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The Indo crowd
From pop culture to politics, business to Bollywood, South Asians’ stock is rising in the American mainstream
By Cary Darling
Fort Worth Star-Telegram Pop Culture Critic
Dean P. Tailor didn’t quite know what to expect.
The Londoner of Indian descent moved to North Texas six years ago to study law at Texas Wesleyan and braced himself for Cowtown culture shock.
“I thought it would be . . . country, cowboys and stuff,” recalls Tailor, 29, now living in Arlington and working for a law firm in Grand Prairie.
But Tailor stumbled across hints of home amid the stockyards and steakhouses. While out clubbing, his ears pricked up when the DJ threw into the mix some bhangra beats – Indian traditionalism-meets-club-kid-modernism that’s big in Europe.
“It was surprising to me,” he remembers.
The bhangra wasn’t an anomaly. The culture and the faces of South Asia – India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal – are making their way into the spotlight, putting an ethnic group that had been largely invisible front and center.
Bollywood, that indisputably Indian style of cinema featuring lavish musical numbers, is the focus of two major productions: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bombay Dreams, which just opened on Broadway, and the upcoming film Bride and Prejudice, a relocation of Jane Austen to the Indian subcontinent by director Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham). At the other end of the cinematic scale, one of the most noted young directors is Indian-American M. Night Shyamalan (Signs and The Sixth Sense), whose latest thriller, The Village, opens in July.
On prime-time TV, where Asians overall still have not made much impact, two South Asians – Ravi Kapoor (Crossing Jordan) and Parminder Nagra (ER) – are featured co-stars.
In dance and world music, the synthesis of ancient South Asian grooves and contemporary electronica is creating a stylish subgenre, while hip-hop stars from Jay-Z to Missy Elliott have played around with Indian textures. Though her music bears no clue to her ethnic roots, singer Norah Jones, the daughter of famed sitar player Ravi Shankar, has had two bestselling albums with Come Away With Me and Feels Like Home.
But it’s not just in pop culture that South Asians are making their mark. Novelist Jhumpa Lahiri (Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake) and multimedia artist Shahzia Sikander have received glowing reviews for their work. In sports, Vijay Singh is one of golf’s top players. In the field of politics, Bobby Jindal almost became Louisiana’s governor last year, and now he’s aiming for Congress.
Indian-Americans’ dominance in high-tech and science jobs, combined with their relative affluence – the Census Bureau says that though the national median family income is $38,885, it’s more than $60,000 for Indian-American families – creates a profile that could heighten respect and influence for the community of 2 million.
“The last few years, I’ve noticed a shift,” says often-controversial cultural commentator Dinesh D’Souza, who immigrated from India in 1979 and whose books include The End of Racism and What’s So Great About America. “I see more running or thinking of running for office, and Indians are succeeding in fields you didn’t see before. . . . Years ago, I gave a talk at an [Indian] conference and one family said their son was in the ROTC. The other families asked why, because Indians at the time didn’t feel that America is their country. That’s changing, and you’re likely to see more Indians in politics and the military.”
If South Asians are embracing America, then America is showing the love right back. Yoga and henna are becoming as American as Starbucks and Botox. Srinivasa Pakala, CEO of Dallas-based Bhuvi Technologies, which operates www.ekNazar.com, a site for cultural and business activities in South Asian communities in 26 U.S. cities, has noticed an uptick in people from outside the community at South Asian events in North Texas.
Bob Duskis, president of dance/world music Six Degrees Records, counts such Indian-fusion acts as Karsh Kale and Midival Punditz as some of his bestsellers.
“The audience is definitely growing, and when you see the concerts, you’re seeing a diverse crowd of South Asians and white college kids with their hands in the air enjoying the music,” he says. “It seems to have struck a chord. And hip-hop producers are discovering that it’s the next thing to plunder for this year. That all helps to work this stuff into the mainstream.”
Gil Asakawa, who runs the Asian culture site www.nikkeiview.com and is the author of the upcoming book Being Japanese American, says: “The South Asian thing is part of a general interest in Asian culture that’s been building for a decade. Particularly with the South Asian visibility, there’s much more of a real-world awareness in the U.S. … So many have come over to work in the technology sector that it’s almost created a market just by them being here.”
For Indian-born Houston entrepreneur Saji Pillai, president and CEO of Bldg.Works-USA, a company that has provided custodial services to such clients as Coca-Cola and Sears, it all comes down to person-to-person contact. Unlike most immigrant groups, Indians have no language barrier.
“We’re seeing a tremendous integration of cultures,” he says. “In India, English is a nationally understood language – that advantage is already there.”
But there are still stumbling blocks to acceptance. After moving to Hollywood six years ago from London, actor Ravi Kapoor refused to work as an actor because he felt the parts given to Asian men – typecast as one-dimensional comic nerds – were demeaning. “They tend to be the buffoonery kind of role,” says Kapoor. “And the females are exoticized as vivacious, lovely and untouchable.”
Two years into his stay, he landed a part as a regular on the acclaimed but short-lived medical drama Gideon’s Crossing, and now he’s part of the crime-busting medical-examiners team on NBC’s Crossing Jordan. But even with Jordan, he had to ask the producers to cool it with the nerdiness.
“[The character] was purely for comic effect. After we did the pilot, the producers were asked to be more progressive with the character,” he says.
Sunaina Maira, professor of Asian-American Studies at the University of California at Davis, maintains that while Americans are momentarily dazzled by “Indo-chic” and “Indo-kitsch,” many still don’t understand the people and make no distinction between South Asians and Middle Easterners.
“There’s been a mixed response after 9-11,” she says. “Hate crimes have not dropped to what it was before 9-11. There’s been a nativist backlash, and a lot of South Asians are feeling the brunt of that.”
She thinks the argument over outsourcing (U.S. companies using South Asia as a base for call centers) could fuel prejudice.
“There’s a lot of concern, and that troubles many South Asians. They see it as a double standard, that they were playing the game of global capitalism.”
D’Souza is aware of the fears but has not yet seen evidence of a backlash. “If there is a prejudice against South Asians, it will be similar to the Jews, it will be a persecution against success,” he says. “There’s a certain kind of antagonism that comes from success.”
Yet there’s also concern that one of the elements responsible for the South Asian success story – the parental emphasis on education in high-paying fields – will diminish with future generations. Says Tailor, the lawyer, “With a lot of my cousins and their families, their kids are doing different things. One wants to be a record producer. Twenty years ago, that would have been unheard of.”
“I’m a little worried that the Americanization will reduce the motivation of these groups,” says D’Souza of South Asians. “I wouldn’t be surprised if divorce rates, low now, will go up over time.”
And then there’s the fickleness of the American public, which may tire of Bollywood long before the last song is sung.
“There’s the purely Indo-American experience and the Bollywood thing,” says Kapoor. “[Bollywood] is a bit of a fad and will eventually disappear. The whole Indo-American experience and what that is can only grow. It’s a developing culture that’s here, and here to stay.”
South Asian rhythms