Virtual Homelands: Indian Immigrants and Online Cultures in the United States

3. The Wired Home: Commodified Belonging for the Transnational Family

Chapter Three The Wired Home Commodified Belonging for the Transnational Family On July 2, 2012, India’s largest private sector bank ICICI launched a Facebook page for the banking services it targets to nonresident Indians (NRIs).1 The launch was one in a series of measures by the corporation to use social media platforms to strengthen its decade-long investment in the global NRI community , especially those in the United States. Starting in the late 1990s and intensifying through the first decade of the twenty-first century, ICICI built a strategic relationship with Indian immigrants in the United States through its online banking services. The effect was remarkable: ICICI catapulted itself into a dominant position in the transnational banking and remittance business . In 2013, ICICI was named the best remittance business bank in Asia by theprestigiousfinancialservicesresearchcompanyTheAsianBanker.In2009, the bank’s NRI services were named the best in Asia for demonstrating excellence in a business model that taps into global labor migration to generate and diversify its revenue.2 As its NRI Services Facebook page demonstrates, the banking giant cleverly utilizes themes of culture, tradition, and bonding to promote its online banking services. A quick scroll of the bank’s posts show numerous references to Bollywood, cricket,India’smultireligiousfestivalsandcustoms,andiconichistoricalfigures, alongsidetipsforonlinebanking;thecompanyismakingaclearefforttobuild a public image for itself on the social media stage. As its June 16, 2013, status update states, quoting Warren Buffet, “Price is what you pay; value is what you get.”3 That value comes from participating in ICICI Bank’s array of services 83 The Wired Home and activities besides banking. For instance,in addition to giving tips on creating strong passwords for secure financial transactions, the “services” provided here include a quiz for the potential user on Indian cinema on the occasion of its one-hundredth-year celebrations in 2013, a note of congratulations for the U.S. National Geography Bee champion, Indian American Satwik Karnik, and a wide array of tidbits on Indian indigenous arts and culture.4 Throughout the page, a common thread is the idea of the NRI as a mobile, transnational workerwhoneverthelessmaintainsstrongtiestohisformerhomesandhomeland . Hence, even as the ICICI NRI page acknowledges the America-centric everyday life and achievements of its target community, it constantly shores up ideologies of the family and the homeland that point to the “Indian” core in the transnational mix. This dynamic—celebrating the transnationalism of theNRIinordertoemphasize anationalistvisionoftheimmigrantfamilyand its cultural and financial investments—is not unique to ICICI. Since the early 2000s,awidearrayofwebsites,fromRediff.comtosulekha.comandincluding Indian American media companies like India Abroad, have built this image of the NRI as proudly transnational but still rooted to tradition. Whilethepreviouschapterfocusedononlinenarrativesofhomecreatedby marginalized Indian immigrant women on the H-4 visa, this chapter explores how online businesses represent the transnational familial life of Indian immigrants via the Indian American marketplace. I am using the phrase Indian American marketplace to refer to the exchange of money, commodities, and services built primarily around the Indian immigrant user base in the United States. Electronic commerce and services built around Indian foodstuffs and household goods, banking, money remittance, and real estate purchases are someofthemostdynamicsectorsinthismarketplace.Thischapterisorganized aroundthreeparticularlyrevealingcasestudies—Namaste.com,Indiaplaza,and ICICI Bank—each of which helps us to understand a particular facet of the ideal image of the contemporary Indian immigrant family and home. Through a close reading of the sites’ textual, institutional, and discursive strategies, the following analysis uncovers a gendered appeal to the virtual home consumer, a Hindu middle-class ideal of traditions, a masculine bias in representing financialnetworks ,andanIndiannationalistvisionofcontemporaryimmigrant consumer desires and cultural anxieties. WhatlinksthesevariedconcernsistherecurringnarrativeoftheIndianimmigranthomeasa “wired”home.Therepresentationofthewiredhometriggersan arrayofassociations—ofnetworksavvy,financialcomfort,privilegedresidence, anddesiredlevelsofprivacyandmobility—andultimatelyoperatesasasymbol ofimmigrantprowess.ThewiredhomehelpstheNRIandhisfamilytoovercome the physical limitations of migration, as well as structural limitations to global 84 Chapter Three leadership and success in the information technology era. We have seen that it is impossible to discuss the networking cultures of H-4 Indian women without continually running into the dominant figure of the Hindu middle-class H-1B man. Here we deepen our understanding of this figure, all too often taken for grantedasastand-inforNRIsasawhole,byexploringtheeffortstocommodify theNRIlifewithindiscursiveconstructionsofthewiredimmigranthomeinthe United States. Thedistinctionsbetweenwhereanonlinemediacompanyisbased(whether in India or the United States) and how it frames its identity (whether Indian or Indian American) are important considerations in the politics of belonging online. Several online ventures, either e-commerce sites or commercially supported community websites, have emerged in cities across India and America withtheexpresspurposeofmeetingtheculturalneedsoftheIndianimmigrant communitywhilealsocapitalizingonthisconstituencytoturnaprofit.Manyof thesecompaniesmaketheideaofhomecentraltotheimagetheirsitesproject. Though these sites all have the same aim—to sell something...