The tides of post-WWII U.S. began to strengthen migration between the U.S. and South Asia, even though immigration itself did not pick up drastically. The lives of academics during the 1950s and '60s show a bit about the migratory paths South Asians followed and forged in the world of university scholarship, both to enter and remain in the United States. This is one of the topics I am studying for my PhD dissertation. From what I’ve found so far, most who came for scholarly purposes did not intend initially to immigrate. In fact, most of those who came to the U.S. as students returned to their homeland, choosing to maintain their national identity and life-long investment in South Asian countries of origin. But economic, social, and political vagaries eventually led some to settle in the United States. While abroad, they tried to maintain ties with their families back home, even as the distance could modify and strain those ties. The South Asian population that developed in the U.S. after WWII, then, can be understood as a transnational community - existing in networks that crossed and often superseded national boundaries and identities.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar demonstrates these strong but strained familial ties well. Chandrasekhar, who received the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics for his mathematical theories of stellar evolution, lived his life intently focused on his research interests. In 1930, Chandra (as his friends called him) left Madras, India, to study physics in Cambridge, England. He desired to study physics at the highest level. Although Indian universities taught and were expanding teaching of sciences such as physics, even the best ones often prioritized applied sciences over theoretical sciences, seeing them as the answer to India’s industrial and agricultural development post-independence. Nevertheless, Chandra’s mind turned to theoretical analysis and calculations, so he turned his gaze on Cambridge where some of the era’s stars of Physics resided. Chandra had earlier immersed himself in their theories through reading their publications and those of the Royal Astronomical Society. Now, he would work with the likes of R. H. Fowler, A. S. Eddington, and Paul Dirac.
Unlike many Indian students studying abroad, at Cambridge Chandrasekhar kept mostly to himself, working on research rather than seeking out social gatherings of peers. Research in isolation was not a new experience for Chandra. In his undergraduate studies in India, no classmates had ever shared his interests in Fermi statistics or “the theory of polytopes”.[2] His single-minded focus on research in England, however, came from a different place. Although his knowledge of physics made him an expert at Presidency College in Madras and even earned him a prize for an essay on quantum theory, his time in England put his genius into context, surrounded as he was with so many other top minds. Years later, Chandrasekhar would remember, “[W]hen I went to England, I had a shattering experience; to suddenly find myself in an environment where there were people like Dirac and Eddington and Rutherford and Hardy…is a very very strong sobering experience. I was extremely optimistic in India, before I left India; but once I came to England I became very sobered if not humiliated. I didn't really know whether there was any possibility for me to accomplish in the world I found myself.”[3] In the presence of the academic elite whose works shaped the fields of physics and astrophysics, Chandrasekhar clung to discipline as his path forward.[4] Thus, he did not seek out opportunities for social activities or political causes to join; he focused on doing “the best I can,” making advances in research to quell the imposter syndrome so common to graduate students in general. After completing a PhD at Cambridge and a post-doctoral Prize Fellowship at Trinity College, Chandrasekhar embarked on a career at the University of Chicago. This involved decades of small-town living in Williams Bay, WI, while Chandrasekhar researched at Yerkes Observatory and taught graduate classes. The academic work that one day would earn him such renown and go on to influence later astrophysics models stemmed from this kind of single-minded investment.
However, Chandrasekhar’s focused academic work can hide the family ties that he maintained over his years abroad. He was a family man as well as a man of science, which meant that traveling overseas undid neither the ties that bound him to his family nor the responsibilities they entailed. Although Chandra would later remember his family as being “very much behind” his career choice and education in England, they still expected certain things of him, particularly marriage. As one family friend put it, “It is high time that he gets married and settled in life before he goes on such enterprises [as accepting a job] even if he is not staying in India.”[5] Happily, Chandra had kept in touch with his girlfriend from Presidency College in Madras - a fellow physics student, Lalithambika (Lalitha) Doraiswamy. While they had not become officially engaged before he left for Cambridge, Chandra noted “we knew more or less that we wanted to get married, and we sort of kept up a correspondence most of the time I was in England.”[6] After receiving a job offer from the University of Chicago, he returned to India for the summer of 1936, where they rekindled their relationship and married.
The Cambridge-to-Madras correspondence between Lalitha and Chandra represented an important tie among diasporic South Asian families that continued throughout the mid-20th century. To keep in touch with much of his family, Chandrasekhar used the medium of correspondence to negotiate the time and space between countries half a world away. Chandrasekhar came from a particularly large family. As the third of ten children, it would have been easy for him to lose track of some of his siblings, especially after settling in the United States. However, Chandra's father, Chandrasekhar Subrahmanya Ayyar, served as a conduit of family news between his children. In letters signed "Babuji," he would relate how a younger sister was studying for her end-of-term exams, how an older sister's pregnancy was progressing, or how a brother was doing in his studies in England or medical work in Canada. Although the siblings might lag in correspondence with one another, spread across the globe as they were, their father kept them up-to-date.
As oldest son, Chandra also held a certain responsibility towards his family. When Chandra’s father C. S. Ayyar sought to publish and market his book 108 Kritis of Sri Tyagaraja in the 1950s, a collection of transcribed Tamil music pieces for violin, Chandra received a series of letters detailing each step of the process. His father was producing this two-volume series following retirement from a career in the Indian Audits and Accounts Services, so Chandra was asked and expected to send money back to India to support the endeavor.[7] This he seems to have done.
Nevertheless, years of living away from family created tensions in the fulfillment of Chandra’s oldest-son responsibilities. When the discovery of an affair between the widowed Babuji and his maid caused a verbal conflagration at the family homestead in Madras, Chandra found himself hamstrung in addressing the situation. Initially, Chandra sided with his younger sisters, who had been so shocked and horrified by their father’s actions that they had forced the maid to leave the house permanently. But Chandra’s response in turn prompted a lengthy missive from his father. With the tone of a legal defense, Babuji made his case to his son, not only explaining his own rational for the affair but also laying bare the family dynamics and disrespect he felt as an elderly patriarch surrounded by ungrateful children.[8] As a result, Chandra seems to have changed his attitude to be more conciliatory towards his father; in a letter a month and a half after the first, Babuji expressed his appreciation for it. Still, Babuji chastised Chandra,
- “I expected that with your larger experience of life – in man to woman relationship – you would have advised your younger sisters to have a more charitable view of things. No doubt, I do recognize the hard fact, that you have lived away from them for a quarter century - but during your last visit, you had ample opportunities to know their mental make-up in relation to the background of Chandra Vilas life.”[9]
Despite over two decades of life lived in the United States and England, C. S. Ayyar still expected Chandrasekhar to know his younger siblings well enough to both give advice and change their behavior with that advice. Chandrasekhar, together with Lalitha, had visited India in 1951, but a visit of six weeks was hardly enough to claim familial authority in such a delicate and explosive drama. Chandrasekhar remained tied closely enough to his family for them to hold certain expectations of him, but living abroad considerably weakened his familial authority as the oldest son.

[1] This immigration amount derived from the 1924 Act’s quota calculations. For nationalities in general, quotas were set at 2% of that nationality’s legally resident population in the U.S. as of 1890. Theoretically, new nationalities still could immigrate because the law directed that “the minimum quota of any nationality shall be 100.” (Treaty, Laws, and Rules Governing the Admission of Chinese: Rules of October 1, 1926, Washington, D.C., G.P.O.) Since the Indian population in the U.S. was minuscule in the late 1800s, the 1946 Act’s stipulation that “all persons of races indigenous to India” who immigrated to the U.S. would be allocated under “the provisions of section 11 of the Immigration Act of 1924” meant that Indians were stuck with the minimum quota for nationalities/races. ("Public Law 79-483, Chapter 534, 79 Congress, Session 2," U.S. Statutes at Large 60, Main Section: 416-417)
[2] Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, “Interview by Spencer Weart,” May 17, 1977, p.10.
[3] Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, “Interview by Spencer Weart,” May 17, 1977, p.9.
[4] Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, “Interview by Spencer Weart,” May 17, 1977, p.11.
[5] B. Rajaswami Aiyer, Letter to Chandrasekhar Subrahmanya Ayyar, March 24, 1936.
[6] Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, “Interview by Spencer Weart,” May 17, 1977, p.55.
[7] Chandrasekhar Subrahmanya Ayyar, Letter to Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, October 11, 1958.
[8] Chandrasekhar Subrahmanya Ayyar, Letter to Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, June 8, 1957.
[9] Chandrasekhar Subrahmanya Ayyar, Letter to Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, July 23, 1957.
All letters and interviews found at: Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan. Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. Accessed July 2016.
