Can the Indian-American immigrant come home?
Melissa A. Bell -
Thursday, July 09, 2009 3:40 AM
A couple posts back, Pankaj, a reader on here, commented that people in the West often have certain beliefs about India and aren’t really interested in finding out the truth about the place.
For some reason, it made me think of my friend Prashant. Not because my friend is uninterested in India--it's quite the opposite with him. Born to Indian parents in Illinois, Prashant is newlywed, even newly-er pregnant and he very much wants to move to India.
This is nothing new to me since everyone these days wants to move there. But his reason for the move was.
We were talking about Prashant’s future fatherhood and he had one concern I hadn’t thought of: he’s worried his children will lose their connection to India. He’s already American. Now, they’ll be Americans born of American parents. And his wife is Irish Catholic, so that’s already one-half removed from India. The divide he straddles and that his parents straddle even more (“the best of both worlds”) will disappear.
I never really considered this as a possible reason why so many NRIs are eager to come back to ‘try-on’ India. But unlike so many of us mutts in the US, they are in the very generation undergoing the great American assimilation. Prashant says it happened to the Italians, the Irish, the Poles all before him. Now, it’s happening to Indians. And Prashant, for one doesn't like it.
It’s evident in the culture: we’ve moved from Apu in Kwik-e-Mart to Kal Penn in the White House in 20 years. And it’s evident in the lifestyles of the generation born to the Indians that moved over here in the 1970s to find a new life. Prashant had a fro, listened to jam-bands, was one of the most popular kids on his college campus—especially with the girls. He was not really big on the culture of his parents until now that he’s facing parenthood himself.
Assimilation is a mostly sad, sometimes good fact about the US. We do maintain some semblance of uniqueness, but a lot of that ancestral identity doesn’t go much beyond the “I’m Irish, hence I must drink lots and lots of Guinness on St. Patrick’s Day.”
Immigrants notoriously cling to their national identities, but after the first and second-generation passes, well, they don’t call it a melting pot for nothing.
Indian immigrants of this generation are also in a rather unusual position because they do have the option of returning home. For many American immigrants, returning to their homeland wasn’t an option. The countries were poor, war-torn or it took too many generations to move from laborers to college-educated. Prashant’s generation doesn’t have that. His parents came over with $7, but they were trained physicians. Now they can send him back to a prosperous country with a medical degree and plenty more than just $7.
So Prashant is faced with a choice: keep up the close-knit ties to his parent’s country as long as he can or stay in the US and face the slow fade of his idyllic India in his family’s collective memory.
Thinking about all this assimilation and migration got me off on a tangent. How do you really know a place? Do you have to be born there? Live there? Visit often? What is it to know a place?
I’m also thinking I’m thinking too much. Long car rides will do that to a person.