 Americans who hailed from India under the British Empire.
The first group, to which Shaik’s grandfather, Shaik Mohamed Musa, belonged, consisted of peddlers who came to these shores in the 1890s, according to Bald. They sold embroidered silks and cottons and other “exotic” wares from the East on the boardwalks of Asbury Park and Atlantic City, New Jersey. They eventually made their way south to cities like New Orleans and Atlanta and even farther to Central America.
The second wave came in the 1920s and ‘30s. They were seamen, some merchant marines.
Most were Muslim men from what was then the Indian province of Bengal and in many ways, they were the opposite of the stereotype of today’s well-heeled, highly educated South Asians.
South Asian immigration was illegal then – the 1917 Immigration Act barred all idiots, imbeciles, criminals and people from the “Asiatic Barred Zone.”
The Bengalis got off ships with little to their name.
They were mostly illiterate and worked as cooks, dishwashers, merchants, subway laborers. In New York, they gradually formed a small community of sorts in Spanish Harlem. They occupied apartments and tenement housing on streets in the 100s. They worked hard.
And they did all they could do to become American in a nation of segregation and prejudice.
A huge part of that meant marrying Latino and African-American women – there were no Bengali women around – and letting go of the world they left behind.
Unlike other immigrants of the time, they didn’t settle in their own enclaves. Rather, they began life anew in established neighborhoods of color: Harlem, West Baltimore and in New Orleans, Treme.
By doing so, they also became a part of black and Latino heritage in America.
One of the most important things I took from the research is the fact that in the years of Asian exclusion, African-American and Puerto Rican communities actually gave (the Bengali men) the possibilities and the shelter to rebuild their lives,” said Bald, a documentarian who teaches writing and digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Those communities lived up to the promise of the nation when the nation failed to do so … because they were equally marginalized and equally deprived of full membership.”
I also found this video featuring Bald lecturing at The South Asia Institute Institute at Harvard. It’s called “Harlem, Black Bottom, Tremé: South Asian Muslims in U.S. Communities of Color, 1890-1965”.
Before I move on, some clarification: the book begins with the stories of Indian immigrants in the late 1800s. At that time, there was only India. In 1947, the Partition of India occured, carving out Pakistan and East Pakistan, leading to the displacement of millions, many deaths and chaos. In 1971, after a bloody and brutal war, East Pakistan gained independence and became Bangladesh. Many of the immigrants came from what is now Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Finally, here’s a list from XXL of fifteen rap songs influenced by Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian music. Now before you interject, “The Middle East is NOT Southeast Asia!”, calm down, I’m aware. I’m including the link here because it touches on the melding of the historically Black American musical genre with sounds that were birthed in Southeast Asia in a number of the listed songs. And I’ll close with one of my favs, “Beware” by Panjabi MC with Brooklyn’s own Jay Z. Many thanks to my friend Wafi who sent me the link at the top of the post that got my brain churning enough to read up on this and write the post.