Growing Up Indian, Becoming Immigrants

Chapter 3 focuses on narratives about immigration and reveals performers’ interpretations of the immigration experience and the processes by which they shape their transnational social realities. A close reading of their performances uncovers the ways that dharm (“religion” or “duty”) shapes the Guptas and their social networks’ understandings of immigration, adjustment, and the identities that both precipitate and result from these experiences. Interpreting the Guptas’, their family’s, and their community’s narrative performances of immigration within the context of dharm demonstrates their participation in creating identities, shaping community, and reinterpreting dharm in a transnational context. Two features of the Guptas’ immigration narratives—ambivalence and comparison—work together to help these immigrants and their families enact their imagination in co-constructing their experience as transnational.

New Opportunities, the Brain Drain, and the Guptas

This chapter provides information about the significant contexts of the Hindu American community’s narrative performances. Reviewing reasons behind why people immigrate, it begins with general theories of immigration and then concentrates on the specific reasons why Indians left India during the period after 1947. The chapter then shifts its focus to the context in the United States as a receiving site for immigrants from India with particular attention to race and religion, two dominant themes in American immigration that have contributed to the Guptas’ experiences and the dynamics of their community-making activities. This leads to a discussion of the significance of religion for migrants in the United States before introducing the more specific religious context of the Guptas’ community. Finally, the chapter expands its lens to their transnational extended family with family trees, a description of their social community, and a specific history of key players in the family.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the Gupta family through Satya, a member of the extended family. While his story is exceptional as his parents were Indian citizens living in Nigeria at the time of his birth in the United States, his family’s narrative performances of his birth experience demonstrate the ways that narratives help to create and maintain transnational family connections. Satya’s story and the family’s performances of it introduces readers to larger global and transnational processes and serves as an example of the ways that performance analysis can help uncover the methods by which narratives create transnational experiences. Additionally, this chapter describes the content and organization of the book.

Sundarkāṇḍ

This chapter examines the ways that the Guptas’ and their social network’s performances of the Sundarkāṇḍ help create a community that is always understood to be defined in relationship with similar communities in India. It begins with a description of an Atlanta Sundarkāṇḍ kathā. After explicating its religious significance and describing Sundarkāṇḍ kathā as a genre within other categories of Rāmcaritmānas recitation, chapter 6 places this performance in its social context, analyzing the ways the Guptas’ and their social network’s performances of it help to shape their community. It then contrasts the Sundarkāṇḍ group with Mausi’s religious group in Delhi to show the continuity and change inherent in the transmigrants’ community. Finally, the chapter depicts Mrs. Gupta’s narrative performance in which she presents her own interpretation of the connections between group religious practices and community.

Neither Black nor White

This chapter considers the unique religious and racial dynamics of Atlanta and its location in the U.S. South. Moving beyond the well-known black-and-white binary, it examines the historic experiences of Asian immigrants in the South and how they negotiated this dynamic. Contemporary immigrants, and particularly Hindu immigrants, have carved out space for themselves religiously and geographically in this historically segregated landscape. The chapter reviews the geography of Hindu Atlanta by looking at residential patterns and the religious institutions and informal groups that Hindus have established in the metropolitan area. While temple-building is important in India, it takes on new significance in the United States, where establishing a Hindu temple announces the community’s presence to the rest of the population and chips away at the Protestant hegemony of the South. Because these sites are the most visible sites of Hindu practice, they have received the most attention from scholarly researchers and local media outlets. This tendency to focus on institutional sites of Hinduism overlooks the central role that domestic practice takes in the tradition. This study of the Guptas’ and their community’s practices helps correct this imbalance in scholarly and popular conceptions of Hinduism in the United States and locates much of the transnational community and its formation within members’ homes.

“One’s Own Home Is Better Than All Other Places”

This chapter explores various discourses and practices in which a transnational community engages that help to redefine places as home, sacred space, and connected across the oceans. After briefly reviewing relevant theories of space, place, and home, it examines the ways the Guptas and their community define home through people who live and visit there. The chapter demonstrates how immigrants (particularly women) also help redefine their new locations as home through their narrative performances. Constructing home in a transnational context inevitably includes narratives that speak about movement across spaces. Speech about visits to India inevitably focuses on family and transformative moments. Speech about visits abroad from India requires an agility that can negotiate a new understanding of family relationships, home, and connections across the oceans. These discourses imaginatively create connections between spaces that are physically unconnected.

Conclusion

This chapter reviews the kinds of narratives discussed in the book: immigration narratives, narratives about making home, and a recitation of the Sundarkāṇḍ. These narrative performances together demonstrate the means by which members of the Hindu transnational community imagine and enact their experiences: shaping identities, creating homes, and establishing religious communities and practices. Religion here is shaped in this process—changing and shifting as the narratives are performed. Shifting attention to the second generation, it is hard to predict how transnational Hinduism will continue to change, but it is clear that transnationalism will continue to shape Hinduism in India and abroad for the foreseeable future.

On the Importance of Maṇḍalı̄s

This chapter weaves together the themes of imagination, religion, and migration. It argues that although economic globalization and technological advances in communication and transportation have provided a framework within which transnational lives are possible, the heart of developing transnational communities and identities lies in the new social imaginaries made viable by these frameworks but brought to life in religious narrative performances. The argument is supported by several sections that develop ideas about what it means to be transnational, the creativity generated by narrative performances and its connection to social imaginaries, and finally, an argument about what count as religious narratives in a transnational Hindu context.