Mohan Guruswamy | Desis in America: How some think and behave

The sheer crudity of the NRI “bulldozer” rally in the armpit town of Edison, New Jersey, reminded me of something I wrote in 2010. It’s about how they think and behave in the United States. They are shrill, noisy and have little interest in their chosen country. All of us have many in our families who are now NRIs in America. Without exception, they think being better off economically than most of us who choose to be here or chose to come back, they know more. My favourite one is a liquor shop owner who spends hours haranguing me on how to set India right. It featured this very same town of Edison, a perennial hotspot of Indian-American racism and parochialism.

On July 2, 2010 Joel Stein wrote a witty and perfectly appropriate piece in Time “My Own Private India” about a town called Edison. Stein was thoroughly excoriated as racist and anti-Indian by people purporting to represent Indians in America. Stein wilted under the onslaught and responded: “I truly feel stomach sick that I’ve hurt so many people.” Besides a few self-proclaimed leaders who found their five minutes of fame, there’s little evidence “so many people” were hurt. Time chipped in with an apology of its own but, apparently not convinced on the extent of anger, said: “We sincerely regret any of our readers were upset by this humour column of Joel Stein’s”. Very clever indeed, which is why Time is what it is. But why did Stein and Time have to cave in? Stein’s piece was inoffensive, whimsical and cleverly humorous. A better response for him would have been to ask the protesters to stuff it or be cleverly conditional in expressing regret, like his magazine.

Now about Edison, that neighbour of Newark and a transportation hub with an extensive network of highways like US Route 1, which also sits astride a five-mile length of the New Jersey Turnpike. Edison’s only other claim to fame is that it has so far resisted attempts by WalMart to open a store near the junction of New Jersey Route 27 and Interstate 287. Edison was incorporated as Raritan Township and became Edison in 1954, ostensibly hoping to ride piggyback on the great inventor who made it his home in 1876. For decades Edison has been a magnet for Indian immigrants, particularly those from Gujarat. Today, over 17 per cent of its estimated population of about 102,000 is identified as Indian- American, most of them Gujarati. I have driven through Edison, NJ, on a few occasions and it’s not the kind of town I would even want to stop by for a coffee. It’s at once grungy and noisy, seems to teem with Indians noisily looking for bargains or cheap desi food.

Desi means homegrown, and is used in a self-pejorative way by almost all NRIs when referring to fellow Indians. At last count there were over 2.5 million desis in the US. The US Census 2000 map shows that Indian-Americans (officially called Asian Indians) tend to concentrate in certain areas. Whenever I visit the US, it never ceases to amaze me that my Indian-American friends and relatives seem to only socialise with other desis. They tend to flock together. The US has a fair number of Indian- American clusters, but it’s Edison that has the highest concentration.

Indian-Americans have the highest median incomes in the US and are generally white-collar professionals. Edison’s desi community, however, has a fair sprinkling of less well-off people doing jobs that probably fetch them much less than the median Indian-American income. It shows easily.

One out of five desis is of Gujarati origin, and like Indians from other regions tend to live and socialise within themselves. Gujaratis, referred to within the desi community as Gujjus, are more entrepreneurial by nature and tend to be in business. The 400,000-strong Gujarati diaspora in the US thus has a smaller proportion of professionals. They now own more than half the economy lodging properties in the US. Since a large proportion of Gujaratis in the US have the surname Patel, these hotels are popularly referred to among Indian-Americans as “potels”, and often are places that rent out rooms by the hour.

Indians, in general, are very racist and colour conscious. Our standards of political correctness are not very high. Our discourse is laced with racist and derogatory references to others. The desi community in the US is not very different. Mira Nair’s 1991 movie Mississippi Masala, set among the Indian-American community living in steaming Biloxi, Mississippi, captures in full all the prejudices and inward-looking attitudes prevalent in Hindu society back home carrying on as before among an expatriate Indian-American community. The story is about the romance of a girl of Ugandan Indian Gujarati origin and a handsome African-American, played by Denzel Washington. But expectedly, the family and friends, mostly in the “potel” business, vigorously oppose the romance with a “kalu”, as persons of African origin are derogatively referred to by desis.

Indians also generally derogatively refer to white people as goras, when not referring to them as “white monkeys”. Most Indian matrimonial advertisements seek fair-skinned brides, and within India people from the lighter-skinned north tend to look down upon the darker-skinned South Indian. Hindi language movies often have a bit of comedy in them featuring a South Indian speaking Hindi in a typically South Indian way. More often than not, the Hindi actor playing the South Indian wears a boot black tan like blackface minstrels did in earlier Hollywood movies. The point is that Indians, by and large, are very racist and extremely colour conscious. Few desis will contest that. And they shouldn’t be complaining.

For a people who tend to look down on so many of our own for reasons of colour, caste and race, Indians seem to be getting notoriously thin- skinned. As America’s wealthiest median income community, they are now bigger players in US politics, with their political action committees (PACs) active in serving many Indian causes, be it the civil nuclear deal with the US or an increase in the number of work visas. Many politicians in the US, like Congressman Frank Pallone, who represents New Jersey’s sixth district, that includes Edison, have a great many Indian-American constituents and increasingly pander to them. The economic clout of the Indian-American is also felt in many ways. It’s good that they have begun to flex their muscles a bit. But it’s not good that they are becoming more parochial, sectarian, racist and thin-skinned.