RAJ S. RANGARAJAN talks to Mitra Kalita, whose Suburban Sahibs, a book about the different fortunes of three Indian migrant families in New Jersey, has just been published in India.
IF you thought IFS stood for Indian Foreign Service think again. IFS is Indian Food Smell, specially among Americans who allege the aroma of Indian cooking tends to be overpowering. FOB stands for fresh-off-boat and Dink stands for double income, no kids. These acronyms are some of the generational expressions used by 27-year-old first-time author S. Mitra Kalita whose Suburban Sahibs, a non-fiction effort with interesting stats, has just been published by Penguin, India.Mitra Kalita, an education writer for The Washington Post, was born in New York to immigrants from Assam and after graduation did her MS from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Her book traces lives of three middle-class families — the Patels: Harish and Kapila; the Kotharis: Pradip (now Americanised as "Peter") and Nandini and the Sarmas: Sanku and Lipi, all of whom immigrated to the United States to pursue the "American dream". How these families' lives have turned out with concomitant pleasures and problems is the subject of Mitra's book. Two of the families moved to New Jersey more than 30 years ago, the third came here a few years ago on H-1B visas.
"We endured little blatant racism but plenty of questions about `what kind' of Indian we were," says Mitra. "What tribe?" one teacher asked. Kalita talks nostalgically about her early days: As an immigrant I became two Mitras: the one at home spoke Assamese, ate with her little hands and slept tucked between two parents in a king-size bed. One spoke in a thick Long Island accent, dreamed of a family past and vacillated between the black Cabbage Patch Kid and the white one, settling on the latter."
Passionate about her association with New Jersey, the Garden State, where between 1990 and 2000 the state's Indian population grew more than 100 per cent from 79,400 to 169,180, Mitra says, the first influx of Indian immigrants arrived as a result of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 which gave almost every country a quota of 20,000 immigrants per year.
Indians initially settled in Jackson Heights (some call it lightheartedly "Jaikishenagar") and Flushing, New York and over the past 10 to 15 years, people settled around Central New Jersey which houses one of the largest communities of South Asians in the U.S. "In Edison neighbourhoods, around dinnertime the smell of curries and cardamom wafts over freshly manicured lawns," where well-known names such as Ford, Revlon, American Can, Johnson & Johnson have a major presence. An estimated 1.7 million Indians are legal immigrants of the U.S.
Thirty years ago, Indian groceries and sari shops were few and far between. Today, Oak Tree Road in Iselin, NJ, is a "little India" where even mainstream American supermarkets stock veggies that Indians favour. An eloquent statistic says all: "The Yellow Pages for both Edison and Woodbridge (now) have more Patels than Smiths and more Shahs than Joneses." Interestingly, according to a conservative think tank, only three percent of Indian arrivals lack a high school education, and about 75 percent of Indian immigrants who work in the U.S. are college graduates compared to about a third of the U.S. population overall.
Of the three families, one never made it and continues to struggle. There are indeed many untold stories or those waiting to be told, of NRIs in a bind, who live from month to month, after decades here. Many face problems like their brethren they left behind in India. Media stories tend to talk only of Indian-American successes but Mitra refers to a certain economically-deprived NRI segment which, for fear of shame and ridicule, will not go back to India, whatever the frustrations, insults and lack of respect they are heir to.
To a question if Indian-Americans in other parts of America or Canada can relate to her book, the former Rutgers student declares, "New Jersey is unique in that it is not in a urban setting and the book has lessons that are universal to other states or counties with large expatriate communities." On the subject of Indian kids raised here, Mitra says, "it was easy to talk with them, hard to write about. I feel protective of these young people but also have an obligation to my reader to be honest." Mitra hopes that her book will resonate across cultures, specially among non-Indians.
While Mitra has produced an excellent dossier on Indians in New Jersey, I wish she had also included more on NRIs who live in other parts of the country such as Jackson Heights, NY or on the numerous NRIs on H-1B visas in California.
Politicians generally like to talk of the American dream. Would the H-1B visa or Outsourcing become a bone of contention this election year for Indian applicants? You bet. The race to replace George W. Bush as president of the U.S. is heating up (general elections on November 2, 2004). Media reports regularly talk of the flight of jobs to countries such as India and China where outsourcing is the new mantra among multinationals.
With more and more Indian-Americans aspiring to join the legislative class by contesting elections here and with some victors in the Garden State, "Namaste" and "Jai Hind" will become staples for sure-fire vote-getting, specially if one wishes to hold public office in Middlesex County, New Jersey, concludes Mitra.
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