There isn’t an MNC – from banking to booze – in the world left where there aren’t tonnes of Indians. The IITs and IIMs could easily host their annual reunions in McKinsey or Microsoft cafeterias across the world. The seminal sketch for the British Indian sitcom, Goodness Gracious Me, where an Indian father is trying to explain to his son how ‘everything is Indian’ is no longer a joke, it is just fact.
Often racist people say, ‘In certain parts of Britain, there are more Indians than the British,’ or ‘Brampton, a suburb in Ontario, Canada is basically Punjab’. What they mean is White people are missing. Indians in Leeds, Toronto, Manchester, Queens in New York, Birmingham in Britain, are equally British, Canadian or American, just of Indian heritage. As citizens, they are proud holders of a foreign passport, often celebrating on Instagram reels when their paperwork comes through. Just as British, American or Canadian as King Charles, Britney Spears or Justin Trudeau – passport-wise.
The difference is in their cultural values. Values so old-fashioned that even rural India has moved on from them. So old-fashioned that the king of old-fashioned Bollywood movies, Sooraj Barjatya, would say, ‘This is old-fashioned!’. As a Punjabi friend put it, ‘One part of my family is in Chandigarh and one in Toronto. The Chandigarh side of my family is far more Western in their values. They watch Hollywood movies, go clubbing and speak English, and one cousin is openly gay. The Canadian side of my family wear traditional clothes, watch Punjabi soaps all day, the wives fast for their husbands, the men go to the gurdwara, and the parents look for arranged marriages. They’re like something out of 1950’.
‘I was judged by my local Indian friends because I was wearing shorts and a tank top in summer, and having White friends’, said a friend of mine from Kolkata, now settled in Cardiff, Wales. Complaining that a lot of her other friends are from rural Bengal and try to keep the values (read: caste, class, creed) of small-town Bengal intact in circa 2023 urban Britain: an impossible clash of cultures. ‘I told them I’m going to see Pink Floyd perform, and they said why do that when you can watch Arijit Singh? If they wanted to just watch Arijit Singh, why did they leave India?!’
In the 1980s, settling abroad was a thing the wealthy did. It cost a lot, and it took a lot. The promise was a better standard of living. Today, urban well-to-do Indians aren’t mesmerised by the West. Many would argue that their standard of living, even with the traffic and chaos and office politics, is better in India, especially with house help and childcare and delivery apps. Which means a lot of rural and semi-urban India are the ones doing the migrating. Being in the West is no longer a sign of Westernisation. In fact, it could be the opposite. Sections of Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata are far more Westernised than many Indians abroad. Also, the rise of social media and WhatsApp was to make everything global. It has, in many ways. But in some other ways, it has made some NRIs even more provincial. Now many of them can sit in Leicester, Melbourne or Vancouver and spend their days opining on Indian politics, watching streaming Telugu movies, and shop at their local Indian grocery. They don’t have to engage in any way whatsoever with the place they live in.
As an older British Indian man told me. ‘When we came to Britain in 1965, it felt like a foreign place. Now, India feels like a foreign place. Britain is far more traditionally Indian.’
