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Reviewed by:
  • Becoming American, Becoming Indian: An Immigrant Community in New York City
  • Kamala Visweswaran
Becoming American, Becoming Indian: An Immigrant Community in New York City. By Madhulika Khandelwal. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002.

Becoming American, Becoming Indian: An Immigrant Community in New York City is a clearly written and engaging ethnographic study of South Asian neighborhoods in New York City. While much of the literature in South Asian diaspora studies remains mired in rehearsed generalities, Madhulika Khandelwal's study is refreshing because it is so rigorously grounded in neighborhood ethnography, carefully tracing the population and employment shifts between Manhattan and the outer boroughs of NYC, and subsequent movements away from well-known Indian ethnic business districts like 74th Street in Jackson Heights back into the suburbs. Becoming American, Becoming Indian is focused on four neighborhoods of Queens: Flushing, Jackson Heights, Richmond Hill, and Eastern Queens; and is drawn on the author's decade-long experience living, researching, and working in Queens. Such extended participant observation is unusual now (though it wasn't in an earlier era of community studies), and Khandelwal's training as a historian is ably supplemented by the 150 ethnographic interviews in English, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu she conducted over a ten year period.1

As a work of descriptive ethnography, Becoming American, Becoming Indian succeeds remarkably well and will serve as a helpful sourcebook for larger Asian American/Ethnic Studies and lay audiences unfamiliar with basic terms of Indian life in the United States. Chapter 1 thus introduces readers to "The Landscape of South Asian New York." Chapter 2 on "Transplanting Indian Culture," contains sections on "Food," "Dress," "Language," "Media," "Arts and Entertainment," and "Festivals and Celebrations." Chapter 3 on "Worship and Community" instructs readers on the diversity of Indian religious communities, and so contains essential sections on "Muslims," "Christians," "Sikhs," "Jains, Jews and Parsis" as well as "Hindus" and "Indian Religions in the United States." Chapter 4, "Building Careers, Encountering Class," explores the demographic shifts from a primarily professional [End Page 84] South Asian migration to the United States in the 1960s to the emergence of a working class South Asian population by the 1990s and the experience of downward mobility for Indian educated professionals.

Becoming American, Becoming Indian demonstrates a concern with documenting the plurality of Indian cultures, and one of its signal contributions is its discussion of the dynamics of Indian ethnicity as negotiated by Indian and Indo-Caribbean immigrants in the Richmond Hill District of Queens. However, the book never quite lives up to its promise of exploring interactions between the diverse ethnic communities of Queens exemplified in the book's opening quote, "In Bombay our neighbors were Gujaratis, Punjabis, and South Indians. Here they are Chinese, Koreans and Hispanics. I do not see much change in our life in the U.S." Khandelwal goes on to describe Bowne Street, Flushing as "a row of old white Christian churches," that shared space with "a Jewish synagogue, a Chinese Christian mission, a Korean Presbyterian church, a Korean Buddhist Center," "a Sikh gurudwara, a Swaminarayan Hindu Temple, and a South Indian Hindu temple" (69). Still later in the book, another Queens resident reflects upon similarities and differences between Indians and Chinese and Koreans, and closer affinities between Indians and Latinos. In other words, the book asks, but never answers the question of how Indian plural traditions of tolerance and co-existence might help to build ties with other racial and ethnic communities in New York City, working against the enclave exclusionism with which South Asian communities are often charged. Part of problem here is that Khandelwal never adequately defines what she means by culture and assumes that it is something which can be "transplanted" more or less whole without being remade and reshaped in response to local and/or transnational stimuli. While Khandelwal deftly sidesteps the debate on assimilation versus acculturation that has haunted Ethnic Studies literature of the last two decades, she has also missed a prime opportunity to engage with much of the newer theoretical work in ethnic and diaspora studies around the formation of hybrid and polycultural identities. Queens, N.Y., literally cries out for such an...

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