Bald’s heart-rending saga of illegal Bengali immigrants of the 1880s.
By Niharika Mookerjee
NEW YORK: If the history of humanity is an unerring testimony to the slow saga of ceaseless migration to far ends of the earth, MIT professor and filmmaker, Vivek Bald’s book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, released by Harvard University Press (hardcover; 320 pages; $35), salvages a lost piece of jigsaw puzzle when poverty-stricken Bengali Muslim peddlers, ex-seamen and cooks arrived in the United States around 1880 from village districts in Hooghly, India.
The book changes the way one perceives illegal immigration and is a rallying cry for a more humane treatment of immigrants who arrive, dead-beaten, with nothing in their pockets but generations of economic repression in their own native land, and who are then, further, subjected to appalling cruelty.
The book also dismantles the presumption that South Asian presence in the United States grew predominant only with relaxation of immigration legislation in 1965 when doors were swung open to professionals from sub-continent. Instead, it exposes the “unbroken stream of migration from the sub-continent to the United States, much of its working class and Muslim, that started well before the passage of the Asiatic Barred Zone Act and continued through the exclusion era,” to quote the author.
In other words, regardless of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Alien Contract Labor Law of 1885, the influx of destitute people transgressing the borders to seek their fortune in United States, even under the most squalid of circumstances continued, even as it does today from Mexico and Latin America.
The hurdles were daunting; the welcome, decisively xenophobic, yet traders like Solomon Mondul, Abdul Goffer, Mohammed Hassain, Bahadoor Ali, persisted despite unspoken miseries under compulsions of forging a livelihood. They exemplified home-spun shrewdness and survival tactics in dodging immigration officials who would comb through their hair for lice, pull their eyelids with metal hooks, prod and probe them.
And although the historical narrative is set one and half centuries ago, the tangled web of immigration laws, the compulsions that drove people to leave the misery of their home shores for a life that was as oppressive as the earlier, are astonishingly contemporary.
As a matter of fact, there is something truly remarkable to be said about a book that does not favor the much repeated rags-to-riches story of new immigrants but focuses with compassion, humor and stark realism, the subterranean heroism of chikandari vendors, doormen, porters, cooks and dishwashers
Navigating their racial identity amidst cultural biases and successful exclusions by white Americans, on grounds of their strange looks, also marked the dynamics of immigration. Subjected to residential segregation, they were considered a moral danger to society. “The Bengalis’ darkness, no matter what shade or category, made them vulnerable to individual acts of violence and was a deciding factor when they sought out family homes , boarding houses, neighborhoods and communities in which to live,” Bald writes.
As fugitives from the stranglehold of law, the Bengali peddlers were swift to change their identity as it suited them: “whites” when they tried for citizenship, “Hindoos” when selling exotic wares, “blacks” or Puerto Ricans to escape immigration officials. With survival being the key to the game, the yoke of Islamic heritage weighed lightly upon them and confined to a few rituals such as ‘namaz’, abstinence from pork and a conservative attitude towards daughters.
Bald also places the spectacle of their struggle in context of the traditional notion expounded by a student Ranjani Kanta Das, from Columbia University, who argued in his text that Indians were, inherently, averse and condescending to African Americans, deeming them to be racially inferior.
This book however, reveals that the only group of people who showed solidarity with the Muslim peddlers and ex-seamen was the colored folks; the blacks, the Creoles and the Caribbeans who experienced the same segregation. This shared exclusion increased the potential for interethnic social contact as they offered access to knowledge, labor, food and festivity that helped overcome the perilous times of the draconian Jim Crow laws.
It set the conditions for intermarriage that formed the backbone of their socio-economic lives. Men like Saad Victor Ullah or Sofur Ally married into the Puerto Rican or the Afro-Cuban community which resulted in hybrid families with intermixed culture.
In course of time, word spread that “Indian men make good husbands” which prompted their wives to introduce other men to their sisters and nieces. Even as their spouses cooked and ran their households, the women back in the sub-continent supplied them with embroidered silks and fabrics, thus deepening a sense of social fragmentation defined by geographical boundaries.
So what brought the destitute vendors to these foreign shores and how did they persevere against the hostile tide of prejudice and disdain? Unlike what present day Indians, disenchanted with government misrule, are wont to believe, British India was no haven of safety during the late nineteenth century. Taxes on home-made goods were high and the markets were flooded with cheap imported merchandise that made sale of Indian goods impossible.
Squeezed out of their means of subsistence in Bengal, they looked westwards, where among Boston, New York and Philadelphia elites, Indian fads and fashion were sine quo non of the day. ‘In order to access jobs and consumers in the United States, they forged pathways in and out of the orbits of two world powers,” Bald narrates.
Whereas, paradoxically, the copper-colored skin tone and looks were targets of ridicule, their exotic drapes, tablecloths, shawls, scarves and cheap labor enjoyed an enviable status in the US, particularly among the elites of New York, Boston and Philadelphia. A familiar refrain, no doubt, in current society.
Choosing to focus upon the moral compass of their anguished struggle, Bald highlights people from humble walks of life who were not among the intelligentsia, artists, intellectuals, journalists or educators, such as Taraknath Das or Swami Vivekananda.
These were people who were illiterate, barred from chasing the American Dream and yet in their own way celebrated small victories of marriage, friendship and individuality. Habib Ullah Jr., son of a restaurant owner of those times, says, “These guys weren’t driving around in Cadillacs. I think starting their own business was their way of gaining independence. They weren’t looking to become rich.”
Despite the scant historical records, the writer painstakingly scours through documents from census records, archives of press reports, catalogues of ship entries and blurred names from historical registers to unravel three different trajectories of these poor, thrifty people who moseyed their way into the deep recesses of American mid-west.
But no matter where they went, they were relegated to the slums and the bastis just as they were at home. The cohort of vendors that sold their wares around the boardwalks of Atlantic City, Long Branch and Asbury Park moved further down to Treme` in New Orleans, where they dovetailed in black neighborhoods among designated sex districts in cramped surroundings with poor sanitation.
One may wonder why. The answer was simple. People of color were considered filthy, unhygienic and criminals under the Jim Crow laws. Resilient, unfazed and striving against heavy odds, the Bengali Muslims continued to sell their goods to the “madams” and customers of the brothels.
Another set of ex-seamen who got off New York ports went as far as Detroit, Buffalo, Youngstown in Ohio, and Chester in Philadelphia to work in the auto factories, where rapid urbanization and two world wars had created a demand for disposable labor.
In the meantime, a third round of people, like Syed Ali, Habib Ullah, Ibrahim Choudhury and Fayaz Khan settled down in central and east Harlem, New York, a few blocks away from Jewish immigrants of Poland and Russia. They worked as cooks in restaurants, served as elevator operators, peddled hot dogs and curry on Madison, Lexington and Third Avenues or opened the first Indian restaurants, Ceylon India Inn and Bengal Garden close to Times Square.
As they integrated into the Creolized and Harlem communities, their histories were subsequently lost to the world as they were illiterate and maintained no written documents. Yet their wisdom and sagacity is invaluable to us as they revealed an easy mobility with Puerto Ricans, Cubans, African Americans, the Jewish immigrants and the Syrians. In the book, Ullah recalls, “You knew all your neighbors and your neighbors knew you – not only within the building, but on the block itself.”
Thus, excluded from national belonging, they found in these black diasporic neighborhoods, “world-traversing and world transcending citizenship” to use the words of African American religious scholar, Theophus Smith.
In contrast, present-day Indian professionals who came after 1965 exhibited an Indo-centrism, associating themselves only with Indians, despite being armed with their enlightened degrees.
With unmistakable nostalgia for a lost sliver of history, Bald’s narrative makes a passing but firm reference to the snobbery and hypocrisy of immigration laws that allows the rights of citizenship only to the highly qualified and technically savvy. This arrogance is in sharp contrast to what the country has historically stood for: “‘Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”
The story is, however, not singular to the United States. The same sphere of hopes and dreams defeated circle around in the same fashion in every other country.
To contact the author, e-mail: niharikam@americanbazaaronline.com