The recent calamity in Mumbai, put India smack in the middle of the fiery geopolitical world stage. However, in general, the American public knows even less about India than it knows about China -- and far less than it understands about the fiery Middle East. This has got to change.
The misplaced priorities of our educational system and our mass news media can be blamed, if obvious culprits are needed for fingering. Few Americans realize that India has more people than any other country except China and, like China, is a rising power with a nuclear arsenal. But China operates under a notorious authoritarian system, whereas India operates under a multi-party parliamentary democracy. This makes it the world's largest democracy, period.
Yet by and large, many Americans in the world's greatest democracy are probably more familiar with the general contours of the surface of the moon than with the contours of India.
Notable exceptions to this generalized ignorance are far and few between, but they do exist. For example, expertise about India can be found in those large clusters of Asian Indians who live in scattered communities around the U.S. Many Indians in America come from a professional class, are extremely well educated, and are totally plugged in to the developments back home in South Asia.
The states of Illinois and Texas can brag of more Indian residents than any other Asian ethnicity. In New York, their numbers are topped only by the Chinese and in California only by the Filipinos and the Chinese. These figures come to us via the East-West Center in Honolulu, that invaluable trans-Pacific intellectual and policy bridge.
Its latest effort is bannered, appropriately, as "Asia Matters for America" (www.asiamattersforamerica.org) The study lays out the growing dimensions of America's increasing Asianization. Between 2004 and 2006, it reports, the increase in America's "Asian alone" population (people who are 100 percent ethnically Asian of one Asian nationality or more) was four times greater than general population growth. Today, of the entirety of America's foreign-born population, fully a quarter hails from Asia. It turns out that the fastest growing Asian subgroups are Vietnamese, Filipino and Indian.
They do not all profile in the same way. Sometimes the Indian population is thought to be the politically quietest of the lot, but this is deceiving. They tend to be active politically and they may be the least disinclined of all Asian groups to stick up for their viewpoint.
In one sense, you can't blame them. Their extraordinary country deserves much better media coverage and a far better effort at a general understanding by the public.
Lately, however, elite groups in the U.S. have begun acting as if India's time may have finally arrived in America. After years of preoccupation with China, major think-tank spotlights are moving to illuminate South Asian issues. Recently, the Pacific Council on International Policy, a foreign-policy study group, said it will soon issue a major report on the U.S.-India relationship.
To produce the task-force report, U.S. business leaders have been working in close partnership with counterparts at the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI), an Indian business association. Key drivers of the effort at improving understanding are Richard F. Celeste, former U.S. ambassador to India, and Dr. Amit Mitra, FICCI's secretary general.
Another important and useful effort is designed to appeal to a broader audience. Courtesy of the superb Public Broadcasting System, a six-hour documentary mini-series comes to American TV sets this month. It is delightfully narrated by pop historian Michael Wood, in a gorgeous production by Maya Vision International.
They are calling it nothing less grandiose than "The Story of India", a TV series that originally was aired by the British Broadcasting Corp. in 2007 to mark, with respect, the 60th anniversary of the independence of India and Pakistan from you-know-who.
The engrossing documentary briskly traverses the 10,000-year history of the Indian subcontinent. It should serve to remind us Americans that, while our country is a relative national newbie, India's (like China's) has been around, festering and developing, for millenia. Finally, please go see "Slumdog Millionaire" for a quick cinematic fix on India. It's set in Mumbai, a city with a population of 13 million -- of which 60 percent live in what are now officially Asia's largest slums. The film's brilliance is that it doesn't skate over this reality, even as it entertains and becomes the easiest-going-down quick passage to India I can imagine. It's a gem, and you'll learn some things. I did.
Veteran U.S. journalist Tom Plate, a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, taught Asia media and politics at UCLA for years. @ Pacific Perspectives Media Center.
