The Triple Package (35 page)

“The American ideal”
:
Neema Vedadi, “And Iran, Iran’s So Far Away,” in Wilcox-Ghanoonparvar,
Hyphenated Identities
, pp. 24–5.

95 percent of second-generation adolescent Iranian Americans
:
Daha, “Contextual Factors,” pp. 550, 554–8.

taught that Persian culture is older, richer
:
Shavarini,
Educating Immigrants
, p. 113.

“confused as to exactly what constitutes”
:
Ibid., pp. 112–3; see also Ali Akbar Mahdi, “Ethnic Identity among Second-Generation Iranians in the United States,”
Iranian Studies
31, no. 1 (Winter 1998), p. 91 (quoting a young Iranian American respondent in a study), (“I really do not know who an Iranian is. To me Iranian probably means
contradiction
”).

“All Iranians are successful”
:
Daha, “Contextual Factors,” p. 560.

“If you don’t get an A”
:
Ibid., p. 561; see also Mahdi, “Ethnic Identity Among Second-Generation Iranians in the United States,” p. 88 (quoting a respondent in a study of 48 Iranian-American youths as saying “My parents expect too much. They want me to be exceptional”).

“that extra effort to have the bigger house”
:
Daha, “Contextual Factors,” p. 561; see also Bozorgmehr and Douglas, “Success(ion): Second-Generation Iranian Americans,” p. 5 (second-generation Iranians internalize their parents’ values and become “very motivated to excel in school and to choose professional occupations which will garner them respect”).

“We have to prove it”
:
Shavarini,
Educating Immigrants,
p. 6.

bewildering array of caste, regional, ethnic
:
See Kanti Bajpai, “Diversity, Democracy, and Devolution in India,” in Michael E. Brown and Šumit Ganguly, eds.,
Government Policies and Ethnic Relations in Asia and the Pacific
(Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 34–8; see also Donald L. Horowitz,
Ethnic Groups in Conflict
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1985), p. 37; Nicholas B. Dirks,
Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 5–6.

great majority of Indian immigrants in America
:
See Eric Mark Kramer, “Introduction: Assimilation and the Model Minority Ideology,” in Eric Mark Kramer, ed.,
The Emerging Monoculture: Assimilation and the “Model Minority”
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), pp. xi, xxi (“Most Indians in the United States are upper-class, upper-caste Indians”); see also Gita Rajan and Shailja Sharma, eds.,
New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the U.S.
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 13; Vijay Prasad,
Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today
(New York: The New Press, 2012), pp. 10–1.

A few immigrants from East India
:
Ramaswami Mahalingam, Cheri Philip, and Sundari Balan, “Cultural Psychology and Marginality: An Explorative Study of Indian Diaspora,” in Ramaswami Mahalingam, ed.,
Cultural Psychology of Immigrants
(Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 2006), pp. 151, 152.

first significant Indian community
 . . . was made up of Punjabi Sikhs:
Madhulika S. Khandelwal,
Becoming American, Being Indian: An Immigrant Community in New York City
(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 9–10.

initial wave of post-1965 Indian immigrants
:
Ibid.,
p. 6; Bandana Purkayastha,
Negotiating Ethnicity: Second Generation South Asian Americans Traverse a Transnational World
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), pp. 15–6.

as of 1975, 93 percent
:
Aparna Rayaprol,
Negotiating Identities: Women in the Indian Diaspora
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 15.

Since 1990
:
Khandelwal,
Becoming American, Being Indian,
p. 6; Sunaina Marr Maira,
Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), p. 10 (“in 1989, 85 percent of Indian immigrants entered under family reunification categories, while only 1 pecent came with occupation-based visas [down from 18 percent in 1969]”).

astonishing 87 percent of adults
:
Pew Research Center,
The Rise of Asian Americans
(Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, April 4, 2013) (updated edition), p. 44.

“ethnic anxiety”
:
Maira,
Desis in the House
, p. 75; see also Purkayastha,
Negotiating Ethnicity
, p. 93.

the most successful Census-tracked ethnic group
:
U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Table S0201: Selected Population Profile in the United States (2010 3-year dataset) (population group code 013 – Asian Indian) (estimating median Indian household income of $90,525 as compared to $51,222 for U.S. population overall).

widely agreed that most Indian Americans
:
See Kramer, “Introduction,” p. xxi; see also Mahalingam, Philip, and Balan, “Cultural Psychology and Marginality,” p. 155 (“most of the current wave of immigrants are from the upper castes”); Prema A. Kurien,
A Place at the Multicultural Table: The Development of an American Hinduism
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), p. 45 (“Given the elite nature of the migration, we can assume that most Indian Americans are from upper-caste backgrounds. Brahmins seem to be particularly overrepresented”); see also Peter F. Geithner, Paula D. Johnson, and Lincoln C. Chen, eds.
, Diaspora Philanthropy and Equitable Development in China and India
(Cambridge, MA: Global Equity Initiative, Asia Center, Harvard University, 2004), p. 350; Himanee Gupta, “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Semiotics of Caste Among Hindu Indians in the United States” (August 2001) (paper presented at 2001 APARRI Conference).

traditional Hindu “castes”
:
See Dirks,
Castes of Mind,
pp. 202–3, 221; Dietmar Rothermund,
India: The Rise of an Asian Giant
(New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 162; Rajendra K. Sharma,
Indian Society, Institutions, and Change
(New Delhi: Atlantic, 2004), p. 14.

For centuries, some say millennia
:
Although the caste system can be traced back thousands of years, some scholars emphasize that “[u]nder colonialism, caste was . . . made out to be far more—far more pervasive, far more totalizing, and far more uniform—than it had ever been before.” Dirks,
Castes of Mind
, p. 13; see also Sharma,
Indian Society, Institutions, and Change
, pp. 11–2, 14–5.

“required to place clay pots”
:
Narendra Jadhav,
Untouchables: My Family’s Triumphant Escape from India’s Caste System
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 1–4; see also Robert Deliège,
The Untouchables of India
, trans. Nora Scott
(Oxford, UK: Berg Publishers, 1999), pp. 1–3.

“master symbol of their inferiority”
:
David I. Kertzer,
Ritual, Politics & Power
(New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 112–3.

Nehru
 . . . Indira Gandhi:
John McLeod,
The History of India
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002), pp. 185–6.

Tagore
:
The caste status of the celebrated Tagore, sometimes called India’s Tolstoy, illustrates the arcane but potent role caste traditionally played in India. Although the Tagores were Brahman, they were so-called Pirali Brahman, “unmarriageable by orthodox Hindus” because (according at least to widely accepted lore) their ancestors had been “tainted by contact with Muslims” some time in the fifteenth century. In the early 1800s, a Brahman who merely ate a meal with a Pirali Brahman had to pay 50,000 rupees to regain caste. Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson,
Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man
(London: Bloomsbury, 1995), pp. 17–8.

Mohandas Gandhi
:
Rajmohan Gandhi,
Gandhi: The Man, His People, and the Empire
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), p. 2.

about a third of the population
:
Bajpai, “Diversity, Democracy, and Devolution in India,” p. 53; International Institute for Population Sciences,
India:
National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3), 2005-06
: (Mumbai, 2007), vol. 1, chap. 3, http://hetv.org/india/nfhs/nfhs3/NFHS-3-India-Full-Report-Volume-I.pdf; 61st National Sample Survey (conducted by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation).

“Just try and check how many brahmins”
:
“Arundhati Roy in Conversation with Venu Govindu,” October 29, 2000, Friends of River Narmada, http://www.narmada.org/articles/arinterview.html. See also Ramesh Bairy T. S.,
Being Brahmin, Being Modern: Exploring the Lives of Caste Today
(London, New York, and New Delhi: Routledge, 2010), pp. 85–6 (in the state of Karnataka, Brahmans, although just 4.28 percent of the total population, “continue to be disproportionately represented in the bureaucracy, spaces of higher education, judiciary,” medicine, and engineering).

the Indian Constitution
:
Constitution of India (1949), art. 15, 17.

deeply ingrained source of superiority
:
Bairy,
Being Brahmin,
pp. 87, 280–1; Jadhav,
Untouchables
, p. 3; Louis Dumont,
Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 79–80.

Bengalis pride themselves
:
Mark Magnier, “In India, Bengalis Seek to Recapture Their Glory as Intellectuals,”
Los Angeles Times
, Sept. 8, 2012.

Bengali Brahman families
:
“Amartya Sen,” Indians Abroad, indobase.com, http://www.indobase.com/indians-abroad/amartya-sen.html; Reshmi R. Dasgupta, “I Had No Idea a Pulitzer Was So Prestigious, Says Pulitzer Prize Winner Siddhartha Mukerjee’s Father,”
The Economic Times
(India), Apr. 22, 2011; see also Maxine P. Fisher,
The Indians of New York City: A Study of Immigrants from India
(Columbia, MO: South Asia Books, 1980), p. 49 (noting that Bengali names ending with “ji” as in “Mukerji” or “Banerji” are “those of Brahmins”).

Gujaratis
:
Pawan Dhingra,
Life Behind the Lobby: Indian American Motel Owners and the American Dream
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), pp. 4–5, 14; Marjorie Howard, “A Motel of One’s Own,”
Tufts Now
, Nov. 27, 2012; Nimish Shukla, “16 Gujaratis in Forbes List,”
The Times of India
, Mar. 8, 2008.

two of the top three
:
“Bhai is king: Gujaratis are ruling Forbes 40 richest Indians list,” Nov. 14, 2008, DeshGujarat.com, http://deshgujarat.com/2008/11/14/bhai-is-king-gujaratis-are-ruling-forbes-40-richest-indians-list.

who number about 200,000
:
Pew Research Center, “How Many U.S. Sikhs?,” Aug. 6, 2012, http://www.pewresearch.org/2012/08/06/ask-the-expert-how-many-us-sikhs/.

Sikhs
 . . . have their own superiority:
Ved Mehta,
Rajiv Ghandi and Rama’s Kingdom
(New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 65; see Dawinder S. Sidhu and Neha Singh Gohil,
Civil Rights in Wartime: The Post 9/11 Sikh Experience
(Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), p. 51 (quoting Prabhjot Singh) (describing the Sikh turban as “a manifestation of the mission given to all Sikhs—to act as a divine prince or princess by standing firm against tyranny and protecting the downtrodden”); D. H. Butani,
The Third Sikh War? Towards or Away from Khalistan?
(New Delhi: Promilla & Co., 1986), p. 26.

competing north/south snobberies
:
See Fisher,
The Indians of New York City
, pp. 29–34; Rayaprol,
Negotiating Identities
, p. 75; Chetan Bhagat,
2 States: The Story of My Marriage
(New Delhi: Rupa & Co, 2009), pp. 13–4, 51; Steve Sailer, “Why Are South Indians So Smart?,” Mar. 23, 2002, http://isteve.blogspot.com/2002/03/why-are-south-indians-so-smart.html. On the colonial origins of the north/south divide, see Dirks,
Castes of Mind
, pp. 140–3.

Indian Institutes of Technology
:
See Anita Raghavan,
The Billionaire’s Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund
(New York and Boston: Business Plus, 2013), pp. 40–1; Thomas L. Friedman,
The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century
(New York: Picador, 2007), p. 127; Matthew Schneeberger, “Why IIT grads abroad are returning to India,” Rediff India Abroad, May 15, 2008, http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/may/15iit.htm (reporting that 35 percent of IIT graduates emigrated to America between 1965 and 2002, and 16 percent thereafter).

anti-Brahman movements
:
Bairy,
Being Brahmin,
p. 124; see also Rothermund,
India
, p. 164 (noting that long before the twentieth century “Buddhism and Jainism were social and religious movements founded on the quest for individual salavation” that “challenged [the] order based on caste and endogamy”).

British colonial rule
:
See, e.g., Chua,
Day of Empire
, pp. 224–28; Niall Ferguson,
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World
(London: Allen Lane, 2003), pp. 146–54, 210–15, 325–8.