The Triple Package (11 page)

Twenty years later, anti-Iranian hostility surged again in the United States when terrorists brought down the twin towers. One young Iranian American woman working in New York remembers thinking, “
God, please don’t let them be Muslim or Iranian or Arab.” After 9/11, Iranian identity “became a
stigma to be hidden,” causing feelings of “insecurity and even feelings of self-hatred and shame among second-generation Iranian-Americans.” For the last decade, Iranian Americans have had to deal with being lumped together with Arab terrorists and
branded part of the “axis of evil.”
Some Iranian parents tell their children not to volunteer their Iranian ancestry; in a hilarious,
self-parodying Internet video, confident Iranians refuse to identify themselves as Iranian, claiming instead to be Italian. In the words of Iranian sociologist Mohsen Mobasher, who came to the United States in 1978, Iranian Americans feel like outcasts both from their home country and in their host country, where they have been “
stigmatized and humiliated.”

Young Iranians in the United States rankle painfully under this scorn and suspicion, as a recent
survey of second-generation Iranian Americans in Northern California confirmed. “When I say ‘I’m Iranian,’ they say, ‘You are [an] Iraqi?
’”
complained one eighteen-year-old. Others reported being called “Middle Easterners” and “hairy terrorist.” Negative portrayals of Iranians in the media are especially grating. Persians are “the kindest people,” said one fifteen-year-old girl, “but [the media] depicts us as vicious animals and we are not. They put Iran down so much in the news.”

All this has led Iranians in the United States to feel an
intense need to distinguish themselves, to acquire visible badges of accomplishment and respect. Study after study portrays the Iranian American
community as extraordinarily
status-conscious, valuing markers of prestige more even than income. “In Southern California,” one Iranian American reported, “
every Mercedes you see belongs to an Iranian person. They can live in a little shack yet go out and buy themselves a Mercedes and drive around.” This status-consciousness is what television shows like
Shahs of Sunset
exploit, while paying much less attention to the hard work and drive that has allowed Iranian Americans to succeed. Iranian Americans often explicitly describe their motivation to succeed—and their parents’ determination for them to succeed—in terms of a need for prestige and respect. As one college student put it:

The American ideal is to study what you want. . . . [T]he Iranian way is to pick something that is guaranteed to make money or guaranteed to be prestigious[;] study is done as a means to an end, not as an end unto itself. The Iranian parent or parents pick a few professions that their peers’ children have done well at. . . . Tara’s father wanted . . . her to be a dentist. My father wanted me to become a doctor, a pharmacist or at least a nurse.

America has intensified Iranians’ attraction to a Persian identity, which among Iranian Americans today not only separates them from Arabs but also from the Islamic Republic of Iran. In one study,
95 percent of second-generation adolescent Iranian Americans said that Persian culture was “a central element in their sense of self.” Over 80 percent called themselves “Persian,” while only 2 percent said “Iranian.” Over half had taken Farsi language classes; many speak Farsi with their parents. Almost invariably, they were
taught that Persian culture is older, richer, and deeper than American culture. Second-generation Iranians may be “
confused as to exactly what constitutes”
Persian culture, but they are “certainly sure” that it was “far superior” to American culture.

They are also sure that succeeding is a requirement for Persian Americans. “
All Iranians are successful,” said one boy. Academic achievement is taken for granted. “
If you don’t get an A,” your parents “get upset with you.” This drive to succeed—a classic Triple Package mixture of confidence in their abilities and a need to prove themselves in the United States—is widespread and well internalized. There is “no problem,” said an eighteen-year-old, putting in “
that extra effort to have the bigger house, it is like a form of sacrifice. Do the sacrifice and be ok with it and become successful. [That is how] I look at it.” Or in the words of a college sophomore, “
We have to prove it . . . we have to carry the torch and show Americans that we are not terrorists.”

—

D
ESPITE THE RICHNESS
and antiquity of their civilization, Indians in the United States, as in India itself, don’t focus so much on magnificent-history narratives, at least by comparison to Persians or Chinese. Instead, Indian superiority complexes tend to be rooted in the highly stratified nature of Indian society, with its
bewildering array of caste, regional, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and other distinctions. The
great majority of Indian immigrants in America come from the upper echelons of India’s social hierarchy.
*
In the
United States, however, they suddenly find themselves outsiders, not fully accepted, often the objects of discrimination. As a result, Indian American sociologists have written about an “
ethnic anxiety” widespread in their community, and this anxiety helps explain the extraordinary drive that has made them, by any number of measures,
the most successful Census-tracked ethnic group in the country.

Although hard numbers are impossible to find, it’s
widely agreed that most Indian Americans, apart from Sikhs and Muslims, hail from the three highest
traditional Hindu “castes” (or
varna
): Brahmans (priests, scholars), Kshatriyas (warriors, royalty), or Vaishyas (merchants).
For centuries, some say millennia (everything about caste is controversial, from its origins to its basic nature), caste was all-important in India. Those at the bottom, the out-caste or “untouchables,” were barely considered human beings. Fit only for such unclean occupations as removing sewage, cleaning latrines, handling animal carcasses, and disposing of corpses, they were forbidden to touch members of the upper castes; they could even be “
required to place clay pots around their necks to prevent their spit from polluting the ground.” One step up were groups such as the low-caste Nadars, who could not wear shoes or use umbrellas in the rain; the “
master symbol of their inferiority” was the requirement that their women bare their breasts in public.

For obvious reasons, virtually all of modern India’s most famous names have been high-caste. Jawaharlal
Nehru, Rabindranath
Tagore, and (Nehru’s daughter) Indira Gandhi were Brahman;
Mohandas Gandhi was born into the Vaishya caste. Even today, the high-caste,
who represent
about a third of the population, still dominate Indian society. “
Just try and check how many brahmins there are as Supreme Court judges,” commented novelist Arundhati Roy in 2000, “how many brahmins there are who run political parties.” Although
the Indian Constitution has formally abolished untouchability and prohibits caste-based discrimination, high-caste status remains in India a
deeply ingrained source of superiority.

But what Westerners know as “caste” only scratches the surface of Indian social stratification. Many Indian subgroups have deep-seated, often cross-cutting superiority claims.
Bengalis pride themselves on being India’s intellectuals. (Luminaries Amartya Sen and Siddhartha Mukherjee are both from
Bengali Brahman families.)
Gujaratis, perhaps the largest Indian group in America, are famous not only in India but all over the world as businessmen; in 2008, a Gujarati website noted triumphantly that
two of the top three, and four of the top ten Indian billionaires were Gujaratis.
Sikhs,
who number about 200,000 in the United States, have their own superiority story as, historically, the armed protectors of Hinduism—a reputation so strong that, according to Ved Mehta, the eldest sons of Hindu families in Punjab used to be raised as Sikhs, so that they could serve as protectors of their families. There are also
competing north/south snobberies, in which supposedly fairer-skinned “Aryans” look down on the mostly southern, darker-skinned “Dravidians,” who in turn think they’re smarter and more academically successful. On top of all this, many Indian immigrants in America are graduates of the prestigious
Indian Institutes of Technology, which are like the Ivy League—only far more competitive.

Some of these sources of Indian superiority can be, simultaneously, sources of insecurity as well. At least since the beginning of the twentieth century, perceived “Brahman dominance” has provoked resentment and fueled
anti-Brahman movements, including among
high-caste, non-Brahman leaders. But the sting of Brahman dominance pales in comparison to the insecurity and resentment generated by centuries of
British colonial rule, with its famous condescension, high-handed oppression, cooption of elites, and “white man’s burden.” When Tagore renounced his knighthood after the Amritsar massacre in 1919, he was only one of many Indians to protest the “glaring” “shame” and “humiliation” inflicted by England on his countrymen, who “
suffer a degradation not fit for human beings.”

Thus most Indian immigrants to the United States bring with them double or even triple layers of simultaneous superiority and insecurity. In America, they run headlong into a totally different set of social hierarchies, in which their old superiority narratives don’t matter even as their insecurity intensifies. The experience of exclusion, scorn, even contempt has been a powerful theme for many Indian Americans, at all social levels.

“
I always felt so embarrassed by my name,” remembers Pulitzer Prize–winner Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri, who now goes by Jhumpa; “you feel like you’re causing someone pain just by being who you are.”
The popular claim that America is a “Christian country,” built on “Judeo-Christian values,” puts Indians on the outside, and Indian Americans are occasionally teased about “worshipping cows.” Academic superstars back home, Indian university students sometimes report a very different reception in America:

If there’s an Indian student who just cooked, and then gone to the office, and he’s
smelling like curry, professors have actually singled people out and told them, ‘Why don’t you shower?’ And ‘why don’t you spray some cologne or something before you come to class because you smell like curry all the time’ and I found that very funny, but at the same time very demeaning as well.

After 9/11, South Asians of all faiths became targets of American anti-Muslim, anti-Arab suspicion and violence. With their turbans,
Sikh men are especially likely to be singled out, pegged as “terrorists” instead of protectors. (“
You fucking Arab rag-head, you’re all going to die, we’re going to kill every one of you,” a white man shouted at a Sikh in one post-9/11 episode.)
Indian cabdrivers report being spat on and called “Arabs.”

Racially, Indians in the United States today are regarded as Asian, although for a long time they were considered Caucasian, but the overriding fact is that they are perceived as nonwhite. (In 1923, the Supreme Court managed to hold that a native Punjabi “of high-caste Hindu stock,”
although perhaps “Caucasian,” was not “white” and therefore ineligible for the privileges of “free white citizens.”)
Many Indian Americans attest to the continuing prejudice their community faces. To attract more business, Indian American hotel owners typically “
whiten” their lobbies—hiring whites as desk clerks. “I think you have to,” said one owner. “If you’re running an upscale hotel with an Indian at the front desk, you know, unfortunately we still live in a society that, uh, doesn’t look upon us kindly at times.” Another observed that a European manning the front desk was better than an Indian:

Even foreign is not a bad thing. I was just at a hotel a few weekends ago, and there was a French lady at the front desk. . . . It gives some, you know, flavor to the place; it’s cool to me. . . . You’re not going to get that [impression] from an Indian, no way.

Such prejudice is a painful reality for many Indian Americans, but once again, the perverse combination of superiority and insecurity can be a powerful motivator. Turning down plum jobs offered to him
in India after graduating from IIT Delhi,
Rajat Gupta came to the United States in 1971 to attend Harvard Business School. Gupta, according to journalist Anita Raghavan, was descended from “one of India’s
oldest bloodlines.” His father had been British-educated, a distinction enjoyed by only 0.1 percent of India’s population during the Raj. And “[i]n a society where skin color was a defining force, both Rajat and his father, Ashwini, were fair-skinned, a clear advantage that afforded them a natural superiority.” Yet Gupta, despite being at the top of his class at Harvard, was
passed over by every firm on Wall Street, including (initially) the consulting giant McKinsey. Twenty years later, he would be
McKinsey’s chief executive.

Sociologist Bandana Purkayastha argues that—following a pattern long familiar in immigrant communities in the United States—many Indian American parents “try hard to succeed as ‘
model minorities,’” demanding high achievement from their children in order to “distance themselves from those who they see as the ‘real’ minorities,” namely blacks and Hispanics. Other South Asian American parents impose similar demands on their children simply because they believe that nonwhites in the United States have to outperform in order to succeed. Either way, “there is an ongoing pressure on their children to be
better, smarter, more high-achieving compared to their white peers.”

Second-generation Indian Americans’ racial attitudes are extraordinarily complex.
Young South Asians who date African Americans or Latinos may well experience intense emotional conflict and frustration with their parents. Some who grow up in relatively affluent white suburbs
may be more insulated from American racism, but the color line in the United States is difficult to escape, and most young Indian Americans feel an “ethnic anxiety” of one kind or another. Trying to “
whiten” their complexion or appearance is a surprisingly
common theme among Indian American adolescents. One twenty-three-year-old Indian American professional recalls: