“I had a slight America obsession,” says Arjun Appadurai, who grew up in Bombay and now teaches at the University of Chicago. “I was in the first wave of people in India for whom the mystique of the U.S. was pushing aside the mystique of England.”
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Appadurai, whose father was a Reuters correspondent and minister of publicity and propaganda for an Indian government in exile during World War II, got his sense of America from Humphrey Bogart movies, Life and Time magazines, novels by Harold Robbins, John Steinbeck, and John Updike. His older brother went to Stanford University, and in 1967 Appadurai won a scholarship to Brandeis. “When I arrived in New York City it was like I was returning, as if I was remembering things that I’d seen.” In 1970 he started work on his doctorate at the University of Chicago, where he studied social theory, including the modernization of postcolonial nations. “I wasn’t learning about the modernization of somebody else,” he says. “I was learning about my modernization.”
–Bill Stamets
