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This tangle of values is our Web, our culture. This new medium is a record of culture as much as ink and paper.

























If "homepages," like Walt Whitman's" Leaves of Grass," are "an attempt, from first to last, to put a Person, a human being. . . freely, fully and truly on record," you can see trends surface like ripples on the Asian Indian quilt.

By Angshuman Das

"Indians shop for mates on the Internet," says a headline on the CNN site on the World Wide Web, the graphic arm of the Internet and the newest window to personal publishing. The story describes an on-line classified ad on Indolink (www.indolink.com), a collection of links about India and Asian Indian life, that serves as a matchmaking device. The story, posted on April 21, says "the ancient Indian tradition of arranged marriages is still not only alive, it has spread to the global village, thanks to the Internet."
Ah! Arranged marriages. Few traditions are dearer to us than this concept. Asian Indian fiction writers dwell on marriages. Take, for instance, "Arranged Marriage" by Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni, or "The Suitable Boy," Vikram Seth's magnum opus. Questions from people from other cultures about arranged marriage find us in a spot as we struggle to explain.
Marriage is part of culture. Culture finds space in the nebulous cosmos of bits and bytes as much as in our lives and in print.
Matchmaking sites crop up to preserve culture and values. One pioneer, Vivah-Sambandhi (www.acornis.com/vivah/), is no mere matrimonial or dating service. On this site, marriage becomes for us a ranking of choices, a form that can scurry over the wires of a global network. You type in your preferences, and your profile brushes with somebody else's and the result flows neatly into your electronic mailbox.
The Internet combines for Asian Indians the power of the newest with antique tradition. "The aim of Vivah-Sambandhi," says the introduction, "is to incorporate elements of the trusted, traditional family matchmaker into a large scale matrimonial service." Children "are now demanding more freedom to find someone their own," but parents don't want to let go. With about 25 percent of the Asian Indian population in America U.S.-born, the clash between culture and modernity is likely to grow.
This tangle of values is our Web, our culture. This new medium is a record of culture as much as ink and paper.
For this essay, I searched the Yahoo! index, the oldest and the best-known, for "India personal pages." (I didn't use "Indian" because the index confuses Asian Indian with American Indian.) I browsed every fifth site in the resulting list. I browsed about 25, leaving those that took longer than 20 seconds to load and advancing to the next fifth.
If "homepages," like Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," are "an attempt, from first to last, to put a Person, a human being. . . freely, fully and truly on record," you can see trends surface like ripples on the Asian Indian quilt. The aggregate persona of an Asian Indian site shares many an attribute.

Nostalgia
One of the foremost is nostalgia. Our home pages have links to our native land. Links to Indo-link and Indiaserver (www.Indiaserver.com), two of the Indian "megasites," are common on Asian Indian homepages. They also contain links to the regions or cities their masters were born in. Hyperlinks to Indian movie and music sites are as common. Sridevi, a top actress on the Indian movie scene, peers out of our pages. Our sites sing Saregama, the Asian Indian octave. Saregama, a bunch of pages off the top-level of Indiaserver, boasts "the latest chart busters and the best new releases on-line." CDs of Ghulam Ali, the South Asian "ghazal" singer, and M.S.Subbulakshmi, the Indian classical singer, top the list.
If a homepage is "Song of Myself," the Internet is our courtyard, our "angan." We are a group of Net-savvy people. We roam cyberspace as if it's our backyard. A sizable number of Asian Indian professionals work in computer-related jobs. We have our own mailing lists, a dozen perhaps or more. I noticed recently Hindi music notes produced in Java, the "hot" programming language of the Internet. Some savvy guy had posted them on the Web.

Marriage as a leitmotif
Here we see marriage again. The blissful marriage between hi-tech and our native tradition. We shine in America's computer frontiers. We are Whitman's torchbearers. We jump the chasm of ocean between one democracy and another like a Hanuman. We blaze a trail from coast to coast, not only as professionals but as entrepreneurs. There are millionaires who have seized the software boom and Bose speakers are highly prized in America.

Hi-tech communication, no wonder, is native to us. Our lives reflect in the Web. It shows the dichotomy in our cultural identity. An article in American Demographics two years ago said the "dual existence" of purely American and traditional values of Asian Indians "has found an outlet in a flourishing subculture of Indo-American magazines." One of the magazines (www.masala.com) rides the Web. From the mission statement of the magazine are culled these lines: Just as the African-American community has a variety of platforms through which it builds an image and a voice ‚ as do the Hispanic, and East-Asian communities ‚ the time has come for a professional, educated, and dedicated force to emerge that will bind the South Asian community and create a bridge between it and the rest of America. The Web becomes the bridge, then, to create a link from the "subculture" to the world at large. This subculture spans arranged marriage, on one hand, and gay rights, on the other. Tucked away in one cranny of the vast Web is a site called Trikone. This is a magazine of a group of gay South Asians in North America. One of the current issues explores lesbian desire.
We have arrived. Our desire, our angst, our tradition, our tangled Web.

Angshuman Das has just finished a master's degree in mass communication at the University of South Carolina. He has been a culture vulture and a Web surfer. He can be reached at adas@sc.edu. He was a journalist in a former avatar in India.
Your essays are invited for this column on any topic related to Asian Indian life in the United States.