Dhruv Pathak
By Dhruv Pathak
In 2018, I was in my parents’ family room in Charlotte, with CNN playing in the background. This talk felt different from their usual reminders to find a job and settle down. There was less guilt and more focus on solutions. My dad leaned in and spoke the most. “I agree with you,” he said. “Racism is bad. Things in this country aren’t good. But it’s not your responsibility. Write, make videos, post on Facebook, but stay away from the jhandha (flag).” My mom filled the quiet moments, as if she were adding lines to a hip-hop song.
They worried about my safety, and about who might notice me, what people would say, and who those people might tell.
That feeling has a name: log kya kahenge, which means “what will people say?” The shame it brings runs deeper than personal embarrassment. It’s different from the fear most Americans carry. An American who skips a protest might worry about their job or getting arrested. We worry about that, as well as about our family’s reputation. A South Asian protester’s actions can affect their parents’ standing at the mandir and elsewhere where the family is known. In 2026, 18% of Indian Americans say they avoid political protests and rallies, and I’m sure many have heard something like what I heard eight years ago.
But bhai, it’s been over 60 years. Please didi, aunty, uncle, hear me out: can we, as a people with the world’s oldest living religion and one of the oldest civilizations, move beyond being seen only for our pretty saris and kurtas, our skill at dance, our spicy food, and a religion that seems mythical to our Anglo-American counterparts? We perform these things everywhere: to American colleagues who want to feel welcoming, to aunties at the mandir, to the WhatsApp groups comparing careers, at every event where we feel we have to prove ourselves.
And we are a highly accomplished technocratic community that runs hospitals, writes the code behind today’s most advanced technology, leads Fortune 500 companies, and builds impressive wealth. Yet after sixty years, we still define ourselves only by our achievements, not by who we are as people. That is the problem: success has become our identity.
Two hundred fifty years ago, on July 4th, a group of Englishmen did something remarkable: they demanded complete freedom. They didn’t ask to be treated more fairly by the empire that governed them; they’d already tried that, and it only made their suffering worse. They refused the entire arrangement, the idea that their self-perception was something a distant power got to determine. That refusal is what the Declaration of Independence really stands for. On our country’s 250th anniversary, it brings up a simple question for us: what have we, as South Asian Americans, ever refused?
Think about that question. Refusal and acceptance only make sense when they work together as opposites. If a group has never refused anything, it can’t really say what it has accepted. Our situation has become so familiar that it feels like furniture that was already here when we arrived, so ordinary that no one remembers who put it there or that it can be moved.
Let’s name what we have accepted. We accepted being seen as the high-achieving professional class without asking whether that was what we wanted or just what was available. We accepted being almost invisible in places where America shapes its identity. South Asian women have only 0.3% of screen time in film and TV, and we are rarely found in writers’ rooms or on school boards.
Strangest of all, we accepted the same system our grandparents fought against for two centuries. The British ruled India with files, exams, and ranks. In 1835, Thomas Macaulay laid out the plan in writing: train a class of Indians to be, in his own words, “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect,” interpreters who would stand between the empire and the people it governed.
The 1965 Act passed in the United States picked exactly those people, the ones who passed exams and held credentials. We crossed the ocean and became experts at this system, with our right to be here kept in a filing cabinet and renewed with every petition.
When a community never questions the empire’s paperwork, it inherits the bureaucracy: a seat near the top as payment for silence.
Think about how we see ourselves. Our heritage shows us what we don’t have to accept if we refuse to be boxed in as just the smart, hard-working, silent, or ascetic type. We come from mathematicians who gave the world zero and infinity in the same breath, from philosophers who explored consciousness before the West even had a word for the soul, and from people who faced the British Empire with only moral clarity, nonviolence, and hunger, and still brought it down.
Even here in the United States, Punjabi Sikh laborers started the Ghadar Party in San Francisco in 1913, a group few people know about. They organized inside a climate that was only getting worse: white mobs had already driven Punjabi mill workers out of Bellingham, Washington, in 1907, and Congress would bar almost all Indian immigration within a few years under the 1917 Barred Zone Act. The party’s goal was to overthrow British rule in India by force.
Its members published a newspaper smuggled back to Punjab and built a network of supporters among Indian immigrants and soldiers worldwide. In 1920, they marched ten thousand strong with Irish immigrants to the Liberty Bell, taking the Declaration’s promise of inalienable rights more seriously than most people celebrating it this July. They weren’t performing for anyone. They knew who they were and demanded to be seen that way. That heritage doesn’t belong in a museum. It’s a living story if we choose to claim it.
Within our community, there’s a divide that our professional success makes easy to ignore. Indian Americans have the highest median household income of any ethnic group in the country, and people often use that as proof that the 1965 Immigration Act’s selection policies worked.
But there’s another side. We own about 60% of US hotels, most of which are cleaned by working-class Indians, and we lead 11 Fortune 500 companies with tens of thousands of H-1B visa employees. At the same time, over 90% of New York City’s cab drivers are immigrants, most of them South Asian, working without basic labor protections. Many Bangladeshi New Yorkers, especially recent arrivals, face a poverty rate close to one-third. The median Bangladeshi household earns about $78,000 a year, compared to about $151,000 for the median Indian household. Same diaspora, half the income.
In this country, people see the Punjabi truck driver in Fresno and the software executive in Palo Alto as the same kind of success story. That kind of thinking makes us forget important differences. We came here in large numbers because Black Americans opened doors that were never meant for us, but we rarely acknowledge that. Now we’re repeating that forgetting within our own community. The dividing line was never about credentials; a motel owner with no degree counts as much as a surgeon. The real difference is between those with capital or a salary and those without, and the second group is excluded from what Indian American success means.
What my parents said in that family room and the 32% poverty rate are part of the same problem: a community that thinks its only responsibility is to itself. If people measure their value only by what they produce, they will eventually find that the market changes, as it always does.
It’s tempting to look for one person to blame, a single villain standing in for the whole system. Idi Amin was the villain for Uganda’s Asian minority, who ran much of the country’s commerce, and announced on the radio in 1972 that the Asians had ninety days to leave the country. The United States usually works differently, taking smaller steps that never need a single name attached to them.
Between 1929 and 1936, in a campaign historians call Mexican Repatriation, as many as a million people of Mexican descent were removed from this country, most of them American citizens, and no president ever signed a single order making it happen.
County relief boards across the Southwest found it cheaper to buy train tickets than to pay a benefit check, so they bought the tickets. No single date marks when it happened, because it happened a hundred different ways at once, each one small enough to defend on its own terms. Not a door slamming shut. A thousand smaller ones, easing closed, none of them bearing a name.
We’re facing a quieter version of the same problem now, arriving the same way: in pieces. New H-1B petitions carry a $100,000 fee, which is still being challenged in court. The lottery itself changed, too. It used to be a flat, random draw; now it’s weighted by salary, so a senior engineer’s odds of getting picked went up by more than 100% this year, while an entry-level engineer’s odds were cut almost in half.
No single agency decided to push us out. A fee here, a formula there, a few months of paperwork in limbo: the same system, dressed up for a different decade.
A conditional welcome was never really about being Indian. It’s about staying useful at a price that fits a neat formula. Mexican labor was welcome until it became a line on a relief budget.
Indian labor is welcome as long as its wages stay above a certain level. Both exclusions happen in pieces so small that no one is held responsible for the whole, which is what log kya kahenge has always tried to guard against. Silence is not a contract. No one agreed to it. It’s just a habit we mistake for safety, and habits can be broken.
Sixty years ago, our parents came here with two things: memories of their civilization and professional credentials. America only cared about the credentials. Those degrees got us into hospitals and good school districts. The other part, the heritage of people who once refused an empire, was left at the door, like shoes outside a mandir. No one threw it away.
We just never went back for it. So the next fifty years for Indian Americans depend on a choice we haven’t made yet: go back and claim it, or admit that just getting through the door was all we ever wanted?
Dhruv Pathak is a salesman and writer based in St. Louis, originally from Charlotte, NC. He writes to better understand people and contribute to our shared humanity. Contact: pathak.d@icloud.com.
