Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents

World War II sharpened the division between the native Fijians and the Indians, who were by now about half and half on the island. One out of every three native Fijian men between the ages of eighteen and sixty volunteered to fight on behalf of the empire. But the Fiji Indians balked. First they demanded the same rate of pay as white soldiers, and

In all of his experience and that of his forefathers, occupation was a primary function and a natural outcome of hereditary caste. The son did as the father had done, and that was all. Occupations had shifted slightly over a century, from weaver to tailor to trader, but that was a matter of economic need, not personal desire.

As for President Johnson, he can perhaps be forgiven for not answering Bhupendra's query personally. On October 3, 1965, the president was at a ceremony at the Statue of Liberty, signing the Immigration Act of 1965. Technically an amendment to the 1952 act, it was underplayed by nearly everyone, including its supporters. "This bill that we wil

Dharma has a dual meaning: religion and duty. In the second stage of life, a Hindu confronts this duality, learning to reconcile his spiritual life with familial duties.

Concern about highly educated newcomers seems quaint and has for the most part dissipated, though its echo remains in the occasional rhetorical barb aimed at H-1B workers in Silicon Valley. It is difficult to remember how in the 1960s and '70s the brain drain roused passions as heated as those surrounding our current immigration crises. If America

am Indian in body, tongue, to anyone I meet in the streets, and increasingly even in my spiritual inclinations. My parents are American in their politics, their optimism, their belief in the dream—for they came to this country at a time more open and hopeful than any I have known. We could also list the ways in which I could be called un-American a

The fight dated back to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which the Supreme Court had said that separate white and black schools could never be equal. But the ruling alone did not integrate America's schools. With the law on their side, civil rights activists had to wage a city-by-city legal battle against fierce, sometimes violent,

The Gujaratis of Fiji mostly kept apart from native people, except as business demanded. Many of my relatives say they were afraid at first of the tall, strong people who seemed as fierce as their historical reputation for cannibalism suggested. Natives and whites tended to see the Indians as clannish and separatist—but the Indians were in fact div

To my father's people, America was uncharted territory—a country where few of their kind had ventured, where one might easily become, in the Gujarati idiom, lost. Poiro khowai jahe, the boy will become lost, busybodies warned his mother. "Lost" meant to become rootless, tailless; to forget the ways of the clan. It was equivalent to anothe