Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (66 page)

[>]
 
They had twenty thousand hotels:
Turkel, "From Ragas to Riches," part 1.

[>]
 
By 1963, a social scientist:
Jain,
The Gujaratis of San Francisco.

[>]
 
President Eisenhower signed:
David A. Pfeiffer, "Ike's Interstates at 50: Anniversary of the Highway System Recalls Eisenhower's Role as Catalyst,"
Prologue,
quarterly journal of the National Archives and Records Administration, 38, no. 2 (Summer 2006).

[>]
 
Half a dozen motel property brokers told:
Scott, "Indians Snap Up Small Motels"
self-insuring and loaning funds to one another:
Turkel, "From Ragas to Riches," part 2.
Justice Department launched:
Scott, "Indians Snap Up Small Motels."

Days Inn conducted:
Interview with Ramesh Gokal, 2001.

[>]
 "
nearly every exit":
"Indian Immigrants Prosper as Owners of Motels," Associated Press, June 22, 1985.

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Saalo gaando chhe:
Saalo
literally means "brother-in-law"—that is, your sister's husband—and is a curse word because it implies that the speaker has slept with your sister. As there is no English equivalent, I have approximated the word as "bastard"
Gaando:
Crazy.
Chhe:
Is.

PAGE
 8.
BODY

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"
To assimilate means":
Adrienne Rich, "Resisting Amnesia: History and Personal Life (1983)," in
Blood, Bread, and Poetry
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), p. 142.

[>]
 
most segregated:
U.S. Census Bureau,
Racial and Ethnic Residential Segregation in the United States: 1980–2000,
Series CENSR-3, 2002 (
www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/housing_patterns/papertoc.html
).

[>]
 
A canal had opened:
Township of Canton,
Canton Sesquicentennial Commemorative Book, 1834–1984,
June 1984.
In 1834 this particular stop was named:
"Historic Canton," Canton Historical Society, last updated September 9, 2007 (
www.cantonhistoricalsociety.org
).
As the "Sweet Corn Capital":
Roy R. Schultz,
Canton Area, the Sweet Corn Capi
tol of Michigan: An Era in Cantons History
[
sic
], undated pamphlet published by the Canton Historical Society.

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The region had lost 87,500 jobs:
SEMCOG,
Economic Development,
p. 4. 311
the Census Bureau counted:
Susan Koshy, "Category Crisis: South Asian Americans and the Questions of Race and Ethnicity,"
Diaspora
7, no. 3 (Winter 1998): 294.
"inconspicuous" and "rapidly assimilated":
Portes and Rumbaut,
Immigrant America,
p. 19.
Rarely did the researchers find:
Of the 27,803 Indians who immigrated in 1987, 10 percent went to New York, 8 percent to Chicago, and 4 percent to Los Angeles, with the remaining 78 percent settling in other destinations. This was the complete opposite of many other immigrant communities at the time; 77 percent of Cubans, for example, went to Miami. Ibid., p. 38.
most educated, most professional
According to an analysis of 1980 census data on immigrants, those from India had the highest level of educational attainment (66.2 percent had four years or more of college, versus 6.2 percent of the U.S. population as a whole) and were the most likely to be working in professions (48.8 percent of adults over age twenty-five, versus 12.3 percent of U.S. adults). Ibid., pp. 60–70.

[>]
 
Before 1808, Native Americans:
"The Treaties," Chippewa Ottawa Resource Authority (
www.1836cora.org/treaties.html
).

[>]
 "
into several numbered townships":
Diane Follmer Wilson,
Cornerstones: A History of Canton Township Families
(Canton, Mich.: Canton Historical Society, 1988).
A few years later, the NAACP:
Riddle, "Race and Reaction."

[>]
 
A map published:
Reproduced in ibid.
"Residential construction":
Charter Township of Canton,
Future Land Use Plan.
At the same time, Detroit:
Ray Suarez,
The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, 1966–1999
(New York: Free Press, 1999), p. 248.
The Census Bureau ordered:
Charter Township of Canton,
Future Land Use Plan.
Our white brick house:
Ibid.
Our elementary schools:
Ching-li Wang,
Population Change in Michigan: 1980–1984,
State of Michigan, Department of Management and Budget, November 1985.

[>]
"
It's because of motherfuckers":
Zia,
Asian American Dreams,
chap. 3.
In southeastern Michigan:
SEMCOG,
Community Profiles in Southeast Michigan, 1980 Census.

[>]
"
Feminism is the theory":
This phrase is traditionally attributed to author and activist Ti-Grace Atkinson, although its provenance and accuracy are debated.

[>]
the split self:
In employing this metaphor to describe my response to the traumas of my migration(s), I do not mean to co-opt or minimize the suffering of those who experience clinical split-personality and/or schizophrenic conditions. For a treatment of migration trauma's possible causal relationship to such conditions, see Elizabeth Cantor-Graae and Jean-Paul Selten, "Schizophrenia and Migration: A Meta-Analysis and Review,"
American Journal of Psychiatry,
no. 162 (2005): 12–24; and for schizophrenia among South Asian women migrants in particular, the work of Dr. Dinesh Bhugra, dean of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and professor of mental health and cultural diversity at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. Additionally, the theorist Vijay Prashad makes an interesting connection between such split thinking among U.S. Indians (the split being, in his conception, a moral home life versus an immoral external engagement with capitalism) and the
girmit
experience, in
The Karma of Brown Folk
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 104–5.

[>]
Exiting the movie theater:
I am grateful to the editors of
Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America
(New York: Asian American Writers Workshop, 1996) for publishing an early poem from which this passage is drawn.

[>]
unearthing millennia of evidence:
See, for example, Thadani,
Sakhiyani;
and Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, eds.,
Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History
(London: St. Martin's, 2000). I first learned of these and other resources via
Trikone
magazine (
www.trikone.org
). For a critical view of the limits of such history, as well as a brief survey of queer South Asian organizing in the 1980s and mid-1990s, see Nayan Shah, "Sexuality, Identity, and the Uses of History," in
Q&A: Queer in Asian America,
edited by D. Eng and A. Home (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).

PAGE
 PART FOUR: DESTINY

[>]
bringing together the stories:
My thinking on this challenge was informed by these words by the scholar Eleni Coundouriotis: "A diaspora becomes intelligible at the moment when a communal identity re-emerges from fragmentation. The narrative of diaspora is always working against the etymology of the word 'diaspora,' which signifies dispersion."
Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies
10, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 37.

[>]
It is this capitalist drive:
See, for example, Joel Kotkin,
Tribes: How Race, Religion, and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy
(New York: Random House, 1993), chap. 7, "The Greater India"

[>]
The Indians were a tiny:
White,
Turbans and Traders.

[>]
Middlesex County, New Jersey
: For a book-length treatment of the Middlesex County phenomenon, see Kalita,
Suburban Sahibs.

[>]
Studies of voluntary migration:
See, for example, Portes and Rumbaut,
Immigrant America,
pp. 10–13.

[>]
largest single immigrant group:
SEMCOG,
Patterns of Diversity.

[>]
The 2000 U.S. Census counted:
Nicholas A. Jones and Amy Symens Smith, "The Two or More Races Population: 2000," Census 2000 Brief, November 2001 (
www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/c2kbr01–6.pdf
).

Of the rich body of work on the diaspora that is now available, I list below those sources from which I drew directly, sorted so that readers seeking further information about particular countries can easily find the relevant works. Titles listed in the "General" category cover more than one country or address some aspect of the diaspora as a whole. Sources listed below are generally those to which I refer multiple times. Sources cited only once appear in full in the Notes section.
HMSO,
below, stands for His/Her Majesty's Stationery Office, the primary publisher of British government documents.

In addition, the following newspapers provided valuable contemporary accounts: in Fiji, the
Fiji Times
and the
Fiji Times and Herald;
in India,
Navajivan;
and in South Africa, the
Indian Opinion,
the
Natal Witness,
and the
Natal Mercury.
Specific editions are cited in the Notes.

GENERAL

Adams, Walter, ed.
The Brain Drain.
Papers presented at international conference on the "brain drain" at Lausanne, Switzerland, August 1967. New York: Macmillan, 1968.

Chaudhuri, K. N.
Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Christopher, A. J.
The British Empire at Its Zenith.
New York: Croom Helm, 1988.

Colombo Plan Bureau.
Special Topic, Brain Drain: Country Papers, the Working Paper and the Report of the SpeciaL Topic Committee.
Prepared for annual meeting of committee implementing the 1962 Colombo Plan for Co-operative Economic Development in South and South-east Asia, held October-November 1972, New Delhi. Colombo, Sri Lanka: Colombo Plan Bureau, 1971.

Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand.
An Autobiography; or, The Story of My Experiments with Truth.
Translated by Mahadev Desai. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1927.

———.
The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.
98 volumes. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust, 1970. Abbreviated as
CWMG
in the Notes. Although I consulted paper volumes, this resource is now available online (
www.gandhiserve.org/cwmg/cwmg.html
).

Gish, Oscar.
Doctor Migration and Brain Drain: The Impact of the International Demand for Doctors on Health Services in Developing Countries.
Occasional Papers on Social Administration, Number 43. London: Social Administration Research Trust, 1971.

Gupta, Anirudha, ed.
Indians Abroad, Asia and Africa: Report of an International Seminar.
Proceedings of an April 1969 seminar held in New Delhi by the Indian Council for Africa and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. New Delhi: Indian Council for Africa, 1971.

Guy, John.
Woven Cargoes: Indian Textiles in the East.
London: Thames and Hudson, 1998.

India. Ministry of External Affairs. Non Resident Indians & Persons of Indian Origin Division.
Report of the High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora.
New Delhi: Government of India, January 8, 2002 (
www.indiandiaspora.nic.in/diasporapdf/part1-est.pdf
).

Jain, Ravindra K.
Indian Communities Abroad: Themes and Literature.
New Delhi: Manohar, 1993.

McKnight, Allan D.
Scientists Abroad: A Study of the International Movement of Persons in Science and Technology.
Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 1971.

Muthanna, I. M.
People of India in North America (United States, Canada, W. Indies and Fiji).
Bangalore: Lotus Printers, 1982.

Newland, Kathleen.
International Migration: The Search for Work.
Worldwatch Paper 33. Washington, D.C.: Worldwatch Institute, November 1979.

Tinker, Hugh.
The Banyan Tree: Overseas Emigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

———.
A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974.

———.
Separate and Unequal: India and the Indians in the British Commonwealth, 1920–1950.
Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1976.

United Kingdom, Colonial Office.
Report of the Committee on Emigration from India to the Crown Colonies and Protectorates.
London: HMSO, 1910.

———.
Restrictions upon British Indian Subjects in British Colonies and Dependencies.
Includes census. London: HMSO, December 7, 1900.

United Kingdom, India Office. "Colonies Committee. Main file." 1922–25. British Library IOR/L/E/7/1319.