A few years ago, Joel Stein wrote a witty and perfectly appropriate column titled "My Own Private India" in Time magazine about a town called Edison in New Jersey. Stein was thoroughly excoriated as racist and anti-Indian by people purporting to represent the Indian community in the US. Time chipped in with an apology of its own but, apparently not convinced about the extent of the anger, said, “We sincerely regret that any of our readers were upset by this humor column of Joel Stein’s.”
Now Edison has another reason to be deemed notorious. It is home to the only ethnic group that played host to Donald Trump. On October 15, over 5,000 people, including the elderly and children, attended the nearly five-hour event organised by the Republican Hindu Coalition, founded and chaired by Shalabh Kumar, chairman and chief executive officer of the AVG Group of Companies and an Indian-American. Dressed in Indian finery, they carried placards that read “Trump Make America Great Again”, “Trump for Hindu Americans”, “Trump Great For India” and “Trump for Faster Green Cards”. They broke into applause as the presidential candidate came on stage against the backdrop of the American flag.
Clearly, the only thing that endears Trump to this crowd is that he has come out vocally against all Muslims. And they seemed to have imbibed Kautilya somewhat. Kautilya, in Arthasastra, Book VI, The Source of Sovereign States, wrote, “The king who is situated anywhere immediately on the circumference of the conqueror’s territory is termed the enemy. The king who is likewise situated close to the enemy, but separated from the conqueror only by the enemy, is termed the friend (of the conqueror).”
Going by the desis of Edison, this is interpreted as “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”.
Little India
Now about Edison, that neighbour of Newark and a transportation hub with an extensive network of highways such as US Route 1, and which sits astride a five-mile length of the New Jersey Turnpike. Edison was incorporated as Raritan Township and became Edison in 1954, ostensibly hoping to piggyback on the name of the great inventor who had made it his home in 1876.
For many decades, Edison has been a magnet for Indian immigrants, particularly those from Gujarat. Today, about 20% of its estimated population of 99,000 is identified as Indian-American, most of them Gujarati. I have driven through Edison on a few occasions and it is not the kind of town I would want to live in. It is at once grungy and noisy, and seems to teem with Indians noisily looking for bargains or cheap desi food. My friend, with whom I drove through Edison, described it as the second armpit of America, the first being Hoboken, also in New Jersey.
Desi means homegrown and is used in a self-pejorative manner by almost all non-resident Indians when referring to a fellow Indian. At last count, there were over 2.5 million desis in the US. The US Census 2000 map showed that Indian-Americans (officially called Asian Indians) tend to concentrate themselves in certain areas. Whenever I visit the US, it never ceases to amaze me that my Indian-American friends and relatives seem to only socialise with other desis. They do tend to flock together.
The US has a fair number of Indian-American clusters. But it is Edison that has the highest concentration. Indian-Americans have the highest median incomes in the US and are generally white-collar professionals in most parts of the country. Edison’s Indian-American community, however, has a fair sprinkling of less well-off people doing jobs that probably fetch them less than the median Indian-American income. It shows easily.
One out of five desis in America is of Gujarati origin. Gujaratis are more entrepreneurial by nature and tend to be involved in business. The 400,000-strong Gujarati diaspora in the US consequently has a smaller proportion of professionals. They now own more than half the economy lodging properties in the country. Since a large proportion of Gujaratis in the US have the Patel surname, these hotels are popularly referred to within the Indian-American community as “potels” and quite often are places that rent out rooms by the hour. Edison is a perfect hotspot for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Rambhakts, who prefer the superior creature comforts on offer in comparison to Rajkot or Surat. This is Modi country.
Growing clout
Indians, in general, are racist, sectarian and colour-conscious, and our standards of political correctness are not very high. Our discourse is laced with racist and derogatory references to others. The desi community in America is not very different.
Mira Nair’s 1991 movie Mississippi Masala, set in steaming Biloxi, captures in full the prejudices and inward-looking mores prevalent back home carrying on as before among an expatriate Indian-American community. The story is a romance between a girl of Ugandan-Gujarati origin and a handsome African-American man played by Denzel Washington. Expectedly, the family and friends, mostly in the potel business, vigorously oppose the romance.
As the wealthiest median income community in the US, Indian-Americans are now big players in the country’s politics with political action committees there active in serving the many Indian causes, be it the civil nuclear deal or increasing the number of work visas. The community’s economic clout is also felt in many ways. It is good that they have begun to flex their muscles a bit. But it is not good that some are showing themselves to be numbskulls.