If Kamala Harris wins the presidential election in November, she will not only be the first woman president of the US but also the first of Indian origin. If she loses, Americans will have, for the first time, a Second Lady of Indian origin. Usha Vance, wife of J. D. Vance, Donald Trump's running mate, is a self-confessed Hindu and vegetarian. "Indian Americans are becoming a political force," wrote the New York Times in July. The latter have five senators and 40 representatives in federal state legislatures, giving them a political influence that far exceeds their demographic weight.
According to a census published in 2023, the 4.4 million Indians now outnumber the Chinese diaspora in the US. And they're not just influential on the political scene. Twenty-five of the 500 largest American companies are headed by Indians, including Microsoft, YouTube, Google and Adobe, compared with just 11 a decade ago. The rise of this diaspora is a recent development, coinciding with the arrival of Indian engineers in Silicon Valley from the 2000s onwards. In the US, Indians are the best-paid and most highly educated migrants.
To explain this success, the US press readily cites the Indian elite's mastery of English, their native tongue, their familiarity with the electoral and, to a certain extent, democratic system, and the excellence of Indian higher education – the famous Indian Institutes of Technology – in the US's favorite field, new technologies. Caste is rarely mentioned, no doubt because members of the upper castes prefer to emphasize their merit rather than the privilege associated with their origin.
And yet, belonging to a particular caste could well explain their incredible success in the US. Kamala Harris' mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who came to the US in 1958, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and former Pepsico CEO Indra Nooyi are all Tamil Brahmins, also known as tambrams.
The caste of scholars and priests
This tiny South Indian community, with just 2 million members in the country and only 50,000 in the US, is over-represented in the American elite. This is the highest Indian caste, that of the learned or priests. Among them, mathematics is a religion and education is highly valued. They are passionate about Carnatic music and classical dance. During British colonial rule, they occupied senior civil service posts, but after Indian independence and the introduction of quotas reserved for the lower castes in the upper echelons of the administration, they turned to the IT industry and created global giants in this sector, such as Infosys or Wipro, or migrated abroad.
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