Even if one moves from one end of a planet to the other, some things remain the same. For Upper School History teacher Sushmita Hodges, that was education. Hodges came to the United States from her home in New Delhi, India when she was 21 years old. She moved to the small college town of Muncie, Indiana to get her PhD at Ball State University.
Much of Hodges’ early life was centered on her education, and her immigration was no exception. “I was in school straight from kindergarten to PhD program,” she said. “No breaks, nothing.” She went to a high school run by Irish Sisters of Loreto, an order of nuns to which Mother Teresa once belonged, at a convent in New Delhi. “I really attribute the foundations of my education to the Irish nuns under whose guidance I was able to complete my high school education,” she said.
Hodges started her undergraduate education at Lady Shri Ram College just before she turned sixteen and graduated in three years. There, she took an interest in history, which would be her major and eventually her career.
It was in graduate school that Hodges first considered going overseas. She took an American history course with a professor who had studied at Berkeley with historian Kenneth Stampp. “He was my first introduction to the desire to come to the states for graduate school,” she said.
A maternal aunt who taught at Ball State University drew Hodges to Muncie to finish her graduate degree and her PhD.
Even though she had just moved halfway across the earth, still more challenging to Hodges was adjusting to small-town America after spending her entire life in New Delhi, whose population today is estimated at 17 million. By contrast, Muncie’s population numbers at about 70,000 today and was still smaller in 1981, when Hodges moved there.
“Moving from New Delhi, which is a large, cosmopolitan city, to Muncie was kind of a reverse culture shock,” she said. Hodges found a community among her fellow international students at the university.
Hodges had a little more difficulty adjusting to her next home. “I think the biggest shock was actually after I got married and we moved to Batesville, Indiana,” she said. Hodges moved to Batesville, a town of around 4,000 in southeast Indiana, because her husband Mark had a job there. “The only thing it has is Hillenbrand industries,” which produces caskets and hospital beds, among other things. “That was definitely a village,” Hodges chuckled.
Hodges still occasionally returns to India, but her visits decreased in frequency when her parents came to live in the United States. They initially had planned to spend summers in the States and winters in India, but their declining health forced them to relocate permanently to the U.S. Hodges last returned to India in 2010, when both her parents died. “When the kids were younger, one year they would come and we would go another year,” she said, “but…in the last decade we’ve probably been there a couple of times.”
Hodges still identifies strongly with her Indian roots. “As I’ve grown older, and having older children, it seems that a lot of my upbringing and values are still very grounded in my Indian identity,” she said.
Her youngest daughter, senior Serena Hodges, says that her family’s Indian heritage has a noticeable impact on her way of life. “It’s there in little ways, little parts of my day,” she said. “She cooks a lot of Indian food…and she likes to watch lots of Bollywood, so there’s music and those movies,” she said. “Little things like that are very much a part of our family culture.” And yet there’s also a certain amount of disconnect. “When we visited India, a lot of the family and friends that we met didn’t really think that we were Indian,” she said. “When we’re here people are very aware that we’re Indian, or at least part Indian, but there people…just thought that we were American.” Of course, like her mother, who has now spent slightly more time in the U.S. than in India, she’s a little bit of both.
