This is a book that deals with Indian experience in a part of America after the 1960s. There are a lot of books examining the American experience in different stages of its history. Kalita - a speaker at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas event this weekend - spoke to Senior Editor Arthur J Pais recently. Two decades ago, not far away from Middlesex County, a gang of youth called Dotbusters had gone around beating and abusing South Asian immigrants. Kalita recounts the now familiar story of how Indian-American shopkeepers regularly contend with vandalism. She notes how their mark on this region has been gradual but increasingly visible: auto-repair shops named after 'Deepa' and 'Singh,' a thriving commercial strip of sari stores and sweet shops, and valedictorians named Patel and Shah.īut, like other immigrants throughout American history, Indian immigrants too did not find it easy to be welcomed in the community. The book, published by Rutgers University Press, is a study of Middlesex County in New Jersey, home to one of the largest group of Indians in America. In her book she focuses on three families and on why they left India, and how their American Dream has been working out. Kalita, an education reporter for The Washington Post, is the daughter of immigrants from India. Instead, it studies how immigration has altered an American suburb, and how that suburb has altered the immigrants.

It does not intend to tell the story of 1.7 million Indians in America. S Mitra Kalita says her first book Suburban Sahibs has a modest goal.

Suburban Sahibs by S. Mitra Kalita