The return of the native: from Little India to Little America
By Michael Neri
The ‘India Shining’ brigade is probably doing a celebratory bhangra jig on news that a majority of young Indian entrepreneurs and newly minted graduates in the US are packing their bags to go home, because the domestic economic horizon is now brighter than America’s. I should take that back. Duke University Professor Vivek Wadhwa’s recently published survey of the locational preferences of 1200 US based Indian entrepreneurs and students is not news. He merely confirms what several surveys over the last 3 years have shown: professional Indians are returning home in growing numbers. I can’t vouch for its veracity, but at least one study claims that the number of returnees now slightly exceeds the number of new entrants, signaling a fundamental shift in Indian perceptions about America. Without quibbling about numbers, we can all agree that perceptions have indeed altered significantly and will probably never revert to the status quo ante, characterized by a dreamy optimism about the wonders of an American life. A majority of Americans themselves expect their material future to be worse than the past. In this respect, petty parochialists such as the above referenced India brigade do indeed have something to crow about, in the same way that they delighted in Britain’s decline from its earlier supremacy.
Yet, one can’t but help noticing that one of the most powerful drivers of this reverse migration is the growing similarities of the material environments in the USA and India. Starting with gated communities complete with swimming pools and manicured hedges, to malls and supermarkets stocking the very consumer products these Indian Americans got used to, to toll roads and new swanky airport terminals, and now even salary parity, it is no surprise that going home is a seamless and comfortable experience. It is hard to avoid the inference that Indian Americans are essentially going back to a Little America inside India, and in that sense are changing locations but not realities. Most returnees will reject the notion that they are returning for material reasons alone, and will cite proximity to family and community as a major motivation, but the blogosphere offers an abundance of evidence that there is much overstatement in this citation. For many returnees, the extended family and friends can quickly become intrusive and backward baggage who have simply refused to evolve to the same sophistication as the returnee has, and hence putting a distance with them is inevitable and essential to their newly minted identities as Indian American returnees. The claim that they are returning so their kids can be brought up with Indian values is also equally stretched , if only because urban Indian kids have themselves become more Americanized than ever, and it would be a loss of status if the returnee’s kids were not able to out-American their untraveled countrymen. ‘Indian values’ can get thrown out the window quite quickly in the process.
The funny thing is that when Indians migrate to the US on a temporary or permanent basis, they are overeager to be accepted and become integrated into the larger American community, and to do so, they adopt all the external accouterments of an American culture. But like all immigrants irrespective of color and county of origin, they are socially excluded and kept at a distance that is never bridged in the first generation. Isolated and forced to ghettoize within enclaves of their own countrymen, their Little Indias, Indian Americans sublimate their identity needs in a single minded career focus which can consume them for an entire lifetime. Deprived of a larger identity, Indians have become the most successful immigrant group in the US, but they have lost themselves in the process. No longer genuinely Indian, not really American, they are divided within themselves and more than a little confused. There is no resolution for this divide within America: becoming more truly American is not an available option. The parallels with Indian call center workers (who have probably never set foot outside their home county) are fascinating. Forced to adopt false identities as Americans or Brits or Australians in order to do their jobs, these hapless people forget who they were and can’t accept who they have become. Yet, this similarity may not be entirely surprising because the Indian American and his Indian call center counterpart are products of the same set of forces. But before we get into that, a little context is in order.
There are about 1.8 million people of Indian origin permanently settled in the US and another million of so transients on a variety of short term visas. Together they make up less than 1 % of the US population, which is arguably too small a ratio to play the identity politics game that blacks, with 12 %, and Hispanics, with 16 %, play to substantial effect in the US political system. But Indians occupy a disproportionate share of high visibility/high impact positions in academia, business, healthcare, and the media, and they are on average wealthier and earn more than even Caucasian Whites, so their lack of a political voice and a group identity is a bit odd, until you consider the forces that propelled Indians into these positions of relative prominence. There was a time when Indian immigration into the US was blocked by explicit (racially biased) law, but as American capitalism metamorphosed into Financial Globo-capitalism, a system so dependent on technology and process skills, the need for an army of people willing to do the drudge work and support the technology underpinning the system, overruled the urge to national and racial exclusivity. The floodgates were opened to immigrants from India, who could fill these needs, tentatively first in the 60s, and more widely in the 80s. From the system’s point of this, this was a transactional intervention, with little place for identity politics and dynamics. Indians would be allowed into the system, and even given an occasional place in the limelight only to the extent that they subsumed their Indian identities into those of faceless globacrats and professionals. Contrast that with the large scale migration of Hispanic peoples in the USA over the past 30 years who by definition were irrelevant to the needs of globo-capitalism and hence allowed to gain and retain a political identity as Hispanics, and the dynamic becomes cruelly transparent. Thus, even the small handful of people of Indian origin who broke through the glass ceiling in America politics, such as Bobby Jindal and Nikki Randhawa Haley, did so only because they had distanced themselves from, and perhaps even forgotten, their Indian roots. They were no voices for an Indian identity, but for its obfuscation. Ditto for the large number of high profile Indian doctors, entrepreneurs, academics, and managers, who stand out not for their Indianness but for their faux Americanization.
In like manner, financial globo-capitalism created the offshore call center and software services industry to meet its needs, and sucked in millions of Indians into its innards, but it was explicitly understood that this was a transaction in which nationality and identity had to be exchanged deliberately and convincingly for a pretense wrapped in a salary cheque. The degree of compulsion to become ‘Americanized’ was much greater in the call center than it was among Indians residing in the US, but the result was the same.
The return of the Americanized Indian native and the proliferation of call centers and American brands in India can only accelerate this process of Americanization of Indian culture till something gives and there is a compulsion to look inwards and rediscover real identities. Will the returning native and his untraveled Indian counterpart muster the courage to face the pain of false identities squarely and begin the process of recovering a truer sense of self? Or is this an illusory quest, because there is no real true self in the sense of a distinct and unique cultural or national identity? Only time can tell.
Michael Neri was formerly Editor of Express Computer. He is currently a consultant to the tech industry and writer based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.