obal, 2009, pages 26-65, 111-178]
When you get a chance, read the article in its entirety, it’s really thought provoking. Now, from India’s forgotten Black roots to the United States forgotten Indian immigrant history… which became intertwined with that of Black America. I picked up a copy of “Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America” by Vivek Bald. Here’s a few excerpts to wet your whistle:
IN MARCH OF 1945, two men from India led testimony before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization of the U.S. Congress. One was a Muslim who had settled in Arizona’s Salt River Valley in the 1910s, where a handful of farmers from the subcontinent had turned hundreds of acres of land toward the production of rice. The other was a Punjabi Sikh entrepreneur who came to New York City in 1926 and established a business supplying luxury Eastern imports to the city’s elites. Both men were lobbying Congress to make East Indians eligible for U.S. citizenship. Their task was not an easy one. In the early years of the twentieth century, Indian immigrants had been vilified. When hundreds of Punjabi workers began to arrive in California and the Pacific Northwest around 1904, they found white citizens’ groups and labor unions already lined up against them, emboldened by years of targeting immigrants from China and Japan. The nativists focused their vitriol on the Indian newcomers, whipping up a moral panic over what they called the “tide of turbans” that threatened to swamp white America. At times, the xenophobia boiled over into violence; in September 1907, a mob of white lumber-mill workers rampaged through the northwestern town of Bellingham, Washington, attacking Indian migrants indiscriminately, rounding them up and forcing them from their jobs and homes. By 1917, the federal government had passed legislation barring Indians and virtually all other Asians from entering the United States. The 1917 Immigration Act made East Indians equivalent in the eyes of the law to alcoholics, “professional beggars,” and the insane; all were undesirable aliens, to be turned away at the borders.
In 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court added a further layer to the exclusion regime by ruling that those East Indians who were already resident in the United States were racially ineligible to become U.S. citizens.
Cover Photo of “Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America”
Decades before that Congressional hearing, thousands of East Indians had already arrived on our shores, made businesses, relationships, marriages and families. Bald traces some of their roots to enterprising Bengal Indians who began traveling to NYC, the Jersey Shore, and New Orleans in the late 1800’s to sell fine, handmade cloth that were made by women in their home villages. England’s colonization of India and importation of factory made fabrics decimated India’s own market, resulting in some men sailing the high seas to sell the wares abroad. They traveled in small groups of maybe 2-12, and sailed from England to various ports up and down the Eastern seaboard. Since many wealthy New Yorkers summered in New Jersey at places like Asbury Park and Atlantic City, the Indian merchants would head there, too, taking advantage of the Victorian Era craze for all things “Oriental” and “Asiatic”. (Sidebar: I get a kick out of these defunct old tyme terms. I’m not quite sure why, either.) Anyway, back to the book:
Over time, hundreds of Indian seamen cycled through the networks that their co-workers and kin had first set up in the 1910s, and most eventually returned to the maritime trade and the subcontinent. But some stayed in the United States for good… Denied official belonging, they became part of another nation, a nation beneath the nation, in working-class neighborhoods of color from New York to Baltimore to Detroit. The greatest number appear to have settled in Harlem. Many married local women here, had children, and even as they maintained ties to one another, developed Puerto Rican, African American, and West Indian extended families and friends. Some o