Jhumpa Lahiri as cultural commentary; quality vs. quantity

TNR has a new piece titled The Assimilation Artist, which has the subheading “Jhumpa Lahiri’s books are more about the coastal elite experience than they are about the Indian-American one.” Well, that’s because the Indian American experience is in large part the coastal elite experience. Here are the numbers from the Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey for levels of education of Hindus and the general population:

Obviously not all Indian Americans are Hindu, but they are a good proxy for the general trends. Below are the outmarriage rates for Indian Americans who were born or predominantly raised in the United States:

From the TNR piece:

But this example also highlights the big difference between Neil Klugman’s world and Gogol’s: Neil’s universe was wholly insular–all Jewish. Roth painstakingly depicts a divide between Jews who’d “made it” financially and those who hadn’t, but the characters themselves never interact socially with anyone who isn’t Jewish. Lahiri’s Bengalis, in contrast, interact constantly with other types of Americans.
Sure, the immigrant parents in Lahiri’s stories might prefer it if their children were confined to Indian social networks, but that proves to be an impossible hope in this new America, the one in which Neil Klugman’s children would have grown up alongside Gogol Ganguli and George Herbert Van Wasp III. In this world, dress matters, home decor matters, and a Brooklyn vs. a Manhattan address says something about who you are–artsy or professional–but judging someone because of the language their parents speak at home? Totally gauche.

The author makes a good point that America has changed a great deal. But numbers need to be kept in perspective. The number of Americans of Jewish background peaked sometime around 1950 at about 5% of the population. And obviously around areas like the greater New York City metropolitan region the concentration would have been much greater. Indian Americans today are around ~ 0.30% of the population. Like Jewish Americans, Indian Americans are ethnically diverse, but the fragmentation is greater. The distinction between the early German Jews from Bavaria and the later waves of Eastern European Jews was certainly of note, but this pales in comparison to the contrasts between Punjabi or Tamil culture (a good Jewish analogy might be the differences between Sephardic, Ashkenazi and Mizrachi Jews, but in the United States almost all Jews are Ashkenazi). Additionally, the demographic balance after 1890 favored the Eastern European Jews so that German Jews were only a small relatively assimilated elite. In contrast, Indian Americans are more variegated; about 1/2 are Gujarati (generally banias), 1/4 Punjabi, with the balance rounded out by hodge-podge of groups.
All these factors contribution to the far greater emulsification of Indian Americans into the “mainstream” than Jews during the first half of the 20th century. If one takes 1910 as the high tide of Jewish immigration; 50 years later in 1960 the outmarriage rate of American Jews was still less than 10%. Today it is on the order of 30-50% depending on which surveys you trust. Native born Indian Americans have already reached the low end of the Jewish range of exogamy, less than 50 years after the first large waves of Indians arrived on these shores.
I think all these points suggest that we need to be very careful in drawing analogies between the present and the past. Not only has America changed, but the structural parameters which define the Indian American immigrant stream is very different from that of late 19th and early 20th century Jews.
Note: My friend Manish Vij points out that the lives of the children of the immigrants of the 1965-1985 period might not be predictive of the generation who are the offspring of the 1985-2005 waves. I think this is a fair point; there are many more brown people today in the United States than when I was a kid. Jumping around Facebook I find it strange to young see Indian Americans whose first-degree friends are almost invariably other Indian Ameicans; but I think this points to the fact that the Indian American experience is going to be hard to generalize because of the diversity of the immigrant streams and the relative freedom that American society now offers newcomers.