 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 opened restaurants or started small businesses, and as they settled, they became a quiet but integral part of the daily life of their adopted neighborhood.
These immigrants occupied a strange place in the heavily racially divided culture of the U.S. Not White, not Black, definitively foreign.
As dark-skinned men from “the East,” the peddlers occupied a slightly different position, but one that was inconsistent and unpredictable; while their place within the country’s black-white racial imagination was not quite fixed, and to a degree was even manipulable, their place on the streets and within the residential neighborhoods of segregated cities was much clearer. So, as they accessed white consumers with fantasies of India, their pathway into and across the United States was a pathway through working-class black neighborhoods; they established outposts in these places and then moved outward to sell their goods.
Bengalis and their Puerto Rican and African-American wives at a 1952 banquet at New York’s Pakistan League of America. (Image and Caption: CNN)
Back in 2013, Moni Basu, writing at CNN, covered the release of the book, an interview with Bald, and a descendant of one of the Indian immigrants.
In the next few weeks, Fatima Shaik, an African-American, Christian woman, will travel “home” from New York to Kolkata, India.
It will be a journey steeped in a history that has remained unknown until the publication last month of a revelatory book by Vivek Bald. And it will be a journey of contemplation as Shaik, 60, meets for the first time ancestors with whom she has little in common.
“I want to go back because I want to find some sort of closure for my family, said Shaik, an author and scholar of the Afro-Creole experience.
That Americans like Shaik, who identify as black, are linked by blood to a people on the Indian subcontinent seems, at first, improbable.
South Asian immigration boomed in this country after the passage of landmark immigration legislation in 1965. But long before that, there were smaller waves of new