The guy was an all-American hulk with reddish hair. The kind who punctuates his sentences with duh. I’d say he was more Moose than Archie. I saw him swagger towards me from the corner of an eye, and quickly said a prayer asking the Lord above to send the gentleman off in a different direction. No such luck: he extended a bulky freckled arm and asked me for a dance.

I froze. I was all of 17 and an undergraduate in a toffee-nosed college for women in New England – at least the college was at the time before it went co-ed. Now, there is – or was – a peculiar tradition called a mixer. This quaint American ritual involves unleashing young men from an all-male college onto a supposedly prim girl’s college so that they can mix ’n’ match during the special dance nights. Like a tribal rite in so-called primitive societies.

“Can I have this dance?” he asked, a bit smugly. It would have been rude to say no. Besides, the two friends I had come with had vanished with two of the invading sophomores from Dartmouth. The Ivy College which had dispatched the young men south to Connecticut College for Women was, at the time, For Men Only.

Alas, I had made the mistake of wearing a sari. “Where are you from?” Mr Dartmouth (no Mr Darcy this one) inquired, puzzled by the yardage I had clumsily wrapped myself in. “I’m Indian,” I replied. “You Indian?” he asked. I nodded. “How!” he chuckled, raising one hand with his palm facing me, as Red Indians in B-grade Westerns do, while greeting others. Sorry, better make that native-Americans in this era of political correctness.

Country of snake charmers
Evidently, an Indian woman had never crossed his path until this moment. Remember, this was once upon a time, a long time ago. India was not really present on the mind-map of most North Americans. Were it to be, India would be a faraway land of snake charmers, the rope trick, maharajas and elephants – an image of cliché India that still persists with a large swath of the population there.

Oh, yes, and women being forced onto the funeral pyres of their freshly departed husbands. An image inked in the minds of many occidentals, courtesy Jules Verne’s popular novel, Around the World in Eighty Days. Not to speak of the many film adaptations of the book, and of other works of fiction in which the oriental damsels were always being rescued by noble white men.

I exaggerate. But Indian women were clearly beyond the horizon of the average American. They were either exotic beings, objects of curiosity: they might as well have been from another planet with a do-not-touch halo hovering over their draped appearances. Or, worse, Indian women were invisible.

The rare exceptions included the late and formidable Indira Gandhi who presided over a nation of millions, and the phenomenally beautiful Maharani Gayatri Devi of Jaipur. The stubborn cliché about India is that it is comprised of the fabulously wealthy princely class and the unbelievably poor.

Fortunately, this cliché’s taken a lot of battering ever since the economy started ticking (post-liberalisation) and the irresistible rise and rise of the Indian middle class. Prominent on this altered landscape are women achievers. They sit comfortably and confidently in boardrooms, increasingly hold the reins of diverse industries, and are at the helm of many large banks.

American desi
But what has changed the perception of Indian women the most on that side of the Atlantic Ocean are the abundant success stories of the desi-American girls on home ground. Many of them whom made it to the pinnacles of their chosen professions: corporate honchos like Indira Nooyi (CEO of Pepsi) and literary celebrities Jhumpa Lahiri (Pulitizer Prize winner for fiction and member of US President Barack Obama’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities) or high-octane glamour figures Padma Laxmi (celebrity chef and former wife of Salman Rushdie. Not to speak of a myriad scientists and researchers.

And then, there’s Bollywood. Aishwarya Rai and Sushmita Sen may have charmed that nation – at least those who watch Oprah Winfrey, but it was Freida Pinto, who courtesy Danny Boyle and Slumdog Millionaire – and the many Oscars the film harvested – caught eyeballs, nationwide. She’s not done yet.

But the desi gal (well, desi-American) to have truly made it into mainstream consciousness in the US (and is probably there to stay) is Nikki Haley, previously known as Nimrata Nikki Randhawa. Last month this Haley streaked across the American political firmament like the comet with which she shares a name. The 38-year-old, striking-looking Sardarni (her parents are Sikh immigrants) from a small town in South Carolina has won the Republican primary for governor of this deeply conservative Southern state.

If she wins in November she will not only be the first non-white governor of South Carolina (a state know for its ole’ boy network where racial discrimination was well-ensconced until not too long ago), she would be the first woman to occupy the gubernatorial chair. And even if she doesn’t, Haley will undoubtedly, according to the political pundits, be a prominent figure in the Republican Party at the national level. She’s obviously going the Bobby Jindal way, the Indian-American Republican governor of Louisiana, another southern state.

Like Jindal, Haley has assimilated perfectly into the landscape – social and political. Both offloaded names and religions (she is a Methodist) en route to power. She was also luckier with her name: while Jindal dropped his first name (Piyush), Haley simply used her middle name. Nikki is an affectionate Punjabi word for the little one.

Dressed immaculately in sharply cut suits, rich in colour, and shoulder length brown hair this woman on the rise conducted a dignified electoral campaign, deftly deflecting both racial slurs (‘raghead’) and allegations about marital infidelities. Haley, who is married to a white American and has two children, looks like an all-American desi, with her perfect American smile and beauty pageant winner teeth.

What’s gone right for this new bright star on the political stage is the fact that, increasingly, ethnicity appears to matter less for political candidates. When you can have a black president in America, it may just be possible to see a brown person occupy the coveted chair in the Oval Room.

Perhaps a desi-American woman could get there faster.

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