some migrant communities are able to rise above their circumstances. The statement by the former senator Phil Gramm, that Indian Americans represent the best and the brightest that the United States has to offer, reinforces the mistaken assumption that professional, well-to-do Indians have the same economic and educational opportunities that individuals from other ethnic and minority groups do.

Some Americans use such statements about the cultural and material achievements of Indian migrants to make unfair comparisons between Asian American communities and black America. According to Prashad,

These are not only statements of admiration. Apart from being condescending, such gestures remind me that I am to be the perpetual solution to what is seen as the crisis of black America. I am to be the weapon in the war against black America…. The struggles of blacks are met with the derisive remark that Asians don’t complain; they work hard—as if to say that blacks don’t work hard. (2000, pp. 6–7)

This book shows that the model minority story shaping the identity of so many professional Indian immigrants in the United States does not take into account that the lives of well-educated Indian migrants begin from a different starting point than that of other minorities. The model minority discourse, as Prashad observes, is “based on deliberate state-selection and not on based on cultural or natural selection” (2000, p. 4). That is, the successful “acculturation” or “assimilation” of professional Indian immigrants in the U.S. workforce is based on a special provision of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows the entry of only a few, highly qualified, transnational migrants educated in postcolonial schools and universities.

Race, Culture, Ethnicity, and Transnational Migration

In the last decade, many prominent scholars of migration studies have pointed out that the canonical “straight-line” and linear assimilation theory proposed by Warner and Srole (1945) and Gordon (1964) is not relevant to the contemporary patterns of non-European migration. For example, in identifying their various flaws, Alba and Nee (2003) write that these old theories of assimilation are formulated on the assumption that assimilation in American society is successful when ethnic groups “unlearn” and abandon their the cultural practices and rituals. This model of acculturation is defined as “unlineal acculturation—where the bargain was straightforward: please check all your cultural baggage before you pass through the Golden Gate” (Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco 2001, p. 160). People became assimilated in American society when they erased their cultural identity, unlearned their ethnic cultural practices and beliefs, and accepted the core values of mainstream American culture. The core “American culture” that immigrants were expe...