The Making of India's Transnational Entrepreneurs

Sri, owner of a cloud-based software company serving 50,000 organisations across 160 countries, was ranked among 100 richest Indians in 2024. Raised humbly in a village and later educated in the United States, Sri attributes his entrepreneurial drive not to his advanced degrees but to his modest schooling, which inspired him to create opportunities for rural youth in India. His wealth is a testament to his success. Devyani, returned to her progressive business family in Kolkata after her marriage failed, and drawing on her personal talent, parental support, network and acquired knowledge, built an export-oriented company valued over multiple crores of rupees.

Sri and Devyani are among the 60 Indian transnational entrepreneurs – 45 men and 15 women – whose cross-border business ventures linking India and the United States constitute the subject of Manashi Ray’s book Becoming Boundless: Indian Transnational Entrepreneurs in the Global Economy, published by Stanford University Press.

Operating across diverse sectors including technology, manufacturing, services and design, these men and women collectively demonstrate the conditions and the means which made possible their transnational entrepreneurship to be built and to flourish. Some remain based in the United States, others have returned to India; all nurture the social, cultural and economic linkages between the two countries, which also function as the fulcrum of their enterprise. 

Ray projects the achievements of all the transnational entrepreneurs who she has spoken to individually against a shifting canvas – changes in government policies such as US immigration law and India’s economic liberalisation, and the broader processes of globalisation that facilitated easy movement of information, capital, people, skills and ideas. 

As an ethnographer and sociologist engaged in migration and development studies, and currently a professor of sociology at West Virginia State University, Ray explores the dense and layered networks through which these actors navigate structural constraints and construct what she terms “boundless” businesses. Her analytical framework – grounded in critical readings of secondary literature and of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital – makes the account theoretically robust and stylistically nuanced.

Cover of 'Becoming Boundless' by Manashi Ray. (Stanford University Press), Stanford, California, 2026

By organising her respondents according to the period and circumstances of their migration, Ray identifies patterns. The first cohort travelled between 1965 and 1979. Post IT boom years from 1996 onwards, witnessed what she calls “macro tectonic shifts” (page 44), prompting waves of skilled labour migration from India to the US, benefiting both the countries. In the intervening years, many emigrated as relatives of earlier migrants, including women whose journeys were determined by kinship-based priorities. 

To weave these individual journeys together, Ray explores their habitus – dispositions shaped by higher education in the US and by forms of social capital, both strong and weak. She tracks how these dispositions informed their choices and actions, enabling their cross-border enterprises to take shape and thrive. Theirs are success stories that contributed to “brain gain,” the beneficiary being India in terms of remittances, ideas, skills and even ideologies. 

Three chapters in the book focus, respectively, on entrepreneurs who own businesses in the US, on those who operate from India, and on women in both countries. By clearly framing questions for each group, Ray ensures that the organisation of her chapters is clear to the reader.

Chapter 2 and 3 details 45 male entrepreneurs based in the US. Through extensive interviews, Ray discerns “dominant sentiments” – motives and opportunities – behind their decisions to opt for business and records actions, interactions and experiences that followed. She categorises them into five distinct groups, all of whom built and nurtured intermediate ties and networks for accessing resources, seeking prospects, and later mentoring younger transnational entrepreneurs. 

These professional, social, co-regional and diasporic ties that were forged, played critical roles in their success, and by creating a “boundary-breaking transnational social spaces (they)…acted as conduits for the reverse migration of TEs…” (page 103).

Different circumstances prompts 24 transnational entrepreneurs to return to India after spending a decade or more in the US.

Chapter 3 of the book is particularly appealing for it reveals not only changing economic conditions but also shifting social dynamics. Reverse migration was often led by gender relations and the inability of partners – usually women – to work in the US. Some returned to care for ageing parents. 

Revisions in Indian citizenship laws provided incentives, alongside a desire to “give back” to their country. These returnees leverage their ability to blend easily into Indian society while simultaneously “distinguishing” themselves through their US exposure. The new generation of returnee transnational entrepreneurs often redefine traditional rules of the game by dismantling older caste- and community-based networks, creating new professional ones. 

Ray’s rigorous theoretical structuring of empirical data is interspersed with light vignettes from her encounters with the entrepreneurs. These interludes enliven the narrative without detracting from its analytical depth. Each entrepreneurial story is distinctive, yet all are situated within a larger conceptual architecture that Ray constructs with considerable skill.

The section on women entrepreneurs foregrounds the gendered dimensions of transnational mobility. Their “socio-economic location” and “cultural identity,” crucial to their access to opportunities and capital, differed markedly from those of men, making each context of women’s entrepreneurship a distinct story. Ray organises her empirical material around three dimensions – class, caste, and migratory history – and studies three groups of women (power couples, inheritors, survivors) to understand their motives and how they deploy skills and networks in transnational spaces. Of the 15 women, eight return to India while the rest remain in the US. 

All, however, become owners or co-owners of transnational businesses. Some enter entrepreneurship with entitlement; others struggle to claim it. While men often rely on long-standing friendships formed in youth and later professional associations, women’s entrepreneurial journeys reveal gender-specific challenges, vulnerabilities and resources.

Together, these are stories of individuals, of struggle and resilience, of creativity and resourcefulness, carefully woven into a compelling narrative tapestry. Ray’s engagement with her subjects lends her writing the quality of storytelling that brings entrepreneurs vividly to life. The result is a writing that is illuminating, immersive, absorbing, and deeply instructive. It is a significant contribution to scholarship on transnational entrepreneurship, migration and social transformation.

Tapti Roy is a historian and writer.

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