Many of these immigrants, having been born in the 1940s and 50s in India, missed the freedom struggles there, and arriving in the United States after 1965, missed the civil rights struggles here. immigration policy in 1965 which favored well educated immigrants with particular technical and professional skills. In fact, much of the first generation of the Indian American community owes its presence in the United States to changes in U.S. He notes, “The road to Indian America was paved by the toil of others, now barely acknowledged” (10).

In fact, a significant portion of the book is devoted to examining the linkages between anti-immigration, racism, Islamophobia, militarism, and the collusion of the Indian American community in maintaining and promoting existing cultural hierarchies in the United States.Īs in The Karma of Brown Folk, Prashad outlines the coming of age of the Indian immigrant community in the United States as a model minority. Such a politics is needed, according to Prashad, to fight against the reigning politics of fear in the post 9/11 era that has been the direct outgrowth of racism in the United States and which has manifested itself in the form of imperialism and war making around the world.

With Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today, Vijay Prashad has not only extended the arguments laid out in The Karma of Brown Folk, but also provided us with a new framework within which to imagine, what he calls, a “politics of solidarity” (x). The text also introduced me to “Yankee Hindutva,” following which the Diwali celebrations sponsored by the Hindu Student Council on my campus took on a different hue and never seemed quite the same again. Prashad’s text not only helped me situate my own immigrant experience and understand the pestilences of the model minority status that I along with so many desis seem to enjoy, but also to find the courage to recognize and name the anti-blackness that seemed so prevalent in so many desi circles. history and with several close relatives safely ensconced in American suburbia. I had come to the United States for undergraduate education with little knowledge of U.S. Like many young, first and second generation immigrants from South Asia, my first introduction to radical desi politics in the United States came in the form of Vijay Prashad’s The Karma of Brown Folk.

Uncle Swami by Vijay Prashad