At the Manas grocery store and restaurant on Vermont Avenue near USC, graduate students from Mumbai and New Delhi stop by late at night to pick up a batch of malai kofta, vegetable dumplings, to fuel their engineering study sessions.
Or they may sit down for a dinner of tandoori chicken and discuss their latest cricket matches.
"If they miss home, they can always come here," said Manas co-owner Kumar Venkata. Increasingly, more USC students do.
With its enormous freezers stocked with microwaveable curries and garlic naan breads of India, Manas is a busy off-campus canteen of sorts for what is said to be the largest group of Indian students in the United States and a culinary symbol of an academic tidal wave from the Indian Ocean.
With a rising middle class better able to finance American university degrees and schools like USC actively recruiting them, Indians have doubled their presence at U.S. campuses in the last decade. Numbering more than 83,000 last year, they are the largest group of international students in the country, overtaking the Chinese in 2002, surveys show.
USC has had the largest number of foreign students of any campus in the U.S. for six years; last year it enrolled about 7,100 from across the globe, including those on extended internships, according to the nonprofit Institute of International Education.
More than 1,500 Indian citizens are full-time students at USC, only about 100 fewer than the number of African American students there.
The large contingent of Indian students runs popular Friday-night cricket games under the lights at Cromwell Field, with squads named Trojan Tigers and Leavy Lions. (Some Pakistanis and Australians also play.) Forget about the formal white uniforms; here, cardinal-and-gold T-shirts are the norm and cricketers end their huddles by shouting the USC slogan, "Fight on!"
"It's a big, very big Indian community. It's pretty amazing," said Gaurav Kumar, a master's student from Kolkata, formerly known as Calcutta, who is president of USC's Assn. of Indian Students.
About 9% of all graduate and professional-school students at USC are Indian citizens, heavily concentrated in the Viterbi School of Engineering and its computer-related classes. Kumar, who is studying signal processing and sound systems, said the engineering school's status -- eighth in U.S. News & World Report's ranking of graduate programs -- and its proximity to so many West Coast high-tech firms make it a desirable brand name among ambitious Indian families.
