PANA Institute for Leadership Development

Himanee Gupta
University of Hawai'i

Presented at the 2001 APARRI Conference: "Religion and Public Life in
Pacific and Asian North America"
University of California at Berkeley
August 9-11, 2001

Abstract

This paper argues that caste identities, which historically lost much of their
relevance when Indians left their home country, are gaining increasing importance
as the identity of Indians in the United States comes to be defined in Hindu
terms. Caste and Hinduism always have been problematically linked, and the Hinduizing
of public culture in India has brought this relationship to the forefront of
many aspects of political and social life. This paper takes a look at how the
rise of global communication technologies and such things as the economic insecurity
that has characterized the post-Fordist work environment may be encouraging
a return to caste identities among overseas Indians, particularly those who
come from high-caste and upper and middle class backgrounds. The paper uses
a semiotic approach to examine how caste identities persist in ways that are
"hidden in plain sight."

Full Text

[NOTE: All rights to the work below are the property of the author. Please
do not cite or reproduce for distribution without express permission.]

In 1973, my father took a sabbatical leave from the university in Indiana where
he taught. My parents rented out their home, purchased airline tickets, and
for one year, our family lived in India, the country where my parents had grown
up and emigrated from twelve years earlier. I was ten years old at the time
and, with my two younger sisters, attended an English-medium school in Baroda,
where my father was a visiting professor. One day, while playing, a girl approximately
my age asked me a question that confused me then and continued to linger in
my mind for years.

The question was: "What is your caste?" My answer was: "I don't
know."

Why should I have known? As a U.S.-born child of Indian immigrants, I knew
a little about the idea of caste, having read about it in a third- or fourth-grade
social studies text. But, until that point, I had regarded caste as a figment
of India's past, far removed from the realities of mass poverty and underdevelopment
that, in my ten-year-old mind, completely contradicted stereotyped yet in America
common images of an ancient heritage based on a social order in which Indians
lived in harmony. The irrelevance of caste to the present day was further reinforced
by the fact that my parent's stories of life in India never included caste.
Furthermore, concerns about caste did not appear to come up when my family socialized
with other Indians in and around the college town where I grew up. I had no
idea what my caste was, and, at the time, I had no reason to believe that I
should care.

So why argue, as I do in this exploratory essay, that caste is a hidden, yet
potent force in influencing how the Indians who migrated to the United States
after anti-Asian immigration restrictions were lifted in 1965 negotiate identity
and define a sense of community? Why argue that caste may be gaining more, rather
than less, relevance as Indian immigrants consolidate their place within a multicultural
America? And, most significantly, why suggest that a hardening of caste identities
in India and abroad may form a critical link between the Hinduizing of India's
social and political culture and pressures in the United States to define Indian
as explicitly Hindu?

I raise these questions at the outset of this exploration for a simple reason:
Arguing that caste matters to Indians outside India speaks against a deeply-ingrained
truth, within academia as well as the public culture of what might be termed
Indian-America. Like the lack of emphasis on caste that was exhibited among
the Indian families in the Midwestern town where I grew up, much of a growing
body of scholarship on the post-1965 Indian immigrants and their descendents
in the United States continues to maintain a silence on questions about caste.
This silence persists even as caste continues to be one of the most contentious
topics in scholarship and public life in India itself.¹

My parents, like other immigrant Indians who settled in the United States between
the mid-1960s and late 1970s, were part of a highly economically successful
diasporic community of Indians and other South Asians that, as of the 2000 census,
consists of nearly 1.7 million people. Their apparent downplaying of caste,
coupled with the jolt of awareness about it that my schoolmate in India provoked
in me, would appear to suggest that migration represents a break, causing the
influence of social dynamics such as caste to be erased. Such an argument would
suggest that while caste persists as a social dynamic in India (despite constitutional
provisions that outlaw discrimination on the basis of it) it loses much, if
not all, of its importance for most Indians upon departure from the subcontinent.

Such a view would support a theoretical assertion made by Colin Clarke, Ceri
Peach and Steven Vertovec that the significance of caste fades in diaspora unless
some reason exists to keep it alive.² That view also would support
a fairly solid body of existing scholarship that argues - often on the basis
of empirical data gathered through interviews and other ethnographic
work - that caste is not a relevant force in shaping the lives of Indians in
the United States because there is no reason to keep its influence alive, except
perhaps when it comes to marriage. In her study of Indians in New York City,
for instance, Maxine Fisher notes that while her respondents place a high premium
on one's regional, religious and linguistic differences, they tend to downplay
caste. "In this country," Fisher writes, "marriage is one of
the few, if not the only, situations where an individual's caste membership
is significant."³ Fisher did her research in the mid-1970s,
but John Fenton reached the same conclusion a decade later. Quoting a respondent
in Atlanta, Fenton notes that among Indian immigrants, caste means very little.
"What brings people together," the respondent asserted, "is more,
first, they are Indian; second, the language spoken."⁴

The initial group of Indians who emigrated to the United States after 1965
did share a common identity of upper-caste, largely because of the type of immigrant
that the change in immigration laws welcomed in 1965. Later changes to the laws,
however, brought to the United States Indians of lower class and lower-caste
backgrounds, diversifying the ethnic mix of immigrant Indians considerably.
Still, caste distinctions continue to be described as unimportant. Priya Agarwal
argues in an early 1990s study of the relationship between Indian immigrants
and their U.S.-born children in southern California that "caste has become
a secondary consideration for immigrants behind regional background."⁵
Aparna Rayaprol, while acknowledging in a mid-1990s study that caste might be
a significant form of identity among the Indian immigrants whom she interviewed
in suburban Pittsburgh, notes that her respondents did not think it was.⁶
While recent works explore the intersections of Indian identities with class,
few devote attention to caste, beyond noting that most Indians in the United
States are upper-caste.⁷

Semiotics of caste

This essay seeks to interrupt the silence on caste. It argues, in part, that
caste's relevance to Indians in the United States lies in its avowed dismissal
of it. Caste identity and caste-like behaviors, like many other forms of knowledge
and practices that shape the daily lives of people in a given social setting,
represent a signification of meaning that exists among immigrant Indians and
their descendents but derives its strength from being "hidden in plain
sight."⁸ Through a semiotic approach, it can be argued that
when one looks at how Indians in the United States negotiate their identities
and formulate their lives on a day-to-day basis, one can see the markings of
caste nearly everywhere. Yet, it is more likely that one might not see caste
at all. It is from the latter point that caste draws its lasting power.

As political scientists Kathy Ferguson and Phyllis Turnbull observe in a study
of the semiotics of the military in Hawai'i: "For something to be in plain
sight it must mark a variety of spaces, projecting itself into a number of landscapes.
For something to be hidden it must be indiscernible, camouflaged, inconspicuously
folded into the fabric of daily life." In Hawai'i, Ferguson and Turnbull
add, narratives of naturalization and reassurance build up the military's ability
to exist - yet appear to not exist - in Hawai'i's public spheres. "The
narratives of naturalization imbricate military institutions and discourses
into daily life so that they become 'just the way things are,' " they write.
"The narratives of reassurance kick in with a more prescriptive tone, marking
the military presence in Hawai'i as necessary, productive, heroic, desirable,
good."⁹

Just as a concealing of its presence in Hawai'i works to the military's benefit,
depicting caste as insignificant to Indians upon departure from their home country
helps reinforce a particular discursively formed truth about Indian-ness in
the United States. Discourse, as Stuart Hall usefully shows, is a way of speaking
through which ideas and/or signs and their antinomies are harnessed together
in a particular historical time frame. Through a nexus of language and power,
discourse creates and perpetuates certain constructed forms of knowledge as
truths, and in the process of doing so, attempts to delegitimize competing knowledges
as non-truths.¹⁰

Through this constructed truth, an Indian self that is characterized as able
to succeed economically in the West yet maintain a spiritually "pure"
inner self comes to stand as a universal standard representing all Indians in
the United States, if not all economically-successful non-resident Indians (NRIs)
worldwide. Such an Indian possesses what often is depicted as the "best
of both worlds": American independence, determination and self-reliance
coupled with Indian morals, religious beliefs and family values. Even as these
Indians embrace the "best" of the West - practicality, assertiveness,
technological savvy - they are said to hold fast to their "traditional"
beliefs. In describing this idealized Indian as being of an immigrant bourgeoisie
- "the class which does not want to be named, indeed needs no name as it
postulates itself as the universal" - feminist scholar/activist Annanya
Bhattacharjee argues that use of the phrase "best of both worlds"
further helps immigrants perceive their place in the United States as being
one that is socially marginal. To compensate for that marginality, members of
the Indian immigrant bourgeoisie "learn to participate successfully in
the U.S. economy and protect their 'cultural individuality.' " What emerges
from this process is a happy position for the bourgeois immigrant - economic
advancement along with cultural preservation of an Indian essence.¹¹

Such a depiction of Indian-ness finds an easy fit within a discourse of multiculturalism
that celebrates cultural diversity as part and parcel of the so-called American
dream, even as that multicultural discourse homogenizes the diversity within
what it defines as cultures and even as it serves to reify a racialized power
relationship in the United States.¹² Yet, in order for this image
of bourgeois Indian-ness to pass muster as an "unnamed universal,"
certain characteristics that may have contributed to the immigrant's ability
to succeed in the United States must be suppressed - "camouflaged, inconspicuously
folded into the fabric of daily life," as Ferguson and Turnbull would put
it. Caste privilege, which in India traditionally has been translated into economic
and educational privilege, is one such characteristic. Thus, by dismissing caste
as insignificant (except, perhaps, when it comes to marriage) Indian bourgeois
immigrants quietly erase the reality of the privileged role they might have
held in India and define themselves in the United States as the Indian that
is not only natural but also the Indian that is proper, or good. Such a "discursive
interbreeding between what it natural and what is good results in a tone of
inevitability," Ferguson and Turnbull write. "What is, is good and
in any case cannot be changed."¹³

Transporting of caste

Ferguson and Turnbull use a semiotic approach to uncover a military presence
at a series of public sites in Hawai'i - museums, memorials, schools. Exact
replication of Ferguson and Turnbull's approach would be unfeasible in revealing
caste among Indian immigrants in the United States as caste does not necessarily
embed itself in such concrete sites. However, it is possible to build upon their
work by defining some of the social spheres in which an Indian identity articulates
itself in the United States and then showing how caste shapes the dynamics that
occur within those spheres.

In addition, however, I would suggest that understanding the relevance of caste
requires placing it in a spatial context that is not entirely unlike the sites
Ferguson and Turnbull use. In this sense, we must shift our understanding of
caste as a system of social order that is largely confined - if not unique -
to India, and see it as an identifier of self that, while perhaps distinct among
those who are of Indian ancestry, is not necessarily limited to the geographic
boundaries of India - or even South Asia - itself. While affiliation with a
particular caste identity most likely does come from prior relationships with
particular social networks in India, it is these Indians' needs to negotiate
their place, their role and their sense of self within an American social space
that determines how they exercise their caste identity and the privileges that
accompany it in the United States. As an aspect of the self, caste would be
a characteristic that travels with one who leaves the subcontinent. Thus, understanding
caste as not only transportable but also individualized and relevant to the
immediate locality within which Indian immigrants reside represents a first
step in the process of unveiling it.

Such an understanding, however, contradicts traditional views of caste as a
localized system of networks within small-scale social settings in India. Scholars
who have studied communities of overseas Indians typically assert that caste
as a system fails to maintain its relevance outside of India, primarily because
it is based on a network of localized social relationships in which all participants
not only are aware of caste dynamics but also know their place.¹⁴
These scholars rightly observe that, counter to Orientalist assumptions, caste
in India long has been a highly localized system in which hierarchical relationships
between castes vary from place to place. Caste membership in these localized
contexts typically has been based on an idea of jati, or occupation, which traditionally
made distinctions on the basis of the specialized crafts skills that members
of a particular caste shared. Because occupations were hereditary, one's work
and place in society in India traditionally were defined through caste, and
a hierarchy was established based on the level of "pollution" that
one's occupation put one in contact with. However, that hierarchy varied from
one locality to the next.

Two things characterize this view of caste: it is localized, and it is a system.
Because of these characteristics, scholars argue, it cannot be transplanted
easily onto foreign soil as migration tends to be an individual, rather than
community-based, process. Elizabeth Grieco represents this argument quite well
in her examination of social networks among the descendents of the Indians who
were brought to Fiji as indentured laborers in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. She argues that "by recruiting individuals from numerous
geographic regions and social groups, the process of indentured labor migration
severely altered the structure of the caste system and removed the basis for
the re-establishment of both caste and subcaste groups overseas." Grieco
notes that migration in itself does not erase "caste-based prejudices"
and that "caste-related ideologies" continue to influence the behavior
of migrants and their descendents in the host society. However, she downplays
the significance of these factors when she points out that such behaviors could
not be systematized. Thus, she writes, "no uniform behavior could be reestablished
or enforced."¹⁵

Similarly, Clarke, Peach and Vertovec show that the indentured labor system
made both the localized and occupational-defined relationships meaningless.
Not only were all those who left India under this system thrust into a category
of "Indian worker" by British administrators, but they were put to
work in jobs that lacked occupational specialization, a criteria that often
had differentiated one caste group from another. The shift from a localized
network to a factory-like plantation created confusion as to where one stood
in a hierarchical relationship to one's counterparts. In addition, they usually
were housed in communal bunkers, which made it difficult to avoid contact with
those of other castes and made any previous practice of exclusion on the basis
of ritual purity impossible. While brahmins were able to retain some power as
authorities over the meaning of Hindu texts, caste became a largely meaningless
category among the migrant communities of indentured laborers.¹⁶
As a result, it is argued that caste persists outside India primarily as a source
of pride in one's heritage, or as a means to posit one's self as superior to
another Indian. Or, as in the case of certain agricultural, artisanal and mercantilist
groups from Gujarat, as a source of social networks that do not exist beyond
a caste group itself.¹⁷ Caste, according to this view, cannot migrate
unless an entire village or local community either migrates with it or establishes
a network that makes the overseas community an integral part of the localized
whole.

If one understands caste only in this light, it is extremely difficult - if
not impossible - to "see" it in the everyday life of Indians in the
United States. The geographic dispersal of Indians in the United States - coupled
with their linguistic and regional diversity - would suggest that the localized
social networks that defined and differentiated one Indian from another in India
clearly is missing.¹⁸ But is caste only a system? Is its only function
that of ordering communities on an extremely localized basis? If one looks at
the caste politics in India today, the answers to these questions are decidedly
no. Caste clearly plays a significant role in shaping individual identities
as well as group ones, at the local, regional and national levels. Similarly,
the effect that such an individual relationship with caste has upon one's sense
of self plays a significant role in defining how caste influences the articulation
of Indian-ness in diaspora. Thus, understanding caste as not only transportable
but also individualized and relevant to the immediate locality within which
Indian immigrants reside represents a first step in the process of unveiling
it.

Susan Bayly presents a framework for understanding caste in such a way. Unlike
many scholars who insist upon regarding caste as a hierarchical ordering practice
with little flexibility, Bayly describes caste in her recent text, Caste,
Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age,
as a dynamic shaper of individual identities as well as community formations.
For her, caste represents an extraordinarily flexible resource that can be adapted
to fit whatever need is perceived to exist in uncertain times. Caste, she argues,
not only helps to build alliances but also has been used throughout Indian history
to empower one's self while also excluding, subjugating and disempowering others.
Yet, Bayly also asserts that one cannot understand caste's full effect if it
is treated only as a means of imposing inequality or of attempting to position
one's self as better than an other.¹⁹ In her mind, caste is largely
what people think it to be and how they act upon the perceptions it embodies.
"Far from being a static reflection of received codes and values, caste
has been a dynamic force in Indian life and thought; it has been embodied in
what people do and say at any given moment about the conventions and values
which they define as those of caste society."²⁰

While caste is ever-present in Indian society, forming a backdrop to the politics
and practice of daily life, Bayly argues that it is not necessarily always on
people's minds. According to her, caste, as a composite of ideals and practices,
constitutes one of many identifying traits that Indians might invoke in times
of great change or uncertainty. When that occurs, caste meanings change among
the participants of a caste society itself. As a result, the way in which caste
is understood in one historical time period will not necessary reflect how it
is understood at a different time. "Conventions of rank and corporate essence
that are often seen as the defining features of caste have been shaped, critiqued
and reconstituted in all sorts of ways, both century by century and region by
region," she writes. "These processes of invention and reformulation
are still taking place today at the local level, and also in the wider context
of regional and pan-Indian political and social conflict."²¹

The fluidity that Bayly ascribes to caste allows its presence to be revealed
more readily in a diasporic context. Although she herself does not consider
the transportability of caste to locales outside India, her emphasis on caste
as a marker of self as well as community and place suggest it need not be confined
to India at all. Rather, it suggests, that when Indians leave their home country,
they carry some sense of a caste identity with them. However, just as caste
is not the only way that Indians define themselves in India, it is not the only
category of identity that migrates out of India with those who leave. Caste,
instead, is one of a multiplicity of categories that constitute the identity
of an immigrant self. In this sense, while caste might not always be of immediate
importance, it cannot simply disappear or lose its relevance in diaspora, as
most scholars suggest. It may remain hidden within the immigrant self until
a perceived need to exert a caste-based identity arises.

Masking, unmasking caste

It is often argued that because the bulk of the Indian immigrant community
came to the United States with unusually high educational skills, they were
able to land highly-skilled professional jobs with little, if any, effort. As
a result, they were able to move easily from the bourgeois class they had been
a part of in India to a similar upwardly mobile, middle-class position in the
United States. The main difference was the strength of the U.S. economy and
the global inequity of resource distribution gave them far more material wealth
than they could have imagined acquiring in India. Because Indians were the "cream
of the immigrant crop," so to speak, there was no reason for them to invoke
a caste identity to gain further privilege. If one follows this argument, caste
identities would appear to fade because there would be no use in keeping them
alive.

Indeed, that initially appeared to be the case. One characteristic of the post-1965
immigrants was, as noted, their level of technical and specialized skills. Elsewhere,
I have argued that while their economic level and access to middle-class privileges
obviously made these immigrants quite different from the Indians who migrated
elsewhere during the nineteenth century as indentured laborers, the fact that
the post-1965 immigrants were defined as possessing a certain set of technical
skills makes them somewhat comparable to the indentured emigrants.²²
It was not unusual, for instance, to regard every Indian who settled in the
United States in the late 1960s through early 1980s as either a doctor, an engineer
or university professor.²³ This was a consequence of the preference
categories set up in the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act that favored migrants
with professional and certain specialized skills.²⁴ However, just
as the homogenization of tasks that the indentured laborers performed wiped
out distinctions among them in an occupational sense, so the similarity of careers
that the post-1965 immigrants chose created a similar standardization. With
all Indians in the United States defined as possessing professional and technical
skills that ensured they would be successful immigrants, caste indeed would
appear irrelevant. Even if the localized backgrounds of the immigrants differed,
they generally were similar in that they were upper caste in whatever hierarchy
informed their geographic origin. In the United States, they generally were
middle class. Similarly, the indentured laborers (who generally were in lower
caste positions within their home locality) fell into a category in diaspora
of lower class. Because the class of the immigrants that ended up in a given
locality was the same, caste distinctions appeared to fade - within the indentured
communities in various locales as well as among the post-1965 immigrants to
the United States. In this sense, it might not be surprising that in India in
1973 the schoolgirl's question came as a complete surprise to me. There was,
perhaps, no immediate reason for an American-born Indian child to know her caste
because the dynamics of the migratory process had shaped a community in diaspora
that had rearticulated itself as being all of one caste - upper-caste and perhaps
NRI caste.²⁵

But, as noted, caste distinctions never disappear entirely. Perhaps there was
no need for the upper-caste, middle-class Indian immigrants who arrived in the
United States in the first few years after 1965 to invoke a caste identity because
a ready access to jobs that translated into almost immediate economic success
gave them a semblance of security, at least in a material sense. Not only did
they regard themselves as better off than Indians who remained in India but
also saw themselves as being among the best of the best immigrants from Asia
that entered the United States during this period. Their willingness to regard
themselves as members of a "model minority" at a time when many Asian
Americans were eschewing this stereotype speaks to this point.²⁶

Underneath their apparent affluence, however, I would argue that many Indian
immigrants of upper-caste, middle-class lineage perceive their status within
American society to be precarious because they see themselves, as Vijay Prashad
has put it, as "forever immigrants."²⁷ Some of this results
most likely from the institutional racism that non-whites inevitably face in
a white-dominant society. Even though Indians as an ethnic group command the
highest salaries in the United States, several studies have shown that much
of this is due to their unusually high levels of education and that when workers
with equal levels of education are compared, whites and other Europeans consistently
earn higher salaries than Indians and other non-whites.²⁸ Some scholars
have described the anxiety that such subtle racism generates among Indians,
who despite the wage differential do remain economically privileged, as a feeling
of "status inconsistency."²⁹ However, I would suggest that
this sense of insecurity carries a much more material face, and that it may
have increased in degree in the past two decades as more Indians have entered
the United States and as the U.S. economy has shifted from one based primarily
on manufacturing to one that is more services oriented.

For starters, the wave of elite Indian and other Asian immigration was relatively
short-lived. As the U.S. economy began to slow in the mid-1970s, the demand
for skilled workers diminished and laws such as the Health Educational Assistance
Act put a curb on how many doctors and other medical professionals could emigrate.³⁰
At about this time, the initial group of Indian immigrants began exercising
family-preference categories in the 1965 immigration laws that allowed their
relatives to migrate. These changes occurred at a time when the emphasis within
the United States began to shift toward a more services oriented economy.³¹
This shift to a services-oriented - or "post-Fordist" or "post-industrial"
- economy has created an employment sphere that is dynamic yet increasingly
uncertain, as social economist Catherine Casey has shown. Post-industrial work
expects the worker to be on duty not just during the eight-hour shift but all
the time, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It values social skills
such as an ability to work with others over specific, industrially trained or
professionally acquired skills. In other words, it defines the idea of worker
less in terms of the kind of the work that the individual might do and more
in terms of how that individual "fits" as an employee within the corporate
setting. With a 24-7 commitment, post-industrialism also re-defines the relationship
between employer and employee, making it less of a wage-labor agreement and
more of a familial compact. With the shift, has come a loss of the lifetime
security that characterized the industrial setting. Job security no longer is
a given, and a repeated changing of employers - if not careers - is regarded
as the norm. As Casey notes, the interactive, seemingly more humane post-industrial
workplace came into vogue at a time when real wages had begun to fall, demands
on one's time began to rise and the threat of losing wages and benefits to contractors,
part-timers or offshore workers increasingly loomed.³²

The post-industrial shift and the loss of security that has accompanied it
affect all sectors of the labor force. However, in some ways, it has been particularly
debilitating for middle-class professionals. For those of Indian ancestry who
might fall into this category, that insecurity may be further magnified by the
fact that a loss of real wages might not only hinder an ability to support family
members in the home country but also might destabilize the "best of both
worlds" myth upon which the Indian immigrant version of the American dream
is built.

The destabilization of the "best of both worlds" myth might occur
in two ways. First, affluent immigrants who might have believed their jobs were
"safe" and might have transmitted that knowledge to their American-born
children as well as their relatives in India, are forced to realize that such
a sense of security is gone. Again, this is a fear that pervades all sectors
of upper middle-class U.S. society, and was perhaps intensified with the waves
of corporate downsizing that occurred in the early through mid-1990s, and may
reoccur in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
But it is perhaps a fear that hits non-white, non-U.S. born residents of the
United States harder as it forces them to come to grips with a reality that
their darker skin and "non-native" status might mean that the economic
aspirations that might have prompted them to leave their home countries will
not be met.³³

Second, the post-industrial reality forces Indians in the United States to
confront a reality that they face competition for work from Indians in India
themselves, as corporations in a quest for low-cost labor rapidly shift jobs
that once were based primarily in the West to "Third World" countries,
including India. In a newspaper article about the shifting of information-technology
employment from North American workplaces to offshore locale, journalist Jennifer
Bjorhus notes that companies in the United States and Canada spent $9.5 billion
in 1999 relocating such jobs to nations where labor costs are cheaper such as
the Philippines, Ireland and Malaysia. In this scenario, Bjorhus notes, India
- with its burgeoning high-tech centers in Bangalore and Mumbai - is arguably
"the leader of the pack." This high-tech economy is expected to generate
1 million new jobs in India over the next decade. But what about the United
States? Bjorhus cites data from a market research company in Viriginia showing
a loss of 116,000 jobs in the United States to these offshore sites. She also
quotes a globalization critic, Patrick Woodall, Public Citizen's Global Trade
Watch, as saying that the global economy's "dirty little secret" is
that "it's not just that manufacturing jobs are being moved to sweatshops
in the Far East, it's also that high-paying technical jobs are being sent offshore."
Woodall adds: "I would be concerned if I were a high-tech workers in California.
I would wonder whether my job was being shipped overseas."³⁴
One can argue that the transfer of such jobs offshore, to some degree, is a
move toward balancing economic inequalities that persist between West and non-West.
However, such an argument loses its righteousness when one recalls that it is
a desire to maximize profits through seeking low-cost labor that drives this
move. At the same time, it is forgotten that many of the high-tech workers in
California that Woodall refers to are persons of Indian and other Asian ancestry
who have built their lives in the United States.³⁵

Thus, as the labor market increasingly has come to be defined by the personal
assets that one can bring to an employer rather than one's level of education
or degree of skill-based competence, competition for skilled jobs has grown
increasingly intense. In such a competitive employment sphere, it would not
be surprising to see Indians who possess a high-caste status turn that trait
into a marketing tool that sells one's self to employers. The persistence of
caste-based identities in India often affords immigrants an opportunity to define
themselves in a racialized society such as the United States in a way that engages
with a racial identity yet, at the same time, subtly subverts it. Although meanings
of caste categories largely are lost on non-Indians, little prevents Indians
from using identifiers of status that have marked caste-defined superiority
as a way of positioning themselves favorably. Susan Koshy, for instance, notes
that the lack of an institutionalized racial hierarchy in India has resulted
in a de-emphasis on race among those who grew up in India as a marker of difference.
"Thus," she writes, "a Brahman's caste position is not undermined
by his being dark-skinned, and he exerts its social power quite independently
of skin color."³⁶ What this might do in the U.S. job market
is give a high-caste, dark-skinned Indian a way to show that she is not only
dark (often an asset in terms of affirmative action policies) but also better
by virtue of being of a pure, upper-caste lineage. Such a positioning of self
often is transmitted casually in remarks to non-Indians in which one states
that their family is part of the highest caste in India.

Caste and authenticity

Caste, as noted, may have become irrelevant within the class of indentured
laborers in diasporic communities. But as Clarke, Peach and Vertovec observe,
it did not always entirely disappear. Merchants and middle-class Indians working
in the colonial bureaucracy often migrated to the same locales as the laboring
groups. These groups were in a more privileged caste position in India and generally
in a higher class in India and overseas. To non-Indians, they tended to portray
their identity as Indians as a cultural one, seeing themselves as "ambassadors"
of their country. Such an identity often cast "high" cultural markers
of India such as classical dance forms, reenactments of the epic Ramayana
story, vegetarian cuisine and Hindu beliefs and practices as representations
of the culture of all of India.³⁷ Many of these Indians further sought
to protect their class position by distancing themselves from their lower-caste
counterparts. Indians who migrated to the United States in the 1960s sought
to do the same thing to some degree by labeling those who were not like them
as Indians who were not "true Indians." Arthur Helweg and Usha Helweg's
study of the post-1965 Indian immigrant experience, for instance, describes
the Indians residing in the United States who are descendents of migrant laborers
who were sent to the Caribbean and married those of Caribbean ancestry as Indians
who "lost their culture."³⁸ Similarly, Karen Leonard notes
that descendents of Punjabi migrants who entered the United States as agricultural
laborers in the early 20th century and entered matrimonial alliances with Mexican
women often faced ridicule from the post-1965 immigrants. Insinuations that
these two groups of Indian shared a common ethnic identity drew laughter. Because
the size of the post-1965 immigrant community far exceeded the population of
earlier migrants, it was easy for them to marginalize the Punjabi-Mexican community
as not truly Indian. "Well placed in the American economy and founders
of their own immigrant networks, (the post-1965 immigrants) have no compelling
reason to recognize the rural, less well educated, half-Indian descendents of
Punjabi peasants as 'real Hindus' or 'real' South Asians - and they have not
done so," Leonard writes. She adds that such inter-ethnic marrying often
was seen as a threat to the newer immigrants, a threat that can be read as destabilizing
the purity rules that may have shaped upper-caste sensibilities. "The Punjabi-Mexicans
see themselves as exemplifying a positive trend toward participation in a broader
American culture," Leonard notes. "To most of the new immigrants,
such assimilation is alarming."³⁹

This fear of assimilation and the projection of self as a "real"
or "authentic" Indian establishes the terrain upon which I suggest
caste consciousness has come to be articulated in the United States. Prior to
the early 1980s, a need to posit one's self as authentically Indian was less
urgent, partly because the geographic dispersal and class position of the bulk
of the post-1965 immigrant community ensured that, aside from a few random instances
such as what Leonard describes, most Indians in the United States generally
encountered Indians who were like themselves: regionally and linguistically
diverse but quite homogenous in the sense of being professionally- or technically-skilled,
middle-class, of urban backgrounds and upper caste. With an average of 15,000
to 20,000 such Indians entering the United States annually - which led to establishment
of an immigrant community of nearly 400,000 by 1980 and of more than 900,000
by 1990 - it was easy for the presence of the economically privileged base to
marginalize other Indians who happened to be in the United States as insignificant.

That began to change in 1980 with the establishment of a separate "Asian
Indian" census category, as a result of a lobbying effort by the Association
of Indian Americans and other pan-Indian organizations that had been established
to promote a sense of pan-Indian unity. Establishment of this category allowed
Indians to define themselves as a "minority" at a time when, as a
byproduct of the 1960s civil rights movement in the United States, it was economically
advantageous to be one. As the job market tightened and grew more competitive
in the mid-1970s, affirmative action also came to play a stronger role in the
granting of jobs and promotions within companies.

On the surface, being able to define one's self as a minority if one is non-white
might seem like a good thing. It gives one an apparent leg up in a difficult
and uncertain job market. Affirmative action policies also continue to work
toward a nobler mission of social justice through a recognition that whites
in the United States have been able to draw upon a history of privilege that
other groups have lacked and therefore continue to be in better economic and
social positions than others.

Despite their merits, affirmative action policies have not been as successful
as many envisioned in the pursuit of social justice.⁴⁰ A similar
thing might be said of the 1980 change in census classifications. While the
categorization of Indians as a singular ethnic category helped bring about an
"imagined community" of Asian Indians in the United States, the enumerating
of Indian immigrants and their descendants in such a way has been accompanied
by a highlighting of differences within this group. This perhaps was no surprise;
such unifying processes as enumeration do tend to be accompanied by movements
toward fragmentation.⁴¹ In the case of Indians in the United States,
this fragmentation has brought what might have been latent caste-based identities
and behaviors to the surface. How? For starters, being defined as a minority
forces a series of questions. What does it mean to be a minority? If it means
being "disadvantaged," what exactly does that mean? How does one who,
by all accounts, is middle-class and economically privileged not only portray
one's self as disadvantaged but internalize a perception of inferiority as part
of the self, as well? Related to these issues are broader questions: If you
one marks a category designating one's self as Asian Indian on a U.S. census
form, how does on identify one's self in a broader context? Does one regard
oneself as Indian? Or as American? Or, perhaps, as Indian American?

Once one begins to start asking such questions, one gets involved with questions
of authenticity: How do you prove your worthiness to inhabit the self that you
select?⁴² Engagement with such questions opens up a potential sphere
where caste attains relevance in the United States. Recall the example of the
Brahmin noting her caste to a non-Indian in casual conversation. What such an
offhand reference might convey is a sense - widely regarded in India as a discursive
truth - that higher castes are purer or less polluted. In a U.S. context, a
claim to be of a superior caste can be translated to claims of being a more
authentic Indian. In the labor market, one then can convey a sense of being
not only the best-qualified person for the job but also the best "minority"
for the job. For the best minority would be regarded as one that would be the
most accurate - or authentic - representation of the culture she represents.⁴³
Such a need to emphasize one's authenticity has meaning mainly, I'd argue, in
the professional, skilled labor market where jobs that were abundant in the
1960s have grown increasingly scarce and less guaranteed as permanent in a post-industrial
economy.⁴⁴ In such an economy, one must sell one's self in order
to survive. One way of doing this is to package one's characteristics as marketable
assets of the self. In the marketing of the self in such a way, authenticity
can be a tool.

The dismissal of the relevance of caste by upper-caste immigrant Indians also
merits scrutiny. As noted, it is common for Indians in the United States to
assert that caste is unimportant, except perhaps when it comes to marriage.
Why should it be important in terms of marriage? One simple answer might be
the one that many scholars offer: Despite their departure from India, Indians
maintain a sense of pride in their identity as Indians and want to perpetuate
that identity by marrying those who understand what being an Indian is like.
I'd like to propose a more complex answer: marrying another Indian, particularly
one of the same or higher caste, is a way of enhancing one's purity - or authenticity
- as a high-caste Indian. Similarly, because marriage is not only an alliance
between two people but also the only institutionally accepted way of producing
a family, who one marries becomes significant in ensuring the authenticity of
not only one's self but of one's offspring as well.

Viewing caste from this perspective might deepen understandings of why higher-caste
immigrants after 1965 tended to look upon an older, working-class community
of migrants with disdain and often regard less privileged Indians who have entered
the United States more recently with alarm. Such a view of caste occurs in concert
with understandings of caste dynamics in contemporary India where the political
ascendancy of some lower-caste groups, coupled with demands for privileges on
the basis of a history of being disadvantaged, and the resulting reactions from
upper-caste Indians have played a vital role in the hardening of caste identities.
Because caste is of such deep relevance to those who are lower caste in India,
it becomes easy for scholars to overlook its pertinence in Indian immigrant
communities such as the one that has formed in the United States, where the
bulk of Indians continue to be upper caste and immigrants.⁴⁵ However,
when the perspective is shifted away from India, one comes to realize that it
is the upper-caste Indians for whom caste identity is of most pertinence in
the United States. It is also these immigrants who are most persistent in disavowing
caste's significance.

Conclusion

This paper has offered a preliminary look at how caste-related behaviors may
persist among Indians in the United States, even as these Indians insist that
caste loses its significance outside India. It also has offered reasons why
caste would not be a publicly discussed issue among Indians in the United States.
I now would like to conclude by opening up a broader, much more contentious
question: What role might caste identities play in establishing a relationship
between the recent popularity of communal-based Hindu politics in India and
the formation of an affluent, overseas Indian community?

Elsewhere, I have argued that a Hinduizing of India's social and cultural spaces
has been accompanied by the constituting of what Arjun Appaduarai has described
as an "imagined world," a diasporic public space whose formation relies
less on conventional territorial boundaries of state and more on a globalization
of mass media and a continued migration of upper-caste, middle-class migrants
from an "underdeveloped" India to an "affluent" West to
define a "Hindu nation" in a broader cultural sense.⁴⁶
Hindus in the West - particularly the United States - often buy into the ideology
that this Hinduizing movement circulates because it appears to speak to their
own desires to overcome the sense of loneliness and alienation of living in
a foreign land by recreating an idealized India back home. With this effort
has come increased pressures to define Indian-ness in the United States in Hindu
terms. This equating of Indian with Hindu in the United States shares some similarities
with efforts to define India as Hindu. Where does caste identity fit in these
dynamics?

Caste tensions long have been embedded in assertions that a true or authentic
Indian society is a Hindu one. Ever since the emergence in the early twentieth
century of a Hindu strain within the broader Indian nationalist movement, pro-Hindu
groups have attempted to gain electoral and other numerically-based advantages
through an effort to argue that not only are all Hindus one community but also
that India is a diverse society that can only attain a sense of unity and harmony
through an adherence to Hindu beliefs and values. Within this movement, caste
identities historically have both contradicted and complemented the unifiying
project. On the surface, caste, as a system based on religiously-prescribed
exclusionary practices through a defining of some as more hierarchically pure
than others cannot be regarded as anything but disunifying. As a result, those
who called upon all Indians to unite as one during the height of the anti-colonial
movement tended to downplay the primacy of caste, as a way of suppressing the
inherent inequalities of the system. However, most of the staunchest ardent
Indian nationalists tended to come from high-caste groups and were quite conscious
of the privileges that accompanied their higher status, whether they exercised
them or not. A similar dynamic existed among Hindu nationalists, as historian
Sumit Sarkar has shown.⁴⁷ That tension between a need to downplay
inequality through a forging of a Hindu unity and the reality of the high-caste
trappings of the Hindutva leadership has led to a discursive idea of India in
which it is held that all Hindus are equal, through a system of social order
that is inherently unequal but, through divine sanction, promotes harmony. Such
a discourse not only works to the advantage of upper-caste Hindus in India by
giving legitimacy to their privileged positions in religious terms but subtly
erases any claim to Indian-ness that those who are outside the caste system
- Muslims, Christians and other religious minorities, for instance - have. Yet,
as Sarkar emphasizes, caste remains present as an under-emphasized force unless
something prompts it to rise to the surface.⁴⁸ Thus, a defining of
India as harmonious but Hindu reveals caste as a factor that here too is hidden
in plain sight.

Within a U.S. context, one might recall the words of Yash Pal Lakra, president
of the VHP of America. In a column entitled "Let Us Call Ourselves 'Hindu-Americans,'
" Lakra urged Indians in the United States to bring the strength of their
diversity together under a common cultural identity as Hindus. Lakra does not
use the word caste, but he does articulate a definition of Indian. He notes,
for instance, that while all people of Indian origin are welcome to identify
themselves as Hindus, Muslims are not because "Muslim identity to them
is more important than their Indian identity."⁴⁹ Such an overt
defining of Indian as Hindu easily acknowledges the salience of caste, even
as it slides over any reference to it. For to be Indian is to be Hindu, and
to be Hindu is to maintain a social identity within caste.

Yet, even as it remains hidden in plain sight, caste distinctions in the United
States also have the effect of destabilizing the Hindu/Indian sense of unity
that organizations such as VHP of America have worked so hard to cultivate.
This can be seen in a boom in temple construction that has occurred in the United
States in the past two decades. In the late 1970s, only a handful of temples
existed in the United States. By the mid-1980s, nearly fifty temples had been
built and, as religious-studies scholar Ray Brady Williams notes, most communities
in the United States with at least a hundred Hindu families were either building
temples or planning to do so.⁵⁰ Yet, with this rise in temple building
has come a splintering within communities, often on regional as well as caste-related
lines. These splits have led to the construction of "competing" temples
in some localities, as well as a rise in popularity in what religious-studies
scholar Joanne Punzo Waghorne has described as sites that are not unlike the
"caste" temples that were built in parts of southern India during
the colonial period. In a study of the relationship between East India Company
trade and the expansion of temple construction in Madras between the mid-seventeenth
through early nineteenth century, Waghorne notes that many of the caste-based
temples that characterized this wave of temple building are now being replicated
in the West as highly-skilled, upper-caste professionals continue to leave India
for economic purposes. As diasporic communities of such professionals form,
these groups "write" their identities into temples. Waghorne writes:
"The eclectic Town Temple has its almost perfect counterpart in the Sri
Siva-Vishna Temple in suburban Washington, D.C. The duplicated temple has its
counterpart in the chain of Venkatesvara temples in the United States that stretch
from Pittsburgh to Atlanta and to Malibu (California). Some community-based
temples have appeared in the United States, such as the many temples to Swami
Narayan that are not formally announced as 'caste' temples but are dominated
by the Gujarati Hindu community. … The Arya Vysya community has installed
the image of its patron Goddess in separate shrines within larger temples here.
Among South Indians the divide between Brahmin and non-Brahmin manifests in
the Muruga Temples that exist in metropolitan Washington, D.C. and San Francisco
near much larger temples, which many Sat-Sudra ("pure" caste
non-Brahmins) perceive as merely reestablishing the generalized Sanskrit tradition
that many fought so hard to overcome in India."⁵¹

Such factors suggest caste distinctions - perhaps silently yet solidly - not
only continue to persist but might be growing more pervasive as more Indians
settle on U.S. soil. It also suggests that caste identities may be a way of
fragmenting a rather sinister sense of Hindu unity that groups such as the VHP
of America have worked so hard to cultivate. But, in privileging caste in such
a way, a new question is provoked: Does the dismantling of one oppressive ideology
inevitable result in resurgence of other, potentially oppressive forms of behavior?

________

¹Susan Bayly makes this point
in Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the
Modern Age, (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1.
²Clarke et al. (1990), 21. For an overview of scholarship on caste
and overseas Indians outside of the United States, see Elizabeth M. Grieco,
"The Effects of Migration on the Establishment of Networks: Caste Disintegration
and Reformation Among the Indians of Fiji," International Migration
Review (32:3) Fall 1998.

³Maxine Fisher, The Indians of New York City: A Study of Immigrants
from India (New Delhi: Heritage Publishers, 1980), 85.
⁴John Fenton, Transplanting Religious Traditions: Asian Indians
in America (New York: Praeger Books, 1988), 114.
⁵Priya Agarwal, Passage from India: Post 1965 Immigrants and Their
Children (Palos Verde, Calif.: Yuvati Publications, 1991), 28.

⁶Aparna Rayaprol, Negotiating Identities: Women in the Indian
Diaspora (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 74.
⁷ See, for instance, Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), Sunaina Marr Maira, Chaste
Identities, Ethnic Yearnings: Second-Generation Indian Americans in New York
City, Ph.D. dissertation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1998); and
Sunita Sunder Mukhi, Doing the 'Desi' Thing: Performing Indianness in New
York City (London: Garland Publishing, 2000). Along similar lines, Satyagraha
in America, a special issue of Amerasia Journal (25:3, 2000), which
purports to be the first extensive scholarly collection of articles on the contemporary
dynamics that influence Indians and other South Asians in the United States,
includes numerous articles that discuss issues of race, class and gender but
none that examine caste.

⁸I borrow the phrase "hidden in plain sight" from Kathy
E. Ferguson and Phyllis Turnbull's text, Oh, Say, Can You See? The Semiotics
of the Military in Hawai'i (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1999). Their semiotic exploration of the military presence in Hawai'i has helped
inspire much of the theoretical framework supporting my argument in this paper.
In addition, my use of this phrase arises as a result of personal communication
with Sankaran Krishna on the issue of caste among Indians in the United States.
⁹Ferguson and Turnbull, xiii.
¹⁰Stuart Hall, "The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,"
Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, Stuart Hall, David Held,
Don Hubert and Kenneth Thompson, eds. (London: Blackwell Publishing, 1996),
188. Also see Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge,
1998), 50; and Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1983), 3-4.

¹¹See Annanya Bhattacharjee, "The Habit of Ex-Nomination: Nation,
Woman and the Indian Immigrant Bourgeoisie," A Patchwork Shawl: Chronicles
of South Asian Women in America, Shamita Das Dasgupta, ed. (New Brunswick,
N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 163-182. I problematize the "best
of both worlds" phrase in American Places, Indian Spaces: Post-1965
Immigrants Negotiate Self and Community (Thesis, University of Hawai'i,
2000), 28-31, building my argument from Partha Chatterjee's much-criticized
but useful depiction of a bourgeois self in colonial India as being characterized
by a tension between external, material and inner, spiritual domains. See Chatterjee's
The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).

¹²For more on how multiculturalism operates, see Verne Dusenberry's
discussion of the "logic of multiculturalism" in his article, "A
Sikh Diaspora? Contested Identities and Constructed Realities," Nation
and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora, Peter
van der Veer, ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).
¹³Ferguson and Turnbull, xiii.
¹⁴See Clarke et al, Grieco, and many of the articles in Caste
in Overseas Indian Communities, Barton M. Schwartz, ed. (San Francisco:
Chandler Publishing Co., 1967).

¹⁵Grieco, 719-720.
¹⁶Clarke et al, 13.
¹⁷Gujarati overseas networks have been the subject of some study,
as Grieco notes, although these scholarly works have focused more on Gujarati
communities outside the United States. For examinations of the Gujarati networks
within a U.S. context, see Usha Jain's dated but useful ethnography, The
Gujaratis of San Francisco (New York: AMS Press, 1989), as well as the references
to the development of a Gujarati-based Swami Narayan religious community in
Raymond Brady Williams, Religions of Immigrants from India and Pakistan:
New Threads in the American Tapestry (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University
Press, 1988).

¹⁸The best examination of this geographic dispersal is Bhardwaj and
Rao.
¹⁹When caste is regarded as more than a hierarchical system, one
can gain a deeper understanding of the overseas networks formed by Gujarati
migrants worldwide that are based at least partly on caste.
²⁰Bayly, 5-7.
²¹Ibid, 25.
²²American Places, Indian Spaces, 83.

²³New acquaintances repeatedly ask me if I am related to the Gupta
who was their doctor in Omaha, or the Gupta who taught at a university in Kansas,
or the Gupta with whom they worked at The Boeing Co. Such an experience is undoubtedly
familiar for anyone of Indian ancestry who has resided in the United States
for a few years.
²⁴For more on the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, see Bill
Ong Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America Through Immigration Policy, 1850-1990
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Harry H.L. Kitano and Roger Daniels,
Asian Americans: Emerging Minorities (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice
Hall Publishers, 1995); Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural
Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996).

²⁵Sumit Sarkar, personal communication, November 2000. Sarkar, a
social historian of India, made the observation that NRI, in essence, has become
a sort of new caste category in a discussion of the relationship between Indians
in India and their overseas counterparts. Arvind Rajagopal's "Transnational
Networks and Hindu Nationalism," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars
29:3 (1997), contains a similar argument in his suggestion that the love/hate
relationship between Indians who are resident of India and those who are NRI
has led to a disjunctive scenario in which the NRI in the globally-dominant
United States has come to represent the model to which all Indians aspire.
²⁶Bill Ong Hing discusses the advantages that Indians had over other
non-white immigrants in Making and Remaking Asian America Through Immigration
Policy, 1850-1990 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 101-102.
The idea of the model minority interacts closely with the "best of both
worlds" stereotype as well as the ideal of the American dream. All attribute
economic success to archetypal immigrant values of hard work and success. Although
these qualities may seem positive initially, they often result in a loss of
self-esteem. For more on the "model minority," see Vijay Prashad,
"Crafting Solidarities," A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian
America, Lavina Dhingra Shankar and Rajini Srikanth eds. (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1998); David Tokiharu Mayeda, "Media Portrayals
of MLB Pitchers Nomo and Irabu," Journal of Sport & Social Issues
(May 1999), 204-205; and E. San Juan Jr., Racial Formations/Critical
Transformations: Articulations of Power in Ethnic and Racial Studies in the
United States (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1992), 98-100.
Prashad's Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2000) also explores Indian immigrants' interactions with the "model minority"
idea, but his personal angst over the issue clouds his analysis of it.

²⁷Prashad, 2000, 77-80. However, I must note that Prashad's solution
to this dilemma, which is to urge Indians in the United States to abandon their
identity as Indians and become Americans, is not one that I support at all.

²⁸Hector Cordero-Guzmaan and Ramon Grosfoguel, "The Demographic
and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Post-1965 Immigrants to New York City:
A Comparative Analysis by National Origin," International Migration Review
38:4 (2000), 56-59; Marilyn Fernandez, "Asian Indian Americans in the Bay
Area and the Glass Ceiling," Sociological Perspectives 41:1 (1998),
119-149; and Peter Xenos, Herbert Barringer, Michael J. Levin, Asian Indians
in the United States: A 1980 Census Profile (Honolulu: Papers of the East-West
Population Institute, 111: July 1989).

²⁹Sathi Dasgupta, On the Trail of an Uncertain Dream: Indian Immigrant
Experience in America (New York: AMS Press, 1989), 190.
³⁰Arun Peter Lobo and Joseph J. Salvo provide a particularly helpful
discussion of this in "Changing U.S. Immigration Law and the Occupational
Selectivity of Asian Immigrants," International Migration Review
32:3 (1998), 737-760.
³¹See Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), David Harvey, "Flexible
Accumulation through Urbanization: Reflections on 'Post-modernism' in the American
City," Post-Fordism: A Reader, Ash Amin, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1994) and Catherine Casey, Work, Self, and Society: After Industrialism
(London: Routledge, 1995) for more on this post-Fordist shift.

³²Casey, particularly chapters 4 and 5.
³³Whites, of course, are not the natives of America but have appropriated
possession of the term "native" through a legacy of brutality and
suppression of the native peoples of America. This slippage often is overlooked
in scholarship that examines the social marginality that immigrants to the United
States face in relationship to whites.
³⁴Jennifer Bjorhus, "Tech world's low-end jobs shifting overseas,"
Knight Ridder News Services, Sept. 18, 2000, via Seattle Times
Web site, www.seattletimes.com. Also see Roger Mitton, "Giant on the Move:
From high technology to the creative arts, India is rapidly becoming a global
player," AsiaWeek, Aug. 11, 2000, 30-39.

³⁵Although this argument also needs additional research, investigation
of it may deepen understandings of why many entrepreneurs of Indian ancestry,
while earning six- or even seven-figure salaries, complain of a glass ceiling
that hinders their ability to advance in the United States. Helen Zia touches
on this point in Asian-American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People
(New York: Farrar, Giroux and Strauss, 2000), 208-209.
³⁶Susan Koshy, "Category Crisis: South Asian Americans and Questions
of Race and Ethnicity," Diaspora 7:3 (1998), 299.
³⁷See Madhulika Khandelwal's discussion of this in "Indian Immigrants
in Queens, New York City: Patterns of Spatial Concentration and Distribution,
1965-1980," Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South
Asian Diaspora, Peter van der Veer, ed. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994), 181-182, and Mukhi, 2000. Mukhi, particularly, argues that festivals
such as Diwali which might involve a broad array of cultural entertainment often
are redefined among upper-caste, middle class Indians in the United States first
as religious festivals that recall the "grand" epics or narratives
of India such as the Ramayana and then, secondly, as festivals that are
representative of all Indians.

³⁸Arthur W. Helweg and Usha M. Helweg, An Immigrant Success Story:
East Indians in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1989).
³⁹Karen Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California's Punjabi Mexican
Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 205-209.
⁴⁰See, for instance, the arguments presented in Charles R. Lawrence
III and Mari J. Matsuda, We Won't Go Back: Making the Case for Affirmative
Action (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1997).

⁴¹See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on
the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983 repr. 1991),
164-169.
⁴²In her doctoral dissertation, a study of identity construction
among American-born Indian college students, Sunaina Maira notes that her respondents
regard experiences such as traveling back to India or taking classes in Indian
languages or culture as efforts to understand their roots. She attributes this
desire to seek out roots to craft an "authentic" Indian self. What
she perhaps fails to realize is that this desire for authenticity may be just
as strong among immigrants, most of whom migrate to the United States at a relatively
early stage in their adult lives, as it is among their American-born counterparts.
⁴³Note, for instance, the reference to caste as a marker of Indian
culture made in a recent newspaper profile of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Creating
a Stir Wherever She Goes," New York Times Feb. 9, 2002.

⁴⁴Koshy makes a point that familiarity with the caste-based reservations
system in India allows immigrants to integrate race and caste in the United
States as a way of maximizing their minority status. While I agree that an invoking
of caste among U.S. immigrants involves an interplay with race, I would suggest
that the American scenario differs significantly from the Indian context.
⁴⁵About two-thirds of the U.S. population of Indians are immigrants.
Although the U.S.-born population of Indians is likely to increase as more immigrants
start families and as their children marry, the continued flow of new migrants
from India ensures that the Indian population will continue to be dominated
by immigrants in at least the near future.
⁴⁶See Himanee Gupta, "Illuminating India: How a South Asian
Diaspora Helps Build a Hindu Nation," Sagar (6:1999).

⁴⁷Sarkar, "Indian Nationalism and the Politics of Hindutva,"
Making India Hindu: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in
India, David Ludden, ed. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 276-277.
Sarkar also has made this point in "Caste and the Politics of Identity
in India," lecture, University of Hawai'i, Honolulu, October 2000.
⁴⁸Sarkar (1996), 277.
⁴⁹Yash Pal Lakra, "Let Us Call Ourselves 'Hindu Americans,'"
Hinduism Today (October 1997), 9.

⁵⁰Williams, 55. Current estimates of the number of temples in the
United States vary widely, ranging between 100 and nearly 600, based on directories
compiled by VHP of America and Harvard University's Religion and Pluralism Project.
⁵¹Joanne Punzo Waghorne, "The Diaspora of the Gods: Hindu Temples
in the New World System 1640-1800," Journal of Asian Studies 58:3
(August 1999), 649.