MY BEGININGS

"The land of India is unlike any other in the world, for it bears in it a spirit that has changed human hearts for thousands of years.

Rudyard Kipling

Like many Americans, I am an immigrant. However, being an immigrant from India, I bear a unique connection to America's roots because America's own native peoples, the Indians, were inadvertently named after my own people by the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus in 1492. Having convinced Queen Isabella of Spain he had figured out a cheap and quick way to get to India's precious silks and spices, Columbus was financially backed by the Spanish monarch, and the rest is, as they say, history.

Perhaps it is ironic that my journey to get to America runs in opposition to Columbus in his effort to get to India. Columbus died believing himself a failure for never reaching my country because he did not see the "vision" of what he had discovered. And though the people he mistakenly called "Indians" of the "West Indies" did not particularly share in the wealth of the later nation, these misnamed natives are perhaps a karmic connection to the successes myself and many Indians have enjoyed in recent decades in this "Land of Opportunity."

As you will see, Indians, whether they were natives of the Western Hemisphere or from the East, were originally never really welcomed by the dominant Anglo-European culture of America. But then neither were the Irish, nor the Italians, nor the Africans, nor the Mexicans, nor even the Jews. And yet if you remove this mosaic of world peoples from the cultural heritage of the United States, you would find a very bland and empty land.

To begin with, I am a Gujarati. I come from a region in India in the northwest, bordered by Rajasthan in the northeast, Pakistan in the northwest, Maharashtra in the south, and the Arabian Sea in the west. It is a beautiful land of contrasts with simple villages and several large city centers. Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Patel, both Gujaratis, were sons of this soil. Current Prime Minister Narendra Modi and several of the richest businessmen of India are also sons of this soil. It is a region that characteristically has harbored a variety of communities and sects. Hindus, Muslims, Jains, Parsees, and Christians have all mingled in Gujarat or declined to mingle. The diversity of religious cultures is historic to the region.

Gujaratis are known mostly for being merchants. For centuries they have been acknowledged as hard working and industrious. They were some of the first expatriates from India to seek their fortunes in other lands like Africa, Asia, and Europe to better their lot in life. This movement to a new location is something in our blood. It is a theme that I have seen in my own life and in many of my fellow Gujarati countrymen; that is, a change of home may often bring a change of life. Even Gandhi lived this philosophy when one looks at the various locations to which his life took him, whether it was Gujarat, England, South Africa, and his several homes in India.

When I was born, the British still controlled India. India had become a prize for the Empire as a source of cloth, spices, soldiers, tea, and diamonds. Diamonds, for example, were first discovered in India in 400 BC, and sold all over the world for thousands of years. By the Middle Ages, diamond-cutting centers were established in Amsterdam and other locations of Europe due to a thriving trade that often involved Jews. These "jewelers," because of Christian Europe's anti-Semitism, were unable to own land. They therefore dabbled in precious stones and moneylending as a way of financial security.

By the 18th Century, when India was firmly entrenched as the "jewel" of the British crown, London had become the diamond-cutting center of the world. British cloth made from and by Indian craftsmen was the choice of the world. The saffron, pepper and teas enjoyed by people from the American colonies to Madrid were controlled by the British colonial occupation of India. They were also exporters of Afghan opium to China. It was this exceptional economic advantage of having India as a part of the British Empire that made Britain so resistant to India's later struggle for independence.

Gujarat, like other areas of India, had been divided up by the British into regions controlled by either the British Raj or the Princely States. Most of Gujarat was Hindu and composed of four divisions or castes: the Brahmins (priests or scholars), the Kshatriyas (nobles or warriors), the Vaisyas (merchants or farmers), and the Sudras (workers). From my earliest recollections, my family used to say that the Doshis were originally of the Kshatriyas or Rajput caste from Rajasthan. The family tree shows that one, Kasidas Doshi, some eighteen generations ago, migrated southwest to Gujarat (around 500 years or so ago). Rajputs are known as warriors who often took on the Moguls and Muslims when they invaded the subcontinent.

A group of Rajputs, probably our close cousins, who were defeated by the invaders left India, migrating toward the Middle East and Central Europe. Before they left, these Kshatriyas (warriors) made a vow that they would return when they were strong to retake the lands the Muslims took from them. However, the Rajputs, now known as gypsies, never returned to India. Instead they traveled throughout Europe, settling in Spain, Hungary, and then moving or relocating to various regions of Europe, from Rome and Naples to Vienna and Sarajevo. This migration is characteristic of the spirit of the Rajputs, a spirit that has mingled with many of the Gujarati Vaisyas who were Rajputs before conversion. It is a spirit found in my own family.

Kasidas and his fellow migrants became Vaisyas, also known as Vahanyas, based on economic needs. It is interesting to note that the name "banyan" came from the writer's caste "Bania," derived from the Gujarati name "va(ha)nias," meaning boat businessmen (vahan in Gujarati means sailboats), travelling as far as Java and Sumatra. Among Gujaratis, baniya or vanias implies they are grocers or merchants by profession. The last name Doshi comes from the word "dosh" in Gujarati, meaning a sin or serious offense. There is a popular Gujarati story recited by a Gujarati poet, Narsinh Mehta, claiming that Lord Krishna, one of the avatars of the Divine Being, appears as a doshi vanio (from vanias) wandering from village to village to sell cheap rough cloth.

The Portuguese picked up the word "banya" to refer specifically to Hindu merchants and passed it along...