Archive: Why Can't Indian Americans Be More Indian? — A Guest Column

From the TI archives — a guest opinion column by François Gautier, editor of the Paris-based La Revue de l'Inde, originally published November 2014. Opinions are the author's; statistics cited are his, and some are contested.

It's lunchtime at the home of India's Consul General in New York, Dnyaneshwar M. Mulay. A young Hindu American arrives — Suchitra Vijayan, then teaching part time at Columbia, planning to start a course on South Asian human rights and to travel to India to interview Kashmiri Muslims and Christian Nagas. Her consular mentor smiles proudly…

Welcome to America, home of millions of Indians — some of whom, the author argues, make a living bashing India in American universities and publications.

Gautier's complaint: Indians who emigrate mostly merge into the American way of life, and their children rarely come back. The culprit, he says, is an Indian education system that mass-produces brilliant export-ready graduates who are taught nothing to be proud of — who know Shakespeare and the latest Dan Brown but not Kalidasa, Shivaji Maharaj, or Sri Aurobindo.

The brain drain is real, even if his figures (80% of Silicon Valley engineers, 60% of the American medical system) are the author's rhetorical flourishes rather than documented statistics. Indian Americans are disproportionately represented in tech and medicine, but not at those levels.

He contrasts them with Chinese Americans, who, he argues, unabashedly retain their identity and repatriate funds to China. And he notes the irony: Hollywood does yoga, American companies teach meditation, the West rediscovers pranayama and Ayurveda — while India itself, and its diaspora, treat these traditions as ornaments rather than practices.

The column's prescriptions — that Indian Americans practicing yoga, pranayama, meditation, and Ayurveda would "shine" and make India proud — are cultural polemic, not policy. But the underlying question it raised in 2014 still circulates today: what do diasporas owe the cultures they left, and what does total assimilation cost them?

— François Gautier, guest columnist