When Jessie Natarajan, 36, first traveled to India from the U.S. it was to get married.
[Details of wedding]
Today, many families in the U.S. are multicultural. According to the Pew Research group, 12 percent of newlyweds married someone of a different race in 2013 versus just 7 percent in 1980. According to the Census report, projections of the Size and Composition of the U.S. Population: 2014 to 2060, by 2020 more than half of the nation’s children are expected to be part of a minority race or ethnic group.
Many immigrants looked to assimilate into American culture …. Today, we see more and more people choosing to preserve their cultural ties to back home and share that with their children.
Jessie grew up in Rochester, New York, later moving to Long Island in middle school. Raised in a Protestant Christian-Italian family, she did not know much about Indian culture until meeting her husband Raghav.
“We met and we got married six months later. I think I thought I knew a lot about India because I like went to some yoga classes, but no I had no idea really, it was all completely foreign.”
Jessie was working at her dream job as a speech pathologist at Vassar Brothers Medical Center in Poughkeepsie when a mutual friend introduced the pair. Raghav was born and raised in Southern India in the city of Chennai before moving to the U.S. to attend grad school at Marist College for computer science.
Although Jessie viewed herself as open-minded and was eager to travel, reality was much harsher than she prepared for.
“It was so weird, like the first two times I went there I would just be like standing there and I’d be telling myself like ‘I’m on earth,’ and India’s on earth and so is America. Because it actually felt so foreign that I didn’t feel like I was on earth, it was so out there,” Jessie said.
When she first journeyed 24-hours across the world to meet her husband’s family and to get married she was miserable and scared. Exhausted from the extensive travel, she felt her body begin to “shut down” when exposed to all these new elements.
“The waters different, the foods different, the smells are different, the sounds are different, everything is so different that you’re body just shuts down.”
Jessie was shocked on her first night there to come into Raghav’s parent’s kitchen to find cockroaches all over the place. This completely disgusted her. Overheated, exhausted and suffering from dysentery from the food and water she gave her husband an ultimatum: that she would never move there and that if he wanted to be with her that he has to accept that they will always live in the U.S.
It wasn’t until Jessie’s third trip that she changed her mind. She decided to accept her experiences there without comparing or trying to make it into a “western experience.” After making that conscious effort to embrace India without the shackles of ethnocentrism, she loves it there now and would like to move there or buy a second home there someday.
Veda, 6, has been to India four times and Henri, 1, celebrated his first birthday there. They all try to go as a family at least once a year for a couple of months at a time so that Veda and Henri are exposed to their cultural roots and get to spend time with their family that is there.
Here in America, the family keeps the culture alive. They cook traditional Indian food at home, which was an easy transition from Jessie’s diet prior to meeting Raghav. Although she comes from a traditional first-generation Italian family, she had personally been vegetarian. Raghav’s family had been vegetarian going back “thousands of years,” because in the Hindu religion meat, especially beef is forbidden. Jessie says that they eat a 90% south-Indian diet, which did take her body a while to adjust to because she was introduced to a lot of spices she had never eaten before.
Jessie also practices Ayruveda, which is ancient system of medicine rooted in India.
“It’s like Chinese medicine but it’s Indian medicine. So like for instance when it’s really hot they would say in my husband’s family ‘don’t eat mango’ because it heats the body. They drink a lot of milk, because the cow is the mother of all humans because they give milk, so you should never kill a cow.”
Jessie never formally converted to Hinduism, but that’s because she didn’t have to.
“What’s interesting about Hinduism is that there’s really no conversion, because they believe that anyone who identifies with the god inside of them, like if we all come from a divine source, once you recognize that, that’s the definition of being Hindu,” Jessie said.
She identifies with Hinduism more than she ever did with Christianity. It liberated her and allowed her to have a “religious and spiritual experience” in her life.
“I love the Hindu way of life and spirituality so we definitely integrate that into our lives.”
Although Jessie’s family is religious, they don’t mind her practicing something other than Christianity. They embrace these cultural differences with open arms, respect and curiosity.