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

The audience for such arguments was an international one, particularly around and after 1947. On August 15 of that year, the British colony of India was split into the two free nations of India and Pakistan. All over the world, Indians held independence parades.

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,

There is no hard link between the medieval Solanki dynasty and my family. Between the last Solanki king's demise in the thirteenth century and our modern family tree's beginning is a gap of five centuries. Any vagabond tribe might have adopted the names and legends of its former rulers and over time created for itself a royal past.

By the 1960s the Cold War had become a national obsession. American superiority over the Soviet Union was measured by every conceivable scorecard: votes in the United Nations, comparisons of gross national product, medals won in the Olympics, shifting maps of small Third World countries. Now President Lyndon B. Johnson was aiming to import the tale

I believed, in those years, that to be a good Indian girl meant to live entirely without sexual desire; that my longing itself, let alone any action to fulfill it, made me bad, wrong, and un-Indian. My entire understanding of my culture was that transmitted by my parents, who in turn passed on what they had been taught, at a level they considered a

The decline of Gandevi's weaving class was of such concern that the kingdom's census bureau conducted a special report in 1931. A typical weaver, the report said, "ekes out a miserable existence," making barely eight rupees a month because of competition from machine-made cloth. One finished sari—a labor of three to five days—was worth on

Always it is the cusp of seasons: harvest, or planting. The soundtrack booms from live singers and musicians, or only a precious cassette tape (now CD or iPod) recorded (downloaded, bootlegged) from the old country. Always the oldest women cluster around the edges, on bleachers or folding chairs or the floor, gossiping or watching silently as they

As one UNESCO writer wryly commented, "There is the gravest ground for suspecting that the existing pursuit of knowledge in the world is not directed to what is desirable or necessary in the interests of the world as a whole but may well be oriented almost exclusively to the needs and desires of the most advanced societies in the world."

Offscreen, almost every daughter-in-law has horror stories, especially if she has lived with her in-laws for any length of time. Some of these complaints are no doubt exaggerated or manufactured, but in my own family, I have witnessed one aunt complaining to guests at the dinner table, My daughter-in-law doesn't know how to cook at all, as the youn