By Steve Zwick
You’ve just entered the Patel Zone.
Three thousand people named Patel recently descended on Miami for a convention weekend that surely would have perplexed every hotel clerk in the city if not for the fact that many of those clerks and their bosses are also named Patel. So are nearly 30 percent of all hotel owners in America, as well as at least half of all the convenience store owners in England and a growing number of Dunkin’ Donuts franchisees.
Jayshree came here ten years ago to marry Nilam, a quietly self-assured engineer whose mellow disposition perfectly complements her exuberance. Somabhai had followed his own son Vallabh, Nilam’s father. On the advice of Manoj Patel, a family friend and convenience store owner turned insurance salesman, Nilam and Jayshree got out of the Indian food business and started selling insurance. “Manoj sort of became our godfather,” says Jayshree, a born wheeler-dealer who’s been shattering quotas almost from the day she started. The only month she hasn’t been the top rookie was when she went back to India for vacation. That month, another Patel slipped temporarily into the top spot. “It helps that so many of my customers are also Patels,” Jayshree says with a wink. “The caste is seen as a source of sustenance,” Nilam says. “Our minds are oriented from birth toward helping others. We’re raised to believe that God gave us this position.”
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Both Jayshree and Nilam are Leva Patels, the most successful stratum of a community that has many layers. “Some Leva Patels consider themselves superior to the others,” Jayshree says, deftly avoiding the question of who she considers the top Patel. One of the big issues Patel scholars debate is whether the Leva Patels, Kanbi Patels, Anjana Patels, and others really are one caste with several names or several castes trying to act as one. Most Patels say they are one caste with two main subcastes: the wealthy and well-educated Leva Patels from southern Gujarat who dominate the U.S. hotel industry, and the somewhat poorer and less educated Kadwa Patels from the north, who have discovered franchising and taken a liking to Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins.
Some say the long trek to America began way back around 680 AD, when marauding Huns plundered their way across the northern state of Punjab. Children of that invasion are said to have coalesced into a Hindu farming tribe that spread the science of agriculture across northern India. When the last Hindu king of Delhi fell to the Muslims in 1139, this farming tribe was allegedly invited to Gujarat, the fertile state that juts into the Arabian Sea just below the point where Pakistan meets India. Some say these migrants weren’t really Huns but Persians, and others say they were the Gujars themselves, the tribe for whom Gujarat is named. Still others say they were little more than figments of the imagination for people in search of a glorious past. No matter which version you believe, the story ends with the tribe establishing a homeland in Kheda and nurturing it into the present-day “Garden of India.” From there they continued to launch mass migrations over the centuries. After India secured independence from England in 1947, they started coming to the U.S. “We all hear some version of that story growing up,” Nilam says. “I don’t know if it’s true, but I have heard there are some language and cultural similarities between the Punjabis and the Leva Patels.”
“A lot of families were given the name Patel very recently,” says Kiran Ghodasara, a Kadwa Patel living in New Jersey who has legally changed his last name. “I think it sometimes happened because you’d be in school and a teacher knew you were Patidar and would just call you Patel, and the name stuck. You sometimes ended up with two brothers with different last names, and those names got passed on.” As to why he changed his name he says, laughing, “There are too many Patels here.”
