Indian Americans of Massachusetts

By Meenal Atul Pandya

Indians are the most recent immigrants in Massachusetts. Though a tiny minority, their contributions are numerous and far-reaching. Swami Vivekananda arrived in Boston in 1893 and left a lasting legacy of Hindu philosophy. Sushil Tuli opened a unique community bank, Leader Bank, as the first and only minority-owned bank in the state of Massachusetts. The Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT, created with the grant of $20 million by Desh and Jaishree Deshpande, empowers MIT's researchers to make a difference in the world by developing innovative technologies. Author Meenal Atul Pandya details the influence of Indians on Massachusetts history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jul 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781439664483

Meenal Atul Pandya

Meenal Pandya has been writing about India and its culture for more than two decades, observing the lifestyle and issues that face the Indian diaspora. She has written five books, including The Indian Parenting Book, Vivah and Pick a Pretty Indian Name for Your Baby. She has published dozens of articles in magazines such as India Today and World International touching on issues about the Indian community in the United States. She received an MBA from Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, and worked as Assistant Vice-President of Multibank International. Currently she works as a financial communications consultant. She has been living with her husband for more than thirty years in Massachusetts, where they raised two daughters.

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INTRODUCTION

There was a time when Columbus left Europe in search of a path to India and, instead, found the Americas. Today, Indians in large numbers are finding America and making it their home. There was a time when Indians were barred from entering the United States. Today, Indians are flourishing in many fields in America. There was a time when Indians who ventured to America knew very little about the country. Today, Indians who come to America have a very good idea of what to expect and how to achieve their dreams. Times have changed.

This is the story of how Indian immigrants created a community from almost nothing in Massachusetts and transformed it into the vibrant and well-integrated community it is today. Their struggles and their answers to those struggles, their needs and their skill sets, their initiatives to preserve their art and culture and their impact on the larger community are illustrated in these pages. It is also a story of how, within a short period of five decades, millions of lives—in America as well as in India—have been, and continue to be, impacted. It is a story of a huge number of people uprooting themselves from their centuries-old homes in cities and villages in India and creating roots in a new land of hope and opportunity. In some ways, it is a prototypical immigration tale, yet in other ways it is a story that is unparalleled in the history of immigration. As the authors of The Other One Percent put it, There is no other immigrant group in America that has the same success rate as this ‘model minority’ and there is no group of Indians in India who can boast a similar success story.

In the last half century, America has changed profoundly, and so has India. Globalization and technology are the main drivers of these changes, but there are also many other factors—from geopolitics to shifting economic powers—that have made those changes possible. As we will see, these larger trends have affected the Indian community in the United States and especially in Massachusetts. They have provided the backdrop and determined the trajectory of Indian immigration.

Ironically, times are changing once again as I write this. America, and the rest of the world, is undergoing a cultural shift in thinking about immigrants in general and immigration policy in particular. How these new ideas will impact Indian immigration in coming years is beyond the scope of this book. But the story of Indian immigration to the United States will give the reader context for these current events—what immigration means for everyone involved and what it can be moving forward. Change is inevitable, but in order to be able to navigate change and determine the direction we need to take in the future, we need to have a good understanding of the past.

I am sure that this book, if written ten years from today or ten years earlier, would be a very different one. This book is a snapshot of the Indian community in Massachusetts as it looks today. My hope is that the experiences set out in these pages will help to showcase a contemporary cross-section of the community. Only time will tell what the future will bring.

PART I

HOW U.S. IMMIGRATION LAWS SHAPED AND PROPELLED THE INDIAN DIASPORA

CHAPTER 1

OVERVIEW

The first Indian to arrive in the United States is said to have been a man from Madras (now Chennai) who sailed to Salem, Massachusetts, in 1790, according to an entry in an eighteenth-century diary.¹ However, in 1917, one hundred years prior to the writing of this book, Indians from South Asia—along with many countries of Asia—were practically banned from entering the United States. Fast-forward one hundred years, and thanks to another immigration law, Indians now account for approximately 1 percent of the U.S. population, a number that is growing exponentially. Though impressive, numbers are just one part of the story. In the five decades since Indian immigration began in earnest with the passing of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, Indians have ascended to the top of many fields. Today, Indian Americans are heads of multiple Fortune 500 companies such as PepsiCo, Microsoft and Google; own over 50 percent of the hotels and motels in the United States; occupy high positions in the U.S. government, including the former surgeon general and a former U.S. attorney; teach at the most prestigious American universities; and continue to make a large impact in the fields of medicine, technology, science, finance, entertainment and many other fields. When the Immigration Act of 1965 was passed, it was unforeseeable that the journey of these immigrants would shape not only the futures of the individuals themselves but the trajectories of the world’s two largest democracies as well.

For both countries, India and America, immigration is a very familiar phenomenon. America is famously a nation of immigrants, with each new group adding to the rich multiethnic fiber of the nation. India has been on both sides of the immigration story. Over the centuries, India has hosted many immigrants who have landed on its shores. On the other hand, Indians have a history of traveling and settling all over the globe, from Sri Lanka to Great Britain and from Malaysia to South Africa. Indians have made their homes in many faraway places and in almost every corner of the world. This book is a slice of America’s history—of immigrants from India in Massachusetts—that has and will continue to impact many generations to come.

THE WHAT AND WHY OF IMMIGRATION

Immigration never happens in a vacuum. It is driven either by a push or a pull factor. Many immigrants who have come in the past—and continue to come—to the United States due to political or religious pressures in their home countries are motivated by a push factor, in search of freedom from those pressures. Then there are immigrants who leave their home country not because they have to but because they are in search of a better life or better opportunities than what they can find in their home countries—drawn by a pull factor. In large part, Indian immigrants are driven by the pull factor. No matter what the reasons, these immigrants’ journeys are shaped by the values, skill sets, aspirations and characteristics that they bring with them. Along with their aptitudes, their motivations for immigrating collectively determine the experiences, struggles and achievements in their new home. As Oscar Handlin puts it in The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migration that Made the American People, when we understand what made a particular group of immigrants come to the United States, we understand their journey.²

As we will see throughout this book, Indians who immigrated to the United States, especially the early immigrants, came looking for better opportunities and to chase the American dream. They typically brought with them an emphasis on education, strong family values and a zeal to succeed. In fact, Indians who came on the heels of the Immigration Act of 1965 constituted the most educated group in the United States: 68 percent of all Indian-born immigrants had a college degree, compared to less than 20 percent of the full population, according to the authors of The Other One Percent.³ In addition, immigration laws in the United States have dictated the number and the type of immigrants for more than one hundred years. For Indians, immigration laws favored Indian immigrants with education in technical and medical fields. Each of these factors has helped shape their journey and their story.

EARLY IMMIGRATION LAWS

Immigration restrictions enacted a century ago virtually barred Indians from immigrating to the United States. The Immigration Act of 1917 (also known as the Literacy Act and, less often, as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act) was the most sweeping immigration act the United States government had passed up to that time. It was the first bill aimed at restricting (as opposed to regulating) immigrants and marked a turn toward nativism. The intention was specifically to ban Indian immigrants, albeit not by name but by drawing a box around the region and calling it the Asiatic Barred Zone. The zone was circumscribed by longitudinal and latitudinal lines, excluding immigrants from Afghanistan, the Arabian Peninsula, Central Asia, India, Malaysia, Myanmar and the Polynesian Islands. Neither Japan nor the Philippines was included in the banned zone. The law was passed on February 5, 1917, and restricted the immigration of undesirables from these countries, including idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, alcoholics, poor, criminals, beggars, any person suffering attacks of insanity, those paupers…persons afflicted with contagious disease…persons being mentally or physically defective… persons with constitutional psychopathic inferiority…political radicals… polygamists…prostitutes…[and] vagrants.⁴ This Literacy Act stayed in place for almost half a century, banning all but a small quota of only one hundred immigrants per year.

The restrictions imposed by the Literacy Act changed in 1965 with the stroke of a pen when a new bill was signed. The Immigration Act of 1965 allowed a special quota of Asians to enter the United States based on certain sets of skills and lifted the latent discriminating policy of earlier years. However, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed this act, it was not believed to be the act that would drastically change the demographics or the wealth of the nation. Only history would tell how wrong they were! Though at first it looked like they might be right because only a trickle of Indian immigrants ventured to the United States in the immediate wake of the act, the trickle soon became a stream and then turned into a torrent as the years passed.

The Indian immigration story can be understood segmented by the era, and sometimes even the decade, in which the Indian immigrants arrived. Each era attracted different types of Indian immigrants whose needs and contributions varied and who strengthened the community in different ways. A century ago, Indians came to America either as laborers or as spiritual leaders. Later, from the 1930s to 1960s, higher education became an attraction for a very small number of students, numbers that only increased after the Immigration Act of 1965 lifted the earlier quotas. According to the

U.S. census, as recently as 1990, the Indian population in Massachusetts was only 11,987. From 2000 to 2010, the population of Indians in Massachusetts grew 76 percent, and by the time of the 2010 census, there were 77,000 Indians in Massachusetts.⁵

MASSACHUSETTS AND INDIAN IMMIGRANTS

Relative to the rest of the United States, Massachusetts has attracted specific kinds of immigrant groups from India from the beginning due to the state’s density of higher-education and healthcare institutions. Even within Massachusetts, different regions and towns have attracted specific groups of Indians. For example, earlier immigrant groups who came to study naturally settled in university towns such as Boston, Cambridge, Shrewsbury and the surrounding neighborhoods. Similarly, healthcare professionals and academics have preferred to settle in the same university and medical centers and then shifted toward the MetroWest area as they completed their training and started families. Technology jobs in recent times have attracted an increasing number of Indians who have preferred to settle around the Route 128 (also known as Technology Highway) and Route 495 corridor. As such, different Indian communities with their own distinct flavors have developed in different pockets of Massachusetts, a trend that will likely continue as the numbers grow. Although these immigrants are still writing the history of Indians in Massachusetts, the state has a long history of Indian immigration that dates back two centuries—a history that is still visible in many parts of the state.

CHAPTER 2

HISTORY

MASSACHUSETTS TRADE WITH INDIA

"The city of Salem, MA, features neither a black-clad Puritan elder nor an American eagle but, instead, a robe-and-slippered Sumatran dignitary standing next to a row of palm trees. Below him the city motto: Divitis Indiae usque ad ultimum sinum (To the farthest port of the rich East)."⁶ This quote, from a picture of Salem featured in Smithsonian Magazine, describes the town’s history of trade with India and China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

From 1788 to 1845, the high-sea trade between Salem and ports in India offered opportunities to the businessmen in the wealthiest town of Massachusetts. At that time, newly independent America began competing with England to establish trade with the Far East. England already had a vibrant trade route with the ports of India, which was known as a land of plenty, with gems, silks and spices. The tradesmen from Salem were also eager to begin trading with many ports in India, including Bombay (Mumbai), Calcutta (Kolkata) and Madras (Chennai). As this highly prosperous trade grew, it benefited many towns and cities in the state of Massachusetts and helped Salem become a major commercial center. As author Vanita Shastri describes in her book The Salem-India Story, Due to this thriving trade between Salem and India from 1788 to 1845, Salem became one of the wealthiest cities in the United States. In fact, America’s first millionaire, a very successful businessman named Mr. Elias Hasket Derby, made his fortune as a result of his trades with the Far East and India as his main partner. Salem became a leader in all of the 13 colonies in terms of fleet size, number of prize vessels, cargoes and profits playing a major role in the trade with [the] East.⁷

A list of items from Calcutta that were for sale in Boston