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Padma Rangaswamy 10 Asian Indians in Chicago ONE OF THE earliest immigrants of Indian origin to have made his home in Chicago is Chandra Lachman Singh, whose adventurous life remains a little-known immigrant saga. He came to New York from Grenada in 1911. He traveled to Chicago, where he worked in a restaurant on Wabash Avenue before being inducted into the army in 1918. He served in World War I, becameanaturalizedcitizen,andpurchasedand managed residential properties in Lincoln Park and Hyde Park. Between 1929 and 1932, he and his wife went to India, where they worked with Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress for the Indian independence movement . He lost all his Chicago properties during the Depression and experimented with homesteading in Brazil before he returned to Chicago and lived out the remainder of his life in Hyde Park; he died in 1989.1 His first days in Chicago predated the arrival of substantial numbers of Indians to this city by more than 50 years yet, his adventurism, entrepreneurship, resilience, love for the homeland and the adopted country , and globalism—all reflected in his checkered career—he foreshadowed a future and presaged the experiences of thousands of Indians who would pour into Chicago after 1965 and form a thriving community here by 2000. The rapid growth of the Asian Indian population in Chicago has to be understood not merely as a one-way stream of migration from India to America, but, as in the case of Chandra Lachman Singh, in a global context, as a constantly evolving migratory network or oikumene (Rangaswamy 2000, 15–40). This network is the result of an interplay of various global phenomena—started by legislative and economic forces that opened the gates to immigration , fuelled by social and cultural factors that encouraged family reunification and chain migration, and finally consolidated by communications and technological advancements that revolutionized the very notion of immigration and created a new breed of “Global Indian.” HISTORICAL OVERVIEW AND THE CHICAGO CONTEXT Asian Indians recorded the highest growth rate among all Asian groups in the 2000 census, making up 16.4 percent of the Asian American population and 0.6 percent of the general U.S. population. Although their immigration history in the United States goes back to the first decade of the nineteenth century (when about 7,000 Sikhs migrated from the Punjab to California), they have long been denied free entry and citizenship rights under racist immigration laws. After World War II, India was allotted a quota of 100 immigrants; not until 1965, withtheCivilRightsmovementinfullswing,did Congress change the immigration laws to drop racialquotasandallowAsianstomigrateinlarge numbers under a preferential quota system that gavehighprioritytoskilledprofessionals.Meanwhile , a new generation of Indians, born after India gained independence from the British in 1947, but still deeply influenced by the colonial legacy, was looking abroad for economic opportunities . India itself was caught in the quagmire of a socialist economy and could not provide Asian Indians in Chicago 129 employment for all its engineers, doctors, and scientists, trained in its own Western-style institutions . Emigration from India to the United Kingdom was attractive during the 1950s, but less desirable in the 1960s because of increased racial conflicts and tighter immigration laws. America became the favored alternative. Travel in search of new adventure was not seen as a one-way street, but as an opportunity to explore new vistas. So, thousands of middle-class, well-educated urbanites from India boarded jet planes for New York, convinced they would return home some day. More than 30 years later, they were still coming, to both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and fanning out to all the major metropolitan cities of the United States, including Chicago. They raised families, sponsored relatives, diversified their population, and built strong, vibrant communities. They did go back home, but only for visits. Home was now America. In the years since they first came, they were joined by Indians from other parts of the world. Chicago’s Indians include those who fled political persecution in Fiji, escaped Idi Amin’s terror in Uganda, sought better economic opportunities than Canada offered, or left behind racialconflictinTrinidad.The“ChicagoIndian” isthelocalIndianofHydeParkorDevonAvenue or even Oakbrook or Skokie, but he or she is also unmistakably the Global Indian who maintains contact with India or the country of origin through a worldwide network sustained by family ties, trade relations, and religious, political, economic, and cultural connections. The evolution of these new Indians, who are at...

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