Alone in his car in rush-hour traffic, Ravi Singh begins to mumble. For almost 20 minutes, words spill softly from his lips as he says his morning prayers.
Here, on a ramp at the Eisenhower Expressway interchange with Interstate Highway 88, his Indian faith merges with the American Dream. Turban on his head and tie cinched around his neck, Singh–a state government worker and aspiring statehouse candidate–is a composite of the city’s Indian community: unobtrusively holding to a few old customs while easing into the American mainstream–and the road to political power.
“We are at a crossroads,” Singh said. “We’re realizing we have to get involved.”
As India approaches the 50th anniversary of its independence, Indians in Chicago–a diffuse group with no real neighborhoods, wards or aldermen to call its own–are seeking the voice their forefathers did half a century ago. But this time they are going about it in a much different manner. Rather than breaking away, they are blending in.
The women in saris who glide along the streets of the city’s Far North Side might be the public image most closely associated with India. But they are just one face of a button-down group that has cemented financial influence in Chicago with a world-class business district along Devon Avenue and a coterie of doctors and other professionals whose Indian identity has fallen secondary to that thing called the American dream.
“Just like all the people say, this is the land of opportunity,” said Jimmy Sabastian, who owns J.P. Electronics of Illinois on Devon Avenue.
Those with the tools to succeed afford themselves no time for socializing. “We wake up, we come here, we leave here, we go home and go to sleep,” said Salim Shelia, 41, who has owned Tahoora Sweets & Cafe on Devon for a year.
Thursday morning, 72-year-old Dhula Bhai Patel sat quietly on a bench facing Devon, sliding his feet in and out of his sandals as he chatted with two other elderly Indian men. None could speak English. But miles away, in a meeting at the state treasurer’s office, Ravi Singh spoke up without a hint of an Indian accent.
And as Syed Rahman sat killing time with his cousin, Bader Arif, at a table in the Hyderabad House Restaurant on Devon one afternoon last week, Rahman–a 61-year-old retired factory worker–wore a topi on his head. But where the older man wore the Hindi cap, Arif–the restaurant’s 45-year-old owner–had his eyeglasses propped, Hollywood style.
Rahman lives blocks away, but Arif–a builder who counts among his recent projects a nearby mosque that draws more than 1,000 people for Friday prayer services–lives in Skokie. Though the long-popular commercial strip on Devon where Arif started his restaurant three years ago is the most identifiable presence of what passes for an Indian community, there are other pockets of Indian life–many of them in suburbs such as Naperville and Orland Park or counties such as Lake and DuPage. In 1970, two-thirds of the area’s Indian residents lived in the city; now only about a third do.
In 1990, about 25,000 of the area’s 41,606 Indian residents lived in the counties surrounding Chicago, according to the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission.
The diffuse nature of the city’s Indian community makes it unusual among ethnic groups, said Jeryl Levin, executive director of the Illinois Ethnic Coalition. Chicago has no real Indian neighborhoods–and that means no wards, no aldermen, no clout. Even smaller immigrant groups that still lack significant political power–Koreans, Vietnamese, Chinese–are generally more geographically cohesive.
Though many Indian immigrants continue gravitating toward the Devon Avenue area, many who have lived in Chicago awhile–professionals who have established a career and begun enjoying the fruits of their success–are among those who have moved to the suburbs. Young urban professionals such as Sankar Sambasivan, a research scientist at Northwestern University who lives in an apartment near Devon, is considering such a move; he and his family would like a little more breathing room.
“To me, it’s not a big deal,” Sambasivan said. “We’d still be close.”
In stark contrast to immigrants from many other countries, Levin said, the first wave of those from India were well-to-do professionals: doctors, dentists, engineers. As a result, they have been more mobile.
It was 18 years ago, at the stroke of midnight, that R.S. Rajan, a successful, high-ranking government official in India, gave up everything and boarded a plane for the United States.
Almost 30 hours later, he landed in Connecticut, where his sister met him and his 17-year-old son at the airport.
Rajan came because he wanted a good education for both his sons. After only two days in Bridgeport, he set out for Chicago, a distant place recommended by friends and relatives. “They said Chicago was a very open and fair-minded place with fewer hangups about immigrants,” Rajan said.
Within a week, he had found a suitable accounting job in Chicago, and his sons were on their way to a Midwestern education at DePaul University and white-collar jobs in marketing and accounting.
Now, Rajan, 63, of Skokie, is administrative manager for the Indo American Center in Chicago.
Even as the Indian population has scattered, Indian interests have become much more focused, he said.
Until three years ago, the Indian community’s annual independence parade was held downtown. This year will be its third along Devon, where a stretch of sari shops, restaurants, groceries, sweet shops and electronic stores has grown in the ’90s to become one of the nation’s largest Indian commercial districts.
More than 80 Indian or Pakistani businesses line the street below fluttering Indian flags and green-and-white banners labeling this the International Marketplace. There are Greek and Russian merchants here as well. But Indian businesses predominate, especially in the stretch between the 2500 and 2700 blocks of Devon.
“It gives the feeling of a mini-India,” Consul General Jagdish Sharma said.
The food on Devon is so spicy it makes Devon Bank executive Irv Loundy sweat. Arif’s most popular dish is a potent rice-and-meat concoction. But the blending going on in the kitchens at the heart of the Indian business district is cultural as well as culinary; many have Americanized their food, toning down the spicier fare somewhat so the clientele won’t suffer too much, said Loundy, who serves as head of the area business association.
It’s a delicate balance, the recipe of success. Getting along is important.
“We are living in America, so we have to follow the American way,” Sabastian said.
But a plunge into the mainstream must be carefully measured, Singh said: “Yes, we can be Americans, but we have to retain our identity. That is what being an American is.”
Singh wasn’t eager to tell his father, Chicago radiologist Pavitar Singh, about his political aspirations. Politics remains a dirty word to many Indians, Singh said.
The elder Singh had come to America in the 1960s with a diploma in one hand and $200 in the other, then proceeded to Cook County Hospital to do what it took to become a doctor in the United States.
As a number of younger Indians in Chicago still do, Pavitar Singh returned to India for a prearranged marriage. Then he came back to the United States, settled in Aurora and proceeded to launch a medical career like so many other Indian immigrants.
The second generation isn’t doing things quite the same way.
“I’m focusing my career on politics, which is unheard of,” said Singh, who ate a muffin and drank three cups of coffee Thursday morning during breakfast with a prominent businessman in a position to help him politically.
“Everyone’s saying, `Ravi, that’s good.’ But at the same time, they’re saying, `Why didn’t you become a doctor or an engineer?’ It’s the mind-set.”
That’s changing, however. Singh, the 25-year-old community relations coordinator for the state treasurer’s office and executive director of the Illinois Indian Chamber of Commerce, is considering a run for state representative. He would be the first Indian elected to the state legislature. But more Indians in the United States have begun thinking politically, and the coming years will reveal how they will amass power in a country fairly bursting with special-interest groups, said Levin, of the ethnic coalition.
Meanwhile, Asian-Americans are the most rapidly growing demographic group in the country. It’s unclear, Levin said, whether Indians will maintain a separate identity from the Asian coalition developing in the name of political representation; whether they will melt into the group; or whether they will think of themselves as Americans.
Choices abound. Many Indians appreciate them.
“I love this city,” said Sharma, whose office in NBC Tower overlooks Lake Michigan.
“I seldom come across a case in which someone leaves Chicago to go to another city.”
But Kamal Nain, a 26-year-old cook from Punjab, sat on a corner bench on Devon last week and missed his India–“my parents, my culture.”
Next to him, in the windows of a video store, hung a poster for the Indian movie being released to coincide with the country’s independence day. “I love my India,” were the words at the top. At the bottom was the name of the movie:
“Pardes.”
It means visitor in a foreign land.
