“I think I want to intern for Preet Bharara.”
As soon as I uttered this seemingly harmless statement at a dinner party back home in New York, the collective jaw of the dinner table dropped.
“Do you mean the United States Attorney for Manhattan who seems to only be interested in persecuting Indians?”
In response, I stated that only the first part of that assumption was correct. Bharara is the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, featured on the cover of TIME magazine for his “crusade” against the four largest banks in the United States and nearly a hundred executives.
He is also the Indian-American prosecutor behind the infamous Devyani Khobragade case that escalated domestic tensions between his native India and the United States.
Despite his achievements as the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan and the fact that he was strongly considered for the position of U.S. Attorney General, why does the Indian-American community not admire Bharara?
Admittedly, there is a strong minority who admires his bravado in tackling the fat cats of Wall Street, but the majority of Indian-Americans refer to him as a sell-out or a coconut for being too white-washed and going against his own people.
Bharara is not, however, the only Indian-American public figure who has been criticized for appearing too white-washed. Two other interesting examples are Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, a former presidential candidate, and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley.
They have been ridiculed not only for their Western first names, but also for their personal decisions to convert to Christianity, which many saw as publicity stunts to appeal to Republican voters in their Southern states.
Although Indian-Americans have the highest median household incomes and education levels of minority groups in America, they have been grossly underrepresented and misrepresented in the public sphere.
Names like Bobby and Nikki look better on American ballots than Piyush and Nimrata, the given names of Jindal and Haley, respectively.
Ultimately, is it worth having a minority representative if all they are running on is their success in compartmentalizing their Indian and American identities rather than integrating them into a cohesive Indian-American perspective?
The answer is not as black-and-white as it may seem. Indian-American identity, like other hyphenated identities, suffers from a classic case of generation gap. Due to the tech boom in the 1990s, there was a significant brain drain from India to the U.S. Computer engineers are jokingly referred to as India’s best exports.
When I visited Delhi this summer, I thought I had taken the wrong flight. India has westernized and modernized to such an extent that my neighborhood in Delhi had a Starbucks before my gentrified neighborhood in New York was granted the privilege. But this modernization is not solely limited to coffee options.
India’s economy is booming and there might be a chance of reversing the brain drain. But what happens when that generation of Indian-Americans returns to a country that is barely recognizable? There will be a major discrepancy between their expectation of India and the reality of India.
Living in the United States, many first-generation immigrants, especially from Asia, try to preserve as much of their cultural heritage as possible. We celebrate when India defeats Pakistan in the Cricket World Cup despite not knowing an iota about cricket, we enter lotteries to catch a glimpse of the charismatic Prime Minister Narendra Modi and we gleam with pride when we see an Indian girl, Mindy Kaling ’01, on primetime television.
Is there a logic to our deeply buried patriotism when those Indian values we take pride in cease to exist in a rapidly globalizing country obsessed with everything American? By choosing to cling to values that now seem like a relic of a 1990s Bollywood film, are Indian-Americans effectively destroying the possibility of carving their niche in the context of the American dream?
This is even more problematic for second-generation immigrants who are confronted with the impossibility of reconciling their parents’ antiquated values brought over from India, alongside their mango pickle and Ganesha statue, with their assimilation into American society. As newly appointed CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, continues to play cricket in India, this dichotomy clearly persists.
No immigrant group will be able to reconcile both parts of their cultural identity without reaching a level of comfort with the value system of their hyphenated home nation. This is impossible if the current immigrant generation remains insensitive to the changes rocking the foundations of the Indian belief system. This reconciliation is made more complex by the recent cultural appropriation of Indian staples such as yoga and mango lassi.
Above all, it is important for any immigrant generation to embrace its individuality before deriding public figures for disgracing a culture that no longer exists. As Mindy Kaling ‘01 concisely describes her success: “I’m an Indian woman who has her own network show.” Indian-Americans can only reinvent themselves if they continue cultivating their individuality like Kaling. India has moved on, so should we.
