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My Community: The Liminality of Being Indian American

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My Community: The Liminality of Being Indian American

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Exploring the lives of Indians in America, focusing on their success, cultural contradictions, and the gap between their nostalgic view of India and their Americanised reality.
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Mid-century, a peculiar reverence arose for those returning from abroad, whether visitors or people of Indian origin. India, as a nation constrained by economic policy, where foreign travel was a rare privilege, elevated the traveler. This was the era of scarcity and license-quota raj.

Nylon shirts, Wilson rackets: totems in a landscape of scarcity. The ‘foreign returned’ held court, their tales of distant wonders—shiny cars, exotic tastes, unseen spectacles—setting them apart. A privileged breed, particularly in college circles. Whiskey, chocolate, televised wonders: their stories painted a world of exclusive access. This ‘foreign returned’ elite, defined by tangible and intangible luxuries.

American lives, Indian hearts define those who went there as students but had gone on to build lucrative and trail-blazing careers, yet craved sarees and familiar tunes. India, to them, was a paradox: a land of chaos and cherished roots. They decried its ills—poverty, decay, political folly—with an air of irrefutable authority, while remaining inextricably bound to its fate. A nation they scorned, yet could not relinquish.

The genesis of this peculiar paradoxical behaviour of our transatlantic cousins lies within the confluence of India’s then-prevailing protectionist and socialist doctrines. These fostered an idealised vision of the US as a haven of liberty, elevating its Indian diaspora to near-mythic stature. India’s subsequent liberalisation shattered this perception, replacing it with a more prosaic reality.

From wide-eyed 1950s arrivals to today’s chip-tech elite, a curious pattern emerges: a patronising zeal for preaching Indian culture to India itself. This behaviour, both amusing and irksome, warrants more than a passing glance.

They’re adamant about seat belts, a non-negotiable rite of passage in their American chariots. Yet, upon Indian soil, the seat belt saints become traffic rule violators. Traffic laws become mere suggestions, and police connections (I can vouch for that) a convenient loophole.

A curious case of selective traffic virtue. In America, a dropped scrap is a social transgression, the nearest bin pointed out with quiet disapproval. In India, however, gift wrap becomes a confetti storm, a testament to festive abandon. Bins? A mere suggestion.

American whispers below the threshold decibel levels of human hearing become jungle cries in India. Queue-jumping elicits polite chides in the States, but here, influential friends expedite matters. Punctuality abroad yields to ‘too many engagements’ at home. ‘Excuse me’ transforms into four-letter fluency. They sprinkle ‘bottom lines’ and ‘success stories’ into their tales, a theatrical display for those denied the American pilgrimage. A curious metamorphosis: civil abroad, operatic at home. They offer a study in cultural elasticity, where volume, punctuality, and vocabulary shift with the longitude.

The returned-home cultural oracles preach India’s virtues—ironically, to the very students yearning for the same American dream. Affluent doctors, engineers, and professors, now self-appointed guardians of ‘Indian values,’ dispense wisdom from their suburban pulpits. One imagines their lectures, seasoned with tales of ‘back home,’ while discreetly checking their balances. A curious missionary zeal, born of comfortable exile.

Stay, they decree, in the land of zero and Pi! They, who embraced the American way, now preach the glories of ancient India—a history gleaned, one suspects, from glossy tourist pamphlets. Their Sanskrit is brochure-thin, their knowledge of Hindu Puranas, five-star hotel adjacent. They, who built careers on foreign soil, now sermonise on ‘Indian values’ to those seeking the same escape. A delightful irony: the Americanised turned cultural gatekeepers, armed with travelogue wisdom and a healthy dose of nostalgia.

Cultural lectures? Bless their hearts. We have our own Vedantic virtuosos, steeped in the Vedas and the Upanishads, people whose feats of memory in reciting poetry in Sanskrit or Telugu or any other language is unrivalled.
Our Yankee cousins are too busy marvelling at Rajasthan’s Rambagh opulence, baby elephants, and champagne-soaked biryani. Their dollar-tinted dream filters out the drought, the weary women, and the dead livestock. It’s a tourist brochure come to life, with a side of selective amnesia. Unfortunately, what is displayed to them and what actually is the state of affairs are two sides of the same coin.

See them again at a glance, our cousins in America, caught between two worlds, not sure whether they belong to America or India, making the typical gestures one sees in American soap operas like moving their heads up and down, shrugging their shoulders, shaking their necks, or stretching their hands wide apart in a particular manner, uttering superlatives ‘great’ or ‘fantastic’ at the slightest provocation and speaking with a nasal twang, a limited vocabulary mostly containing unmentionable four-letter words. (When Rex Harrison said in My Fair Lady that in America they have not spoken English for years, he was probably referring to “Our Cousins”!). If at all they are genuinely interested in helping their motherland, they are quite welcome and there are many ways to do so.

One conspicuous aspect anyone can notice is that despite being one of the largest and most affluent communities in America, our cousins—i.e. Indians settled in America—have not formed a “strong lobby” with clout in the sense the Jews, the English, the Italians, and some other ethnic groups have done.

True, they meet at temples for bhajans and during festivals. However, this very limitation imposes a restriction on their capacity to have a major say in anything, not even the kind of meal that is to be served to them by any major airline.

The next time you are on a flight across the Atlantic or the Pacific and notice the foreigner sitting next to you enjoying the food he had ordered, including his juicy steak or noodles or spaghetti, you have to accept whatever the stewardess thrusts on your table—uncooked lentils, corn smelling of rancid butter, and unrecognisable vegetables floating in stale yogurt with a label “special meal” stuck to the foil, adding insult to injury.

Please try to understand that “our cousins” in New York and San Francisco have never had the courage to tell any airline that what they serve can by no stretch of imagination be called a “special meal,” for it does not even have one item from the hundreds of mouth-watering dishes that constitute real Indian food; nor even that Indian vegetarians are not monkeys to be fed with bananas and peanuts throughout the flight.

America is a nation of immigrants—a melting pot of races. The “Pilgrim Fathers,” as well as the earliest immigrants, had a historical and moral advantage over those who came later.

The process of immigration continued in the following centuries. Jews from Russia and later from Europe and other countries constituted the majority in the first five decades of the last century. In the fifties, Indians started to go to America for higher education and for employment. Their numbers gradually increased, reaching the present stage—a large and affluent group, though not comparable population-wise to the earlier hordes from Europe.

However, by and large, our cousins have done well for themselves and also served America well. The engineers, doctors, scientists, and businessmen owning restaurants, and shops selling jewelry, electronic gadgets, and saris are successful and affluent. And of late, our engineers have flooded the Silicon Valley and might be appropriately christened ‘Silicon Chip Indians’ (an expression coined by me, which my brother loves!).

Every family regards some member as a ‘Success Story,’ which is another favourite expression. Dad is a top executive in one of the greatest multinationals. Mom is a real estate dealer, and they both earn millions of dollars. One son has recently joined Harvard, and another has received a certificate of merit from Yale or Columbia (who has the time or energy to verify these claims?). Both represent their colleges in basketball, and their heroes are Michael Jordan and Babe Ruth. Their houses cost 10 million dollars, and they have four cars—a Mercedes, a Porsche, a Lexus, and a Mazda. The younger son lives on a steady diet of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle comics.

At least African Americans get a chance to appear as attorneys or judges in films, whereas our cousins are totally ignored by Hollywood as well as television. But our cousins are not particularly bothered.

The next time one of our cousins tells you that he has published many scientific papers, kindly ask him what exactly his field of research is and the journal in which his papers have appeared. If he has not published articles in Nature, or Science, or Scientific American, his work has no significance. That should call his bluff.

I cannot resist quoting Tom Stoppard’s views about Americans in Newfoundland: “Americans are a very modern people, of course. They are a very open people too. They wear their hearts on their sleeves. They don’t stand on ceremony. They take people as they are. They make no distinction about a man’s background, his parentage, his education. They say what they mean, and there is a vivid muscularity about the way they say it. They admire everything about them without reserve or pretence of scholarship. They are always the first to put their hands in their pockets. They press you to visit them in their own home the moment they meet you, and are irrepressibly good-humoured, ambitious and brimming with self-confidence in any company. Apart from all that, I’ve got nothing against them.”

This applies to our cousins as well.

By and large, our transatlantic cousins are generally an affable lot: law-abiding, industrious, and weekend-starved. They juggle home chores, transatlantic calls, and temple bhajans with admirable efficiency. Ambitious souls ascend TANA, RANA, KANA, BANA (acronyms for Telugu associations of North America, etc.), meeting Indian dignitaries—a blend of American routine and Indian connection, a life stitched between two worlds.

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This is a picture I took on my last trip- I used to feel that all the colors and designs of the jewelry were too bold, too big, and too much of a statement. Now, I can see them for their beauty and recognize that they are not gauche but confident and truly beautiful.

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Feeling Liminal:

I used to feel disconnected from my Indian side. I avoided traditional clothes, felt awkward about cultural celebrations, and wanted to just "fit in." But over time, I’ve started embracing my roots: practicing my language (Kannada), listening to Indian music, and wearing Indian clothes proudly. However, this change didn’t happen in isolation. Many kids like me are going through this, in the 2nd gen community.

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This figure shows that immigration from India to the US has increased! This means that there are more and more people who feel the same way I did.

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Jeanne Batalova Ari Hoffman and Jeanne Batalova

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Significant immigration from India to the United States began only after 1965, when the United States dropped national-origin quotas that favored Europeans. Today, Indians make up the nation’s second largest foreign-born group. On average, they tend to be very well educated: 80 percent have a colleg…

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In this short video, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Mindy Kaling describe how it feels to dislike/not feel comfortable with your culture as an immigrant child. Although the Netflix show certainly has it's not school-appropriate elements, it does a lovely job (in my opinion) at showing the transition from disliking Indian culture to embracing it. Just like Devi, I'd feel 'too' Indian or 'too' American, and I would hate to wear my cultural clothing or be at Indian functions or religious events, feeling that they were 'too Indian' (as if that was a bad thing). And, just like Devi, I began to accept my identity, and love my Indian side. Seeing these feelings portrayed in a television show helped me realize that how I was feeling was not just isolated to me- other kids of immigrants felt this way too.

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Never Have I Ever | Mindy Kaling & Maitreyi Ramakrishnan Celebrate Ganesh Puja Episode | Netflix

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This photo is from last year! In India again- and this time I tried to wear more traditional clothing (yes, I paired the top with jeans, but its a style!). It sounds silly, but I felt a bit uncomfortable at first. I'm very much an American person, and it still felt a little bit like I was intruding on my own culture...if that makes sense? As the trip went on, though, I felt much more comfortable in my own skin, in my kurtas and lehenghas, wearing jhumkas and bangles! And now, I feel like I have reached the best point of my life so far liminality-wise: I'm still growing, of course, but being both Indian and American has never felt so natural to me. I'm going to India soon, and I'm going this time not as a (total) foriegner, but as someone who can belong.

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This photo is from many years ago- a picture of the daughters of three 2nd generation Indians in Portland!

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This picture is from 3ish years ago. I was in India, alongside my cousins and sister, wearing Western clothing! I distinctly remember that in that trip, despite being in India, I did not wear Indian clothing or jewelry once. It felt too uncomfortable- I felt 'too American' and too much like a poser, a foreigner- that I could not bring myself to wear Indian clothing.

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I remember I used to feel like the 'odd one out' with my mom's upma or my dad's dhal and rice. Living in the U.S., especially in liberal places like Portland, gave me space to explore my identity. But that same environment also made me question my differences. Why didn’t I bring “normal” lunches? Why didn’t I speak Kannada (my home language)? Why did my name and skin stand out?

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"We all know the Indians were colonized by the Europeans, but every colonized Indian has been colonized by the Indian reaction to colonization."

- Sherman Alexie

I feel this quote connects to Chapter 1 of Changing Society, where the book discusses the colonization of Algeria, and how the belief of the colonizers was that colonization would improve the lives of those they were colonizing. This is similar with British colonization over India, which left India with new pressures in how people were expected to behave.

Alexie's quote explains why being Indian can feel so complicated. Those pressures were passed down and still shape how identity works today. My generation is trying to understand (and sometimes undo) those layers.

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Globalization creates diverse, complex cultural landscape for the 2nd generation community as we navigate between our families' heritage and the mainstream society we live in.