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POST INDEPENDENT INDIA
EXPORTS BRAINS AND ........

Prof. P. Venugopala Rao

Pattern of Immigration

At the turn of this century, practically all the Indians residing in USA, were those who came as laborers to the west coast. They came from rural India and they were agriculturists before they left India. They encountered a lot of prejudice from the local labor organizations. A 1910 annual report by the Commissioner General of immigration stated that “there is a strong prejudice on the Pacific Coast against Hindus by all classes of people except among a few employers who think to profit by the procurement of cheap labor�. The 1917 as well as the 1924 legislation included the so-called exclusion clause, which denied admittance to citizenship to several Asians. Thus the first images about Indians in this country were created by those who settled here before 1920’s and they were not very favorable ones.

The new immigrants who arrived from the post-independent India brought a new image. In spite of the existing quota system, several Indians found their way to USA in the late fifties and the early sixties through the exceptions provided by the existing law. These exceptions permitted only educated and skilled Indians. A significant event in mid fifties was the reason for this to happen. The defence department of US Government decided to support graduate education financially in universities with a view to increase the base of scientifically trained personnel in the country. This shift in the policy permitted the universities to free up their own funds to recruit graduate students from all over the world. Within five years of this policy shift, hoards of foreign students were entering the American graduate schools.

This situation turned out to be a blessing for many who were graduating from the Indian universities in basic sciences and engineering subjects. In the post-independent India, there was a lot of unemployment among the emerging college graduates. The welcome signals from, US universities opened up for them the possibility of new careers and continuation of study in their chosen fields. Indian graduate students became the new pilgrims to come to America and this pilgrimage was the pattern of flow for the next ten years.

Most of these early ‘pilgrims� are bachelors or newly married young men between the ages of 25 to 35. Many of them retained the dream of returning to India, for a long time. It was soon to be realized however that job opportunities home did not increase even after a decade. They settled down eventually in the land of their education and they would become the founding members of their community organizations that came into existence ten or fifteen years later.

Large scale immigration actually started after the reformation of the immigration laws by the Congress. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act represented a major break with the past and discarded many past provisions based on racial prejudice. It introduced basic policy changes - the abolition of the national origins quota system, a new preference system, labor certification procedures, and a limit on Western Hemisphere immigration. These new laws opened doors for doctors, engineers and a few other professionals from India. The late sixties and early seventies were also the times when USA needed to recruit more skilled personnel to meet its growing demands.

The late seventies and early eighties have seen larger increase in the Indian immigrants in USA. This was largely due to a sudden influx of those of Indian origin from other parts of the world, especially Africa.

The next wave of Indians to arrive in this country started with the increasing demand for the computer engineers at the beginning of nineties. These are the newly graduated young professionals from India. Many of them come on a temporary basis and most of them are bachelors or newly-wed. This decade of nineties will be known for its influx of computer - trained, ‘software� Asian Indians.

Thus we can recognize three different waves of immigration from post - independent India. At the top of the age group are the early settlers, mostly in academic and professional positions. The next age group consists mostly of doctors and engineers. It will be followed by an younger group consisting of recent arrivals including computer engineers. Straddling all these groups will be entrepreneurs most of whom arrived in late seventies and early eighties. They own travel agencies, news stands, fast-food restaurant, luncheonettes, sari shops, gas stations, independent convenience stores and motels. To this profile we must add the members of the accompanying families especially the growing second generation who are almost ready to make their impact and carve out their own destiny. The second generation is beginning to enter their thirties. Since there is a continuous supply of new Indians from India in the younger age groups, the profile of the ‘first generation� immigrants is also continuously changing. The activities and goals of local community organizations are also becoming redefined. The early settlers and the new arrivals have sometimes different goals to pursue.

These new immigrants from post-­independent India, with the diversity of their occupations, are also demographically very much dispersed across the urban landscape of USA. Originally hailing from urbanised middle classes in India, and having the facility of an English language to communicate with, they adapted themselves very quickly to the new environment. They have become very successful and accomplished. The social life of individuals and the activities of the community as a whole reflect this change.

Making of a Community

The community life in the early years was confined to the activities sponsored by the Indian student organizations on the university campuses. After the increase in numbers in mid sixties, the need for the community-based organizations became obvious. They began to take roots in the beginning of the decade of seventies in many major urban areas.

The increase in Indian communities was limited to large urban areas, such as New York-New Jersey, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and San Francisco. By the end of seventies almost every major city has an Indian community organization. National organizations started as a federation of several of these local community organizations. In fact we have now many federations of these community organizations, such as NFIA (National Federation of Indian - American Associations), AIA, IAFPE, AAPI (for physicians), and AAOHA (for motel owners) who serve the community at the national level.

These organizations form an infrastructure that provides the necessary loyalties and relationships to create an active, dynamic community life for the transplanted Asian Indians. It has been the privilege of these organizations to provide an awareness of and identity with the culture and religion of our native land.

These organizations, managed by individuals who volunteer their time and effort, play a significant role in setting the tone for the activities of the community. Starting from small events such as picnics, movie projections and cultural evenings that centered around festivals and demonstrations of local talent, these volunteer organizers developed leadership and managerial talent to such an extent that now they organize conventions hosting crowds of several thousands of participants every year.

To this rich and cementing dimension of cultural awareness, is added another strong element in the eighties - that of religion. To day there are Hindu Temples all over North America, built by collaboration and support of all kinds of immigrant Indians. Temple construction has its effect on many families. The religiosity and spirituality that remained dormant in the early settlers for a long time has found an outlet and opportunity to flourish in these modern places of worship dedicated often to an assortment of gods and goddesses.

The growth of religious awareness has an interesting history. The early settlers have no other resources except their own knowledge. Religious rituals often had to be improvised and conducted by learned elders. The community had to educate itself in the appropriate religious tradition. There was no generation of elders who knew the tradition very well. The group that arrived here in sixties did not bring all their scriptural know­-how. Most of them are representatives of the westernized, secular Indian middle-class. Some of them took pains, only after arriving in USA, to educate themselves in their religious tradition. This process of education has been a relatively slow process and went through distinct stages. The first stage was just getting acquainted with the tradition by some means or other.

The next stage in this education was actually a stage of adaptation or editing of the scriptural tradition. This involved greater understanding of the scripture and the ritual. Our (Hindu) scriptures are all in Sanskrit and understanding them needs translation. Translations are available but had to be secured from India with a great deal of effort. There are also interpretations in English by Western scholars access to which is easy only to those who are in academic professions.

A deeper problem faced by the immigrants must be recognized. There is no tradition of educating the young in our religious tradition in the westernized Hindu Society of contemporary India. The young had to learn    only by watching and participating in the rituals practiced by the elders in the family. As immigrants we have to invent an educational process. The experience of the communities or other religions (Sikh, Muslim etc) is similar.

The construction of temples has given a boost to this process of learning. The temple priest became the main dispenser of the ritual tradition. Originally trained only in the minimum ritual necessary for worship in temple, they had to quickly learn the rituals demanded by the families. Today the temple priests play the double role of both a family priest and a temple pujari. We also have now regularly lectures by visiting swamijis and other spiritual leaders and even summer camps to all age groups to acquaint ourselves with the tradition.

The beginning and consolidation of these educational processes that solidify the sense of community among the immigrants is not usually a task that can be completed in one generation. They also need sustained leadership endowed with vision and integrity. That the Asian Indian communities in various parts of this country have reached a mature stage is undeniable. While they enjoy the benefits of certain solidarity, they also face the problems that are common to any community which is part of a larger society. They are also victims of crimes from inside and outside. Any casual reading of our ethnic-news journals would open our eyes to that facet of our lives. Both successes and failures have become part of our lives. Our community does not resemble any more the original “graduate student groups� that populated the college campuses of US. It is now diverse in its character, dispersed over, a variety of professions. We have among us not only the well-accomplished, including a couple of Nobel prize winners, and wealthy, but also the underprivileged as well as criminals including secret spies, murderers and drug abusers.

The Family as a Cohesive Unit

The typical family unit is still of the same of the size as that of early settlers, consisting of the husband, the wife and two or three children. But unlike that of the early settlers, a typical nuclear family today has greater roots and connections in the community. It is not isolated as before � a reflection of the fact that Indian community in this country is not just a collection of strangers from a different land, but a group that is developing a collective consciousness. It is not uncommon these days to have annual gatherings of relatives from various parts of the country highlighting their family connections, in addition to the conventions and conferences sponsored by community organizations.

Two aspects of the internal dynamics of the family unit are worth considering. These are related to the very nature of ‘transplantation� that affects immigrants in general, not just Indians alone. The host society offers an immigrant not only opportunities for making livelihood and to accumulate wealth, but at the same time rubs its own culture on them. The most characteristic feature of this adopted Western society is the great weight given to the notion of individuality and individual freedom in the society at all levels. This translates into two changes in the traditional Indian family culture. There is an inevitable demand and desire for more freedom and self-expression on the part of every member of the family unit. The head of the household has to learn to share the privileges with others. This is a process of acculturation which is slow, but inevitable. The second change concerns the role of women in the family as well as the place of the second generation. We shall deal with these two aspects separately.

Women’s roles and expectations

There is growing awareness on the part of the women in the family of the opportunities to assert their independence. That many of the wives, who accompanied their husbands, eventually acquire the necessary skills and education to get into the job market is a fact of history. This opportunity enhanced the role of the traditional wife, just as it was happening in some parts of urban India, and provide greater economic freedom and security. In many situations the lifestyles became enriched along with the status of the women in the family. A modernized and eloquent image of Indian women emerges as a consequence of their transplantation.

Not only economic independence but independence to express their own views and feelings about matters concerning them is plenty in this society. While some husbands still carry their own images of an Indian wife, i.e. that of a caring docile child­rearing partner, many wives have learned to exercise independence and began to redefine their own roles in the family as well as in the society. Many immigrants adjust very well to these changes and live happily. But not all of them are lucky and some had to face problems.

One such problem is the domestic violence which we are becoming aware of more and more recently. The battered wife is not a rare being any more among Indians in USA. One organization informs me that it has handled at least eighty cases of spousal abuse since its formation a few years ago. Most of the abuse is verbal and emotional, with physical abuse manifesting only occasionally. It is also noted by many of these organizations that a typical battered wife is an educated well-accomplished young wife, who feels ‘trapped�. Typically the abuser isolates her from society, going to the extent of preventing her from making phone calls, from letter writing, withholding means of transportation, not providing any money to spend, not allowing any social interaction and sometimes locking her up in the house with a dead­bolt lock while he is at work. The abusers are many times young men who came here recently from India to take up a job, brought their newly married wives later and then keep them as docile house­keepers. In a few cases they even continue their relationships with their former girl friends if they have. And most of these young men are born and raised in post- independent India, lived there for about twenty five years in the authentic Indian environment. Of course, it is not fair to identify these younger husbands as the only perpetrators of this tragedy. We know of well-settled older parents-in-law subjecting their daughters in-law to both verbal and physical abuse. We know of alcoholics whose conduct is reprehensible. These domestic problems quickly lead to divorces in the younger couples, but continue to play their havoc in older families where divorce is not chosen as an immediate alternative, with significant effect on their sons and daughters.

There is nothing peculiar and strange about spouses who nag and put down their partners continuously. These are universal phenomena that are part of humanity’s culture. Such aberrations are present in the host (American) society too. But immigrant victims have an extra disadvantage. They have no ready made support groups to look for comfort and help. One sign that our community is maturing is that such support groups are coming into existence now a days in various cities. A recent list of Indian women’s organizations or support groups that work in the area of domestic violence and abuse has addresses of about forty organizations. The counselors that work for these organizations report that there is much more abuse than we publicly acknowledge. They also point out to the cultural barriers, that prevent us from acknowledging; the existence of these problems. While our community must find ways and means of taking care of the ill effects of this domestic violence, it is time that we try to understand the causes behind this domestic abuse. The sociologists and anthropologists among us have a significant role to play in this area.

The growing second generation

A noted American Scholar, Marcus Lee Hansen, proposed in 1937 a hypothesis about the problems faced during the successive generations of immigrant’s history in America. Briefly it can be stated as follows: During an immigrant group’s first sixty years in the United States, each generation - the pioneers themselves, their children, and their grand children, faces a special problem rooted in the characteristic of its social position within the overall population. The problem of the first generation is to make the adjustment necessary to survive economically, to function within an alien culture and to learn about democracy. That of the second generation is “to inhabit two worlds at the same time.� The problem of the third generation, briefly expressed, is properly interpreting the history of the two. While this model is contested by many scholars, this hypothesis served as a starting point to understand the ethnic diversity and immigrant assimilation in US.

Applying this model to the case of Indian immigrants, we can safely conclude it does not fit very well. Our first generation not only adjusted themselves very well, but built up a sense of community within their own life time. Unlike the earlier immigrants, these new immigrants came at a time when multicultural cosmopolitanism is an accepted state of mind in this country. The so-called melting pot has not melted. Ethnic groups became part of an acceptable landscape of the American Society. Asian Indians fit the text book description of an ethnic group ­that is a group of people racially and historically related, having a common and distinct culture. We are destined to become part of the ‘unmeltable ethnics� in the American landscape.

Hanson’s description of the second generation goes as follows: “The sons and daughters of the immigrants were really in a most uncomfortable position. They were subjected to the criticism and taunts of the native Americans and the criticism and taunts of their elders as well…where as in the schoolroom they were too foreign, at home they were too American�. Clearly that is not the case with our second generation. They are thoroughly Americanized but are not as alienated as the immigrants who arrived at the turn of this century. They are pulled naturally between the identity of their parents and identity of the society in which they are growing up. As John Fenton wrote in his remarkable study of the second generation, “they are looking for a middle course between retaining their Indian character, their family ties and their cultural heritage and are becoming just like other Americans. But they know more about American culture than they do about Indian culture and religion.�

The size of the second\generation, that is of marrying age and that is already married, is increasing constantly during the last decade. Some of them are entering the work force and starting their own nuclear families. The generation is beginning to define their own role in the society and their relation ship to the first generation. They are going through the assessment of the values and merits of the “arranged marriages�. There are mixed marriages as well as traditional marriages and there are divorces too. The older among them are able to engage and confront their parents in a discussion of the values which they are expected to live by. The youth conferences which are organized almost annually reflect the alertness and dynamism with which they are imbued. A significant segment of this generation is made up of college-going age group. Across the campuses of the universities and colleges are mushrooming. Asian Indian student associations with membership largely recruited from those who are born and raised in America and are citizens of this country by birth. These associations have a different agenda than those that existed earlier. They have a self image, vastly different from that of the former “foreign� graduate students groups. This loyalty is not always to India as a mother country, but to their Indian origin and their religious and cultural tradition. It is no secret that on campuses a distinction is often made between the ABCDs (American Born Confused Desis) and FOBs (fresh off the boat Indian students). This second generation is building up an identity that goes beyond the nostalgia which the first generation cherishes.

The second generation is in a sense luckier than others in this country’s history. They have stable environments at home and belong to a community which is dynamic, cultured and sophisticated. They are well indoctrinated with an ethic of hard work. They need not have to disown their parent’s culture and religion in preference to that of the surrounding society. So it is natural to assume that the third generation that is yet to come will have no problems of identity crisis. It does not have to rediscover its identity, because the second generation is not going to lose it in the first place.

When sociologists, anthropologists and the life refer to the second generation, the reference is often to the older among this second generation. Strictly speaking the new born, as well the young kids are part of this generation. Bringing up children is an activity that consumes energy and requires wisdom. As immigrants we face some peculiar problems. But we are now in a community that can address these problems constructively. Both adult partners in the family have the task of raising children who are growing with an extra sense of independence derived from the society around them. Any sense of discrimination between daughters and sons is immediately resented by the children. It was not uncommon that some parents found it more convenient to send their children to live with their grand parents in India until they are of manageable age. Bhajana groups, baby­-sitting grandparents, religious camps, bilingual education and regular visits to temples have all become part of our life, style as parents struggle to raise their kids: as Indian kids exposing them to Indian culture at every possible opportunity.

The first generation also started sincere efforts to educate their second generation at an early stage, as evidenced by the educational and cultural programs being organised at various places. We have schools to teach languages, schools to teach cultural arts and schools even to teach religious traditions. The resources and determination are plenty and are growing in every community across the adopted country

The ageing of the community

The one kind of experience the Indian immigrant has not yet encountered is the stage of retired life. Only few of us are at the threshold of retirement. Their number will increase into thousands by year two thousand. They have no role models to follow now. This retiring first generation shall set up examples for the future generations. Some of them talk of going to India. Some of them hope to spend their remaining years both here and there. Some wish to acquire a new residence closer to their son or daughter. Some are anxious about the treatment they have in store from their children. Some entrepreneurs are contemplating the building of homes for the retired near the temples. Some have no idea at all what might happen to them. We must watch the history unfolding and wait for the results. But it is time to put our thinking cap to construct Scenarios for our retirement.

History as a personal testimony

Scholars and historians in the future will no doubt study and discuss the Asian Indian immigrants� lives and their contribution to the American way of life. The accomplishments, the successes and failures of the generations of the various immigrant communities will be intensely scrutinized. The raw material and data for their studies will have to come from the experiences of the first generation. There is obviously a need for “reconstructing the memories� of our arrival and survival in this new land. We need not have to let some research scholars in the future guess about us. We can ourselves provide authentic data by carefully recording our experiences. In this age of electronic communication and magnetic storage of information, gathering, depositing and disseminating knowledge about our experiences need not be a chore but a satisfying act of service to posterity. Members of the first generation should take time off to record the memories of their immigrant experience. An autobiographical note, a reflection on an accomplishment, a meditation on a tragic event or plain recalling of a celebration ­all and any ofthat kind can become valuable resources to reconstruct a generation’s memory not only for the benefit of the scholars but also for the members of our own future generations. Our ethnic journals, TV programs and souvenir publications must encourage this activity which preserves not only the identity of our origins but also allows us to stay alive in the ‘memories� of our future. Four decades of immigrant experience constitutes a good chunk of history.