IndiaSphere

A few months ago, in the middle of the Sonal Shah controversy, I wrote a blog post criticizing Vijay Prashad’s The Karma of Brown Folk as a somewhat inadequate historical account of the Indian-American community. The example I focused on was the “Yankee Hindutva” chapter, which I thought was unbalanced and prone to cast aspersions rather than actually illuminate the topic at hand. But other chapters in Prashad’s book have similar problems: Prashad’s book is more a critique of the “desi” community in the U.S. than it is an introduction to it: we are too bourgeois (the “model minority” myth), too racist (i.e., against African-Americans), and too religious.

We finally have a better introductory book on the history of the South Asian American community, Vinay Lal’s The Other Indians: A Political and Cultural History of South Asians in America (see an earlier post on ... [Follow Original Article link for full content.]