Indian Immigrants in the American West

As a scholar of the American West (a hat I don't wear very often on this site, but one in which I have a ton of training), I have always been fascinating by the stories of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Chinese immigrants in the most isolated parts of the region. How did they get there? How did they survive being able to communicate with no one? What stories they must have--except there were so few people they could tell them to.

I am similarly interested today in the story of Indian immigrants to the region. Wherever I go in the West, Indians are running hotels. How do they end up in eastern Oklahoma, central Wyoming, or western North Dakota? What is up with that? Why? Is there some Indian hotel mafia assigning people to these places? How did they get involved in hotel operating to begin with?

Yesterday, I was driving to Albuquerque, where I am spending the holiday. I had just crossed into New Mexico on I-40 and I was getting hungry. I was thinking that another bland Subway veggie sandwich was in the offing. But as I approached the exit for San Jon, New Mexico, I saw a bunch of signs promoting an Indian truck stop. Wondering what on earth this could be, I pulled over. The Indians had closed the gas station, but were running a convenience store/restaurant. Indian food in San Jon, NM!!! What? The entirety of the buildings at this exit are the truck stop and a road maintenance station. I don't think the town really exists anymore. Where these guys are living, I do not know. Tucumcari, an isolated place in its own right, is about 20 miles west. Maybe they live there and commute to this god forsaken place on the high plains everyday. But I was absolutely floored by this whole scenario. The food wasn't the best Indian I've ever had, but it was certainly good enough to wish that Indians did this across the country and that I wouldn't have to eat at Subway ever again.

Bye-Bye Tigers

India may be bringing up the issue of Chinese poaching of their dwindling tiger populations in bilateral talks this week, but does anyone think the Chinese are going to do anything about it? With traditional Chinese medicine using rare cat products such as tiger penis soup for fertility, with rising prosperity in China leading to a huge surge in demand for such dubious products, and with high-ranking members of the Chinese government major consumers of them, I think we are seeing the last wild tigers roam the Earth. I don't know much about captive breeding programs for tigers, but I hope they work because otherwise we are going to lose the great cats.

Indian Elections: A victory for secularism in a land of many gods

This first sentence from The Telegraph, a renowned publication from the eastern Indian city of Calcutta pretty much summed up my own reaction to the Indian election results:

“The idea of India — a vibrant, secular, plural, resurgent nation that can transcend its myriad differences and complexities to reaffirm an essential unity of purpose — received a resounding victory today as the world’s largest electorate shed the politics of extremes and delivered a decisive mandate to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance.”

This road to victory wasn’t always clear, however.

As Ananya Vajpeyi explains, over the past few years the world’s largest democracy has become increasingly undemocratic, one where minorities and marginal groups are struggling to survive, and where election campaigns are based on divisiveness along religious lines.

Many candidates from the conservative nationalist party, the BJP, which represents the Hindu and Sikh communities of India, have invoked hate speeches against Muslims in order to further their campaigns. One such contender, who went far enough to say that he would “cut the heads of Muslims;” was jailed for a month before charges against him were dropped.

Of course, this is not entirely new to Indian electoral campaigns. Politics of identity, regionalism and religiosity is but natural in a land where so many different creeds populate what would be the American equivalent of a block in a cosmopolitan city. However, despite the depth of diversity that exists in the subcontinent, India’s national campaigns have been relatively secular in the past, even if not at the communal or individual level, certainly at the political party level.

One of the laudable things about Indian elections – and this was true up until the late nineties – is that campaigns were rarely exclusionist in terms of certain groups of the population, castes or religions, perhaps owing to the myriad number of small – but by no means insignificant – political parties that exist in the country’s political landscape. But in the aftermath of the religious animosity engendered by the Gujarat riots of 2002, the Mumbai blasts, and more recently against Christian groups in the southeastern state of Orissa, this has changed.

People from minority religions have been marginalized, in some states being forced to flee to other regions, and Hinduism, which has historically been celebrated for being exceedingly tolerant of other religions, has been used for political reasons by the BJP, whose acronym literally translates to “party of the people,” but which really is the Hindu nationalist party. In some regions of the country the recent terror attacks and increasing resentment toward Muslims have led to the popularity of pro-Hindu political leaders.

Robert Kaplan raises this very point in last month’s issue of The Atlantic, characterizing Narendra Modi, head of the western Indian state of Gujarat as the possible “new face” of India. Celebrated for his ruthless efficiency and his incorruptible personality (a rarity in a country where every other government official has at the very least a bribery charge against him), Modi’s lesser-touted characteristic is his intense hatred of Muslims. Modi is said to have perpetrated the infamous riots of 2002, where more than a thousand people were killed.

In the midst of religious and political unrest in neighboring Afghanistan and Pakistan, political stability and religious tolerance in India becomes that much more important.

As Kaplan eloquently articulates,

“...as the influence of an economically burgeoning India now seeps both westward and eastward, to the Iranian plateau and to the Gulf of Thailand (the borders of viceregal India and its shadow zones a hundred years ago), it can grow only as a force of communal coexistence, a force that rests on India’s strengths as the world’s largest democracy. India, in other words, despite its flashy economic growth, will be nothing but another gravely troubled developing nation if it can’t maintain a minimum of domestic harmony.”

The route to that domestic harmony – at least for now, is the re-election of the pan-Indian, less marginal, more moderate, exceedingly progressive Congress party with Manmohan Singh at its helm. This mandate did not just signal a victory for religious tolerance in India, but was also a referendum on an increasing desire for social equality in a country where slums continue to grow along the feet of towering skyscrapers.

Singh, who is credited with the liberalization of the Indian economy in his role as Finance Minister in the early nineties, and the country’s resultant economic boom, was criticized by aspiring, free-market advocates just a couple years ago for appealing to business leaders to exercise restraint, regulate executive pay, and allow more demographic representation among employees.

A graduate of Cambridge and Oxford, Singh has no doubt been a free-market advocate for much of his life. But as Prime Minister, owing to an alliance with the socialist-leaning Leftist party, but more importantly - pragmatism in a land that houses 456 million people below the global poverty line - he has displayed a strong commitment toward the social and public sectors and insisted on providing economic security, health benefits, and greater representation to the underprivileged.

The task is certainly cut out for Singh and his party if they plan to deliver on their promise of balancing economic growth with social equality, but getting elected is a step in the right direction.

Global adoption at a tragic price

Here's a very compelling, and heart-wrenching piece in Mother Jones about a kidnapping racket that is delivering Indian children to unsuspecting couples in western countries. Many of these children are from poor families in Indian slums, and while their lives are not perfect, their loving parents are very much alive – and desperately searching for them, in many cases giving up securities and assets just to be able to afford it.

The particular couple that Scott Carney details in his piece has tried for several years, in vain, to find their missing son. Little did they know that Subash was ten thousand miles and two oceans away in the American Midwest. For almost a decade, an Indian orphanage had been paying a couple hundred dollars per child to willing kidnappers, and shipping off children to unwitting couples located anywhere from the US to Australia.

The bureaucracy surrounding global adoption laws, and the incompetence of the Indian legal system ensured an ideal cover for this deplorable kidnapping conspiracy. This sort of child trafficking is not limited to India, of course.

Put together the amount of money involved, too many middlemen and little oversight, and you end up with child trafficking in developing countries. It’s little surprise, then, that of the three hundred suspected adoption cases handled by the same orphanage, only three are being examined by India’s Central Bureau of Investigation; all of the cases are about a decade old.

Due to the number of years that have gone by, and the belief that life would probably be better for their children in western countries, the few Indian couples who have been fortunate enough to learn the whereabouts of their kids choose to not re-claim them but merely ask permission to communicate.

When Carney approached Subash’s adoptive parents with the details of the investigation, adequately aided by police reports and photographs, they remained skeptical and unwilling to correspond with the Indian family. So, this case literally hangs on a standoff between the American and Indian parents, orchestrated by a journalist. There is something terribly wrong with this picture.

An Interpol request has finally reached the attorney general, and there’s hope that the FBI will make a request for DNA samples to confirm the boy’s identity. However, assuming that the adoptive family would probably go to court, Carney reasons that the case could be stalled for years till the boy turns 18.

The western agencies that arrange these adoptions aren’t totally guileless in this process. Many don’t bother to gather sufficient information about the source of the children or the authenticity of the organizations delivering them. And from the recent case involving the American agency, Focus on Children, we know some have their very own child-snatching schemes.

Inexplicably, the Hague Convention on international adoption does not set any standards on how to deal with kidnapped children.

Carney zeroes in on a point made by the lead Indian investigator in this case, “If you didn't have to pay for a child, then this would all disappear.” Many have suggested that capping adoption fees paid by western countries could alleviate issues of child trafficking for this purpose.

The money is the huge incentive, no doubt. Orphanages in India, and in other popular adoption destinations are charging huge sums of money for these stolen kids. And understandably, unwitting - or witting - western agencies and parents would comply, as long as they deliver them a child with little complication.

My own take on the Slumdog win (and backlash)!

Slumdog Millionaire was the best movie I saw all year until I got to The Wrestler, which was far better (and Mickey Rourke was robbed, but that's another post).

Anyway, I've read lots of criticisms of the film, and a lot of the backlash seems to me to miss some of the point. I certainly find it problematic that it's a movie written and directed by white men telling an Indian story, but more than that, I disagree with a lot of the critiques.

M. Leblanc at Bitch, Ph.D. had a good post up about it yesterday.

On the one hand, the film is so clearly a fantasy story, that I don't know that it's trying to convey a "message," about social justice or anything else. It's unrealistic. It does not attempt authenticity. It employs flashbacks and shifts in time to create a wonderland-effect which is at odds with the gritty realism of some of the images (not, mind you, the cinematography, which is very polished and cinematic). I think people make the mistake of assuming it's trying to present something "real" because movies don't usually feature or address poverty, especially third-world poverty, unless they're trying to convey something "real" and convey a "message."

I totally agree. She also references Samhita's post at Feministing.

I guess I have more questions than I have answers. And the questions I ask were certainly not the ones considered by the Academy in choosing this film. To be clear, I loved this movie and I saw it twice. The second time I brought my family, and my father a staunch Indian nationalist, hated it. He didn't like the way it portrayed India. I do not hold the same politics as my father and I felt that it actually held more truth about poverty and corruption in India than we would like to admit. But once you sift through the amazing imagery, adorable kids and soundtrack you are left with a coming of age story, only the story is not really for Indian audiences.

But the question that occurred to me when reading all of this was:

Is it colonialist of us to expect Slumdog Millionaire to be a social commentary because it's set in a slum?

I watched it and wrote a review of it in which I pretty much gushed all over it. I haven't watched it again, and I'm fully aware that I'm watching it through white American eyes.

Although I did take a certain message from the film, I don't think it was the one that people expected. I read it as a parable about how random success is. Jamal is not a “Christ-figure” as much as he is the Holy Fool, someone who screws up again and again and haplessly stumbles through the world by being good. It's still a Western character archetype placed in India, which is probably colonialist in itself. And Leblanc and Samhita point out the problems with the Latika character so I'm not going to here.

But the story is NOT a 'pulling-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps' fable. In fact, the character who does pull himself up, Salim, pulls himself up by falling into crime. Jamal, on the other hand, stumbles into things and manages to get rich. Perhaps it shows my own bias, but I read this as a comment on the nature of modern capitalist society, that those who are on top often did not get there through their own work or the fairy tale of pulling oneself up by those damned bootstraps.

Also, the story was told through Jamal's eyes and so is tinged with his own views. The riot from which Jamal, Salim and Latika flee as children? It isn't presented with context because that's how it would look to the kids running away. They weren't running for their lives thinking, “Gee, the Hindus are really taking out this geopolitical strife on us!” They just ran.

And so I come to the question that I always run smack into: does everything have to be social commentary? Does one film set in India have to portray the whole of Indian experience, because it's the rare Western film set in India, or should we instead be arguing that we should see more films set in India (insert other commonly Othered country here)?

Sylvia critiqued it as well, here, and I can see her point, as I can see many of these points. I just don't know if I agree.

This, however, does indeed bother me. Even though stories came out later that noted it wasn't as bad as that story made it sound.

Another Reason to Bag on Slumdog

I am enjoying the backlash against the wildly overrated Slumdog Millionaire. This is a really good (if overly political reason) to feel even better about it.

Despite all the money the movie has made, the small children in it are still living in abject poverty.

Both children were found places in a local school and receive £20 a month for books and food. However, they continue to live in grinding poverty and their families say they have received no details of the trust funds set up in their names. Their parents said that they had hoped the film would be their ticket out of the slums, and that its success had made them realise how little their children had been paid.

Ismail is in fact “worse off” now, as his “family’s illegal hut was demolished by the local authorities and he now sleeps under a sheet of plastic tarpaulin.” Ali lives nearby — in a “hut.” A Fox Searchlight spokesperson said he is “proud” of their treatment and boasted, “For 30 days work, the children were paid three times the average local annual adult salary.”

Classy.

Historical Image of the Day

Indian Prime Minister Jawharlal Nehru and Dwight Eisenhower, 1956.

Drill, Baby, Drill

Evidently, many people believe that we can drill our way out of all of our problems.

And if the resources aren't here? Well, we'll drill the rest of the universe.

Starting with the moon according to Julia Levitt.

She writes:

The New York Times reported last week that on October 22, India launched its first unmanned spacecraft to orbit the moon.

The craft is expected to remain in space for two years. During that time, it will do something undeniably cool:

prepare a 3-D atlas of the moon.

The other part of its mission, however, is something I find pretty unsettling:

and prospect the lunar surface for natural resources, including uranium, a coveted fuel for nuclear power plants, according to the Indian Space Research Organization.

Um, this is a really stupid idea. Not only is it logistically insane and prohibitively costly, but it is yet another example in humans' belief that there is always more where that came from and that technology will solve our problems.

But there's not more of a lot of things. And if we are seriously looking to find our resources from the moon, we are in very big trouble.

Rats and Natural Disasters in India

In my study of natural disasters, I've rarely come across something as odd (and personally disturbing) as this.

The provinces of India near Myanmar are suffering through a huge explosion in the rat population. Every 48 years or so a particular kind of bamboo goes crazy with its flowering. It deposits tons of seeds that rats love. Their populations go through the roof. Then, with no more bamboo seeds to eat, they invade farmers' fields. This has led to severe famines in 1862, 1911, and 1958-59. The article does not much explore the possible human impact in making these famines worse, though if Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts is any guide, the colonial famines were due as much to colonial neglect as the rats. It does however note that the 1959 famine was laughed off by the Indian government and led to a local guerrilla movement, which is certainly interesting.

We can therefore expect a likely famine this summer in India. Hopefully disaster relief can be prepared ahead of time.

In any case, tonight I will have nightmares of hordes of rats running over me. Great.

Best. Conference. Ever.

If there was one conference to attend this year, it's definitely the World Toilet Summit, currently going on in New Dehli, India.

Next year I have to remember to submit my paper on three-seat latrines on the frontier on time.

Asia on the Moon

Why in the world is there a sudden space race in Asia? China and Japan have been talking about putting men on the moon. Now India is getting involved.

Why?

What utter pointlessness. I'm completely opposed to the US placing a base on the moon. Is space travel really a good use of resources? Or does it just feed the egos of a nation's planners and politicians? Even if there were valuable resources on the moon, the cost of getting them back to Earth would be astronomical. Is this just a new and very weird form of national expansion? Really, what we are looking at here are nations that are unwilling to admit that we need to shepherd the resources we have on this planet.

Most of all, shouldn't China and India especially be using those billions of dollars to lift their people out of poverty?

Asian Rivers

I have stated more than once before that the Asian environmental crisis will undermine the rise of Asian nations to world power. Alan Boyd's Asia Times story on the horrid conditions of Asian rivers only makes me feel stronger about this. Dams, human population growth, and especially massive unregulated industrial pollution are placing these rivers in extreme danger. The Yangtze is the worst but the Ganges, Mekong, Indus, and most other major Asian rivers also face incredible challenges. Multiple species have already gone extinct and thousands of others, from large water mammals to plants, are in serious trouble.

As Tom Le Quense from the World Wildlife Federation says, "We're talking about a complete collapse of the system - they're so polluted, so over-extracted or so cut up by dams that it's really not functioning as a river anymore. It's a challenge that humanity faces not far off the scale of climate change." I could not agree more. Moreover, I simply do not see how China and India can grow very much more and not face the complete collapse of their environmental base.

Without functioning water systems, human civilization cannot survive. That sounds apocalyptic, but it is also true. China, India, and to a lesser extent nations like Vietnam, Burma, and Laos, are reaching a point where they have to decide whether they want to survive.