American Karma: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Indian Diaspora

Acknowledgments

■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Acknowledgments I owe this book to the intellectual, emotional, and moral support of my family, friends, colleagues, and students. At Connecticut College, I am thankful to my colleagues Peggy Sheridan, Michelle Dunlap, Jennifer Fredricks, Mike James, and Sandy Grande for creating a warm, supportive , and intellectually engaging “culture of work” in the department. In particular, I am deeply grateful to Peggy Sheridan for being a steady mentor and friend through the various phases of my career. It has been my good fortune and privilege to be a part of this department that she created with her vision and labor of love. The R. F. Johnson, Hodgkins, and Opatrny Summer Funds from Connecticut College granted me the opportunity to conduct my extensive fieldwork and interviews with the participants of the local Indian diaspora. I also extend my thanks to Mary Howard, whose keen editorial eye immeasurably refined and refocused my writing. I am thankful to my students—Mridula Swamy, Jessica Philips , and Rebecca Fagan—for working as dedicated research assistants for this research project. In particular, I want to thank Mridula and Jessica for giving such meticulous help with transcription, photocopying, editing , and coding. The input given by students from my ethnography courses in HMD 201 and HMD 406 played a crucial role in refining and transforming the arguments in my book project. Above all, the magnanimity of the Indian immigrant community in southeastern Connecticut made this book possible. I owe a great debt to my participants, who welcomed me into their homes and patiently allowed me to interview them. My deepest thanks goes to them for sharing their life stories as immigrants. Over several cups of garam chai and namkeen snacks, they eagerly shared with me their narratives and their interpretations and experiences of their migrant life in the United States. I express my deepest and sincere thanks to Barun Basu, who played the role of gatekeeper and connected me with several families who were willing to be interviewed for this project. I am very grateful to Adesh and Gayatri Saxena for making sure that my fieldwork and ethnography were successfully completed. Their hospitality, openness, generosity, and friendship made this project much more than just another research activity. They were my intellectual partners in the community, and their compassionate support and insightful interrogations pushed me to clarify even more the findings of the ethnography. I am sincerely thankful to Jasgit and Ranjana Bindra for their advice, friendship, and support of this book project. A very special thanks to Usha and Avinash Thombre for supporting this project and setting up numerous contacts with several members of the diaspora. I hope that I have been able to convey in some “authentic” way a slice of the rich, unsettling, varied, and complex cultural lives of the participants in this study. This book is about Indian migrants: their family conversations , their expressions of identity, and their ways of interpreting the worlds they inhabit. However, in the process of making sense of their lives, I have learned a little more about my own migrant journey, and I thank them for enabling me to see my own history through their everyday lives. I am immensely grateful to my teachers at Clark University: Nancy Budwig, Michael Bamberg, Bernie Kaplan, Jaan Valsiner, and Jim Wertsch. I would also like to acknowledge the intellectual support provided by Hubert Hermans, Ingrid Joseph, and Hank Stam. I owe a great deal of intellectual debt to the works of scholars outside my discipline, such as Alejandro Portes, Vijay Prashad, Susan Koshy, Sunaina Maira, Sandhya Shukla, Kamala Visweswaran, and Mary Waters. My conversations and lively discussions with Ram Mahalingam were important to shaping the basic architecture of this book. Ram’s critical x ❙ Acknowledgments engagements with this project through all its phases and transformations added depth to its theoretical and methodological foundations. Ruma Sen, the “maha maa/godmother” of my kids, became a sounding board for my unfinished ideas—she carefully listened to my ideas, challenged my assumptions, and provided beneficial suggestions about the organization of the book. I am grateful for her friendship, her passion for Hindi movies, and her constant encouragement. I am very thankful to Michelle Fine and Jean Marecek for choosing to make this book a part of the book series Qualitative Methods in Psychology . Their editorial suggestions and incisive comments on earlier drafts helped tighten my arguments and claims. I thank the anonymous reviewers for their...