Raj Oza moved from India in the mid-60s and found new roots in the American Midwest. He learned about America, especially race relations, playing dodgeball on the playground. From his parents, who worked three jobs to support their four children, he learned a strong work ethic. In those days there were no Indian grocery stores to buy yogurt; the family joked that learning to keep a yogurt culture alive kept their Indian culture going. Raj’s family and his parents have lived in California since 1980. He shares how he learned to navigate his Indian-ness.
We Belong is a visual series highlighting different experiences of South Asian and Indian identity. This series was produced by India Currents in collaboration with CatchLight as part of the CatchLight Local CA Visual Desk. Photographs and interviews by CatchLight Fellow Sree Sripathy.
Portraits were made in Morgan Hill, Calif. on March 3, 2023 and the interview took place on June 5, 2023 via Zoom. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What was your journey like from India to the US?
My parents moved from Rajasthan to Bombay, now called, of course, Mumbai. In the mid-60s my father first moved to Canada because it was much easier in those days to go there rather than to the US. After several months my mother and my siblings, an older brother, older sister, myself, and my younger brother, all joined my father in Ontario, Canada.
We lived there for almost four years. Then in ‘69, we moved to Chicago, and that was very much where, you know, our family found its roots, if you will. The roots are in Rajasthan, and in India, but in North America, it’s really the American Midwest.
My parents had a vision of what their lives could be; their children, their grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren. They had a vision around education, and what America could provide. They had a wonderful life in India but they just had this idea of what America could provide for their descendants.
What was immigrant life like for your family?
In the playground, I really learned a lot about America, in many ways, really about race relations. Black kids would play on one side and white kids on the other side of this game called dodgeball. My parents were also learning what it meant to be an Indian in America, working a combined three jobs each.
My father was a purchasing manager. My mother was a seamstress, and tailor. They decided to help make ends meet (with) a small catering business. They’d make batata vada and chutneys and sell them to graduate students at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago between the intermission of Bollywood movies.
My parents really were keen on all their children being educated. My eldest brother Nirmal is an engineer. He saw an opportunity here in California, in Silicon Valley, and joined National Semiconductor.
How old were you when you came to California?
It was a slow process for me because I was 19 years old and still in college. So I continued through college, and graduate school, working in Chicago. My permanent move was in 1986 when our daughter was born.
Were there differences you noticed between Chicago and the Bay Area?
When we arrived in Chicago in 1969, there were hardly any Indians, proper restaurants, or grocery stores. You know, there’s a story in our family around yogurt – dahi – and how that kept the culture going. Mom figured out a way to make yogurt because there was no yogurt back then.
Indians in Chicago were few, very much connected to India, and trying to build a sense of community.
There was a different sense of the Indians in Chicago. You’d have two branches of Indians: one affiliated with the university, some with engineering, and medical backgrounds; and another one on Devon Street, which charmingly got to have three names. One side was called Gandhi Marg and the other side was called Jinnah Way, you know, that sense of India and Pakistan.* And the people who worked on Devon Street, you know, some may not have even graduated from high school.
(In) California you see the beginnings of Silicon Valley. There are all the high-end engineers from the other IITs of India, highly educated folks around whom the world has come to revolve.
In Chicago, nobody sold any yogurt?
In the early years. I still remember an advertisement on television, when they started to introduce yogurt into the Americas. They were talking about this man who was over 100 years old, somewhere in Europe. And the reason for it was his diet of yogurt. They’re introducing the idea that yogurt could be a healthy food. It wasn’t like you’d go to your local grocery store, Safeway, Trader Joe’s, and get a Dannon yogurt – it just didn’t exist.
California also had this other element. Palo Alto is right at the heart of where everything started with Hewlett and Packard and stuff at Stanford. Then you go further out, you know, Sunnyvale, there are still orchards!
We were living in Morgan Hill, a good distance away from the heart of Silicon Valley. But Morgan Hill was the split town. Half the people worked at IBM and the other half were very involved with agriculture in those days, in the early 80s. A lot of them were migrant workers. You have Indian immigrants, and you have Mexican immigrants, it’s a very different immigrant experience.
I came across a short story, by Chitra Divakaruni called “Living in Yuba City.”** And suddenly, my eyes opened up. There are many other Indians here who predate all of us from Silicon Valley, living north of Sacramento, having these agricultural lives going back generations. Many of these men had to marry Mexican women so that they could own land in America. This is a very different sense of what it means to be an Indian in Silicon Valley or California as a whole.
There are not that many people who have had your experience. You had the immigrant experience, you married someone of Indian origin, and you raised your children. And now you have grandchildren here.
In the ‘60s, there’s a small smattering, and in the ‘70s you get a little bit more, but it was really with Y2K, that you see that big jump in numbers (of) people, ungenerously labeled the H-1B generation. We’ve had these small waves and then the bigger ones have come in the last 20-25 years.
It seems that the adults who came in the 60s and 70s had more of the British colonial past attached to them, as India had just won its independence 20 years prior, but those who came 20-30 years later seem further removed?
India was just a baby in the sense of modern India; obviously, ancient India is truly ancient. But we were just so close to the time when the British Empire was ruling the world. The ones coming now, they’ve come here because of companies like Hewlett-Packard, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.
I would say, they’re very different people in that the world is different. But in terms of being immigrants, they still had to pick up and leave and go somewhere else. If you’ve picked up and moved, there’s something that shifts in your head. Our home country becomes our foreign country, and our foreign country becomes our home country. And we try to navigate that path between the two.
How did you, growing up in Chicago, connect with your roots as a teenager, as a young college student? Was it something obvious to you?
No, it wasn’t obvious. What was obvious to me was watching the Brady Bunch on television; watching the Chicago Cubs play baseball at Wrigley Field, and being socialized into that way of being.
One of the things my parents really insisted on, with all four children, was to speak English and sound like an American, this sense of fitting in. So it wasn’t obvious to connect back to India. There wasn’t the internet, there weren’t movies at home. That occasional movie that would play at IIT (Illinois Institute of Technology), felt like a foreign world. Lata Mangeshkar came one time and sang in that same hall. The music made no sense. What made sense was listening to The Beatles, listening to Cat Stevens.
In 1977, the year that I graduated from high school, my eldest brother graduated from college. My parents thought, well, it’s time for him to get married. My sister is just a year behind him, let’s think about her marriage.
They found spouses for both of my siblings, and that was my first time back to India in 1977. So more than a dozen years have gone by, I’ve never seen those relations in India. I knew them through aerograms, those little blue letters, and blue envelopes. It’s like you’re seeing your grandparents, uncles, aunties, and cousins through little scribbles on a piece of blue paper.
I went to India. It was this experience of I’m home, but I’m not. Everyone looked like me all of a sudden, so different from my Chicago experience. Raj is not an unusual name [there]. In the U.S. it’s like, “What an interesting, different name!” At 17 years old, I was going off to college, a place where you start to find who you are.
I was doing biomedical engineering and computer science but I was really interested in anthropology and cultures in India, Japan, and China. Who I am, where am I from, making sense of all of that.
There’s a movie by Satyajit Ray, this Bengali director, and the movie was Devi. It was playing in a little Hall at Northwestern and I was just transported. Wow, what a different way to do filmmaking, a different way to think about India. I started to spend all my time in the India part of the library, reading all these books about Gandhi ji, taking history, political science, anthropology classes on India, religion, and Hinduism. What a strange way for a Hindu to find out what it means to be a Hindu, by studying things written by more often than not non-Hindus, more often than not the British and Americans who were fascinated with India.
What’s interesting for me is in the last 15 to 20 years, there is this young crop of academics, brilliant, motivated folks, one of them a former editor (Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan) of India Currents, and they’re writing about India. They’re writing about what it means to be a Hindu, and what it means to be a South Asian.
In fiction, R.K. Narayan, one of the earliest writers of the Indian experience in English, V.S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie —there’s been this small, small building of the Indian voice, on the world’s stage.
But for me, how did (I) navigate the sense of Indian-ness? It was when I was a junior, and I was reading a book called Pather Panchali (about) this really interesting small boy in Bengal, trying to figure out who he is.
I just said this is what I’m going to do with my life, I am going to make sense of India for myself, and maybe others.
You were primarily raised in the U.S., yet your marriage to your wife Mangla was arranged. Why did you decide to go that route?
I remember that they (my parents) sat down with me, and they asked me, “Well, what do you want?”
I was on this road of finding out “who am I?” I really wanted to believe that I was still an Indian in some ways. My Hindi may be terrible, I speak what I call khichdi bhasha, a mixture of Hindi, Marwari, and Gujarati. My best language is English, but I have all these centuries before me that have informed who I am. Can I just let that go?
I was at this very pivotal point, what anthropologists call a turn. I just felt like that this was right for me, to find a kindred spirit, a soulmate.
One last question. How did you impart your culture or whatever you knew about your culture to your children?
Mangla and I talked quite a bit about “how will we raise our children?” We moved here because we wanted our daughter to be with family here in California. For quite a few years, we had four generations living under one roof, my grandparents, my parents, Mangla and myself, my brother Kamlesh and his wife, and four children. Family passes along that sense of what it means to be an Indian and an American. Part of it was the Ramayan and the Mahabharat were playing on these VHS tapes. We watched them together.
Mangla and I made a pact. We would go back to India every two years, forgo any other vacation, and the kids would spend the summer there with their Nana ji and Nani ji, Mangla’s parents. Anu’s Hindi is so much better than mine, partly because she was talking with her grandparents in India but also her great-grandparents here.
*Devon Avenue in Chicago, IL has sections named in honor of the communities who live there. Devon Avenue’s sections are named Gandhi Marg, Muhammed Ali Jinnah Way, and Golda Meier Blvd.
**The book is a book of poems called Leaving Yuba City
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This series was produced by India Currents in collaboration with CatchLight as part of the CatchLight Local CA Visual Desk. Contributors include Vandana Kumar, Meera Kymal, Mabel Jimenez, and Jenny Jacklin-Stratton. Learn more about CatchLight Local’s collaborative model for local visual journalism at https://www.catchlight.io/local
This series was made possible in part by funding provided by the State of California, administered by the California State Library in partnership with the California Department of Social Services and the California Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American Affairs as part of the Stop the Hate program.
Filoli is a Silver Connection Sponsor for the We Belong series.