Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America

Vivek Bald

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674070400
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award
Winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for History
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year
A Saveur "Essential Food Books That Define New York City" Selection In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal. The American demand for "Oriental goods" took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey's beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore. As factory owners sought their labor and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest.The stories of these early working-class migrants vividly contrast with our typical understanding of immigration. Vivek Bald's meticulous reconstruction reveals a lost history of South Asian sojourning and life-making in the United States. At a time when Asian immigrants were vilified and criminalized, Bengali Muslims quietly became part of some of America's most iconic neighborhoods of color, from Tremé in New Orleans to Detroit's Black Bottom, from West Baltimore to Harlem. Many started families with Creole, Puerto Rican, and African American women.As steel and auto workers in the Midwest, as traders in the South, and as halal hot dog vendors on 125th Street, these immigrants created lives as remarkable as they are unknown. Their stories of ingenuity and intermixture challenge assumptions about assimilation and reveal cross-racial affinities beneath the surface of early twentieth-century America.

CHAPTER 1

Out of the East and into the South

There are some thirty Indians, fresh from East India who landed in Atlanta about two weeks ago and every one of them has been peddling notions in and around the city.

—Atlanta Constitution, November 21, 1912

ELLIS ISLAND WAS ON FIRE. The grand, three-story immigration station had cost more than $75,000 and had taken almost two years to build. It had been in operation for no more than five and a half years, and now, in the middle of the night of June 15, 1897, a fire had broken out. More than two hundred immigrant detainees were rushed out of the building as the flames spread. Across the water, on the southern tip of Manhattan, fire crews scrambled into action, but before their boats could reach the island, the entire pine structure was engulfed in smoke and fire; the ceiling quickly caved in and the federal government’s flagship immigrant-processing station collapsed to the ground.

Three days later, the SS St. Louis sailed into New York Harbor from Southampton, England. It was a beautiful early summer evening; the sky was clear and the weather was warm. The St. Louis approached the Statue of Liberty, still a relatively new addition to the waters below Manhattan, and turned gently to the left toward the mouth of the North River. Twelve Muslim men from Calcutta and Hooghly, West Bengal, were on board the steamship, preparing to disembark after their six-day journey across the Atlantic. Ahead and to the ship’s right, they would have seen southern Manhattan’s impressive outcrop of skyscrapers—the tallest reaching more than twenty stories above the ground—aglow in the evening sun. On their left, where their ship was supposed to dock, lay a pile of rubble.

Since the conflagration, the Bureau of Immigration had been scrambling to deal with incoming passenger ships. Each day, two or three more ships arrived, bearing thousands of immigrants from Europe and points farther east. In the absence of a processing facility, the Bureau had ordered arriving steamships to proceed to their respective piers along the Manhattan waterfront. A team of medical and immigration inspectors would meet each ship as it docked, examine its passengers, and admit or detain them as warranted. So, after passing the embers of Ellis Island, the St. Louis made its way up the North River to Pier 14, the terminal for its parent company, the American Line. This was one of the largest and most modern structures on the waterfront, extending into the river from West Street between Fulton and Vesey, exactly where, a century later, the north tower of the World Trade Center would stand.1

The Bengali men on board the St. Louis were peddlers, on their way to the beach resorts of New Jersey—Atlantic City, Asbury Park, and Long Branch. In their home villages, their wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters produced finely embroidered silk and cotton fabrics—handkerchiefs, bedspreads, pillow covers, and tablecloths—in a style known as chikan; no doubt, the luggage that each man carried was filled with such goods. At some point earlier in the year, perhaps as recently as May, the twelve men had made their way by ship from Calcutta to Southampton, England. They had then crossed the Atlantic in the SS St. Louis, with more than two hundred other migrants, immigrants, and travelers. They shared the cramped quarters of third class with a German butcher, an Armenian student, a Japanese cook, two Russian Jewish tailors, and a number of returning Americans: a dressmaker, a cigar worker, a cattleman, an upholsterer. More than half the passengers were Scandinavian immigrants on their way to New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, and North Dakota. The majority of these men and women were farmers, laborers, and domestic workers.2

What were the Bengali peddlers anticipating as their ship docked on West Street? The older members of the group, Mintoz Mondul, Moksad Ali, and Moosha Mondul, had been making voyages to the United States since the 1880s. In those early years, they had been through immigration procedures at Manhattan’s Castle Garden depot, and they may have seen the Ellis Island station under construction, sailing past it on their way in and out of port. In more recent years, a few of the peddlers had passed through Ellis Island’s imposing new processing facility and made their way through its maze of metal pens, going from one type of inspection to the next.3 It is hard to know whether these previous experiences would have eased the Bengalis’ anxiety as they approached Pier 14 or increased it. The men likely knew what to expect as they faced the indignity of the medical exam, in which they were poked and prodded like cattle, their hair combed through for lice, their eyelids pulled back with a metal hook to check for trachoma. However, the number of questions that the immigration examiners asked them had been increasing and the speed at which they were asked these questions had grown more rapid. And in the days following the Ellis Island fire, the examiners were, no doubt, under pressure to be extravigilant, to prove that the adverse conditions would not hamper their ability to prevent “undesirable aliens” from entering the country.4

When Mintoz and Musa Mondul, Moksad Ali, their colleagues Abdul Aziz, Abdul Ahmed, Basiruddin, Obidullah, and Fazleh Rahman, and the rest of their group went up before the examiner, they gave a single set of answers to a quick succession of questions: Occupation? Merchant. Nationality? East Indian. Last residence? Southampton. Final destination? New Jersey. Who paid for your ticket? Myself. How much money do you have with you? £6. Been in the United States before? Yes. Joining a relative? No. Been in prison? No. Polygamist? No. Under contract to work in the United States? To this last question, they all answered “no”—or at least this is what was recorded on the incoming ships’ manifest. But something must have happened when the men were face-to-face with the immigration examiner. Something was said; something was misunderstood; someone hesitated; or the examiner simply decided that the dozen Indians were suspicious, that they looked like contract workers, entering the country in violation of the law. He ordered them detained. As the Scandinavian farmers and workers disembarked onto West Street to start new lives, meet eagerly waiting relatives, or make their way to points farther west, the twelve Muslim peddlers from Bengal were taken away to the southern tip of Manhattan, to a makeshift detention center on the top floor of the Barge Office—a facility that one contemporary reporter described as “grimy, gloomy, [and] more suggestive of an enclosure for animals than a receiving station for prospective citizens.” Across the water, a few miles down the New Jersey coast, the beach boardwalks were filling up with thousands of summer vacationers, thousands of potential customers for the “fancy goods” that sat packed away in the peddlers’ trunks. But this summer’s trip was not to be. After holding them in detention for eight days, the Bureau of Immigration’s Board of Special Inquiry ordered the twelve men deported, declaring that “inasmuch as they peddle goods not their own, they are held to come under provisions of the Contract Labor law.” On the ship that took them back to London, the men were now listed as “laborers” rather than “merchants.”5

What is remarkable about this story is not the harshness of the treatment to which the twelve Bengali peddlers were subjected—or the cursory nature of the Board of Inquiry hearing that turned them back from U.S. shores. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, as the numbers of immigrants arriving at U.S. ports swelled, the federal government had taken over the processing and evaluation of arriving passengers—a role previously played by individual states. The government’s Immigration Bureau began rationalizing, regularizing, and tightening the criteria according to which “alien passengers” would be admitted. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Alien Contract Labor Law of 1885 were two of the first elements of the new border regime. Both were suffused with racist assumptions about the nature of Asian laborers, and both complicated the Bengali peddlers’ ability to cross into the United States, making their treatment in 1897, at the very least, unsurprising.6 What was remarkable was the peddlers’ ability to adapt to their deportation and operate within a much larger field of possibilities. Within a month of their arrival in London, five of the deported men—Musa Mondul, Basiruddin, Abdul Aziz, Abdul Ahmed, and Obidullah—signed on with a group of fifty miners from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Northern and Eastern Europe and set off by steamer for South Africa, which, along with Australia, was another market for their goods.7 Within a year or two, almost all twelve men would return to the United States, traveling in smaller groups, trying different ports, finding a way to get back in, reunite with kin and co-villagers, and carry on their work.

These men were part of what may be the first significant settlement of South Asians in the United States. Beginning sometime in the 1880s, Muslim peddlers from a cluster of villages just north of Calcutta began traveling to the United States to sell “Oriental goods”—embroidered cotton and silk, small rugs, perfumes, and a range of other items. Indian demand for their handicrafts had declined under colonial rule, as the British imported cheap factory-made textiles and established greater control over the subcontinent’s internal markets.8 But overseas, middle-class consumers in Britain, Australia, South Africa, and the United States were in the midst of a fin de siècle fashion for the exotic ideas, entertainments, and goods of India and “the East.” Other Indian traders had made their way outward from the subcontinent to sell handicrafts to European travelers in the Mediterranean and North Africa.9 The Bengalis ventured into new territories, establishing an extensive network that stretched through the East Coast of the United States, into and across the southern states, and as far south as Panama. Even as U.S. laws and attitudes turned against Asian immigrants, these men worked the India craze to their advantage. Between the 1890s and the 1920s, as the policing of immigration shifted from the regime of the Alien Contract Labor Law to that of the explicitly exclusionary Immigration Act of 1917 (also known as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act), these men built upon existing ties of kinship and newly established connections within U.S. communities of color to build, maintain, and expand their operations. In their own day, they became a regular fixture at North American tourist sites and on the streets of major U.S. cities. Yet they have vanished from historical memory.

Buried in hundreds of fragmentary archival documents—ships’ logs, census records, marriage certificates, local news items—the stories of these men illuminate a very different trajectory of migration to the United States from those celebrated in the national mythology. The peddlers did not leave their homeland behind in order to start new and better lives in the United States. Like other sojourning laborers of their day, they moved often, following the temporary openings and shifting demands of the U.S. and other economies. In their case, the “opening” was an expanding American culture of travel, tourism, and consumption and a broad demand for Oriental goods. Rather than reconstituting their Indian families in the United States, they forged different, sometimes temporary, forms of affiliation in the places they peddled goods, while continuing to function—through remittances and return visits—as part of economic circuits that stretched back to their families and home villages on the subcontinent.10 Rather than forming their own enclaves in U.S. cities—ethnic neighborhoods where they sought to replicate in miniature the places they left behind—these peddlers built a global network that was multiethnic and rooted in segregated black neighborhoods. The men who moved through this network had to navigate the economic circuits, national borders, social spaces, racial ideologies, and consumer desires of both Great Britain and the United States. They were living, working, and moving in the shadows of two empires.

Peddlers of Notions

Today, when we think of U.S. fads and fashions for India, we tend to focus on the recent mass popularity of yoga and Bollywood films or on narratives of self-discovery in the East such as Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling Eat, Pray, Love. The hippie counterculture of the late 1960s, with its obsessions for Indian music, fabrics, and spiritualities, also remains strong in the public memory. It is largely forgotten that at the turn of the twentieth century the United States was in the grips of a craze over India and “the Orient” that was, in some ways, larger and more pervasive than anything that has occurred since. Between the 1880s and 1920s, Americans from all classes and walks of life were drawn to an “India” that was, in essence, a collective fantasy. Elites of cities such as New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia explored Vedantist philosophy and attempted the contortions of “tantrik” yoga. A young Isadora Duncan performed her interpretations of Eastern dance, in bare feet and flowing robes, on the lawns of Newport, Rhode Island’s finest mansions, while Ruth St. Denis performed in Indian-style on Broadway, bedecked with jewels and wrapped in a colorful silk sari. The New Thought writer and publisher William Walker Atkinson built a national audience for his mail-order books on clairvoyance, mind control, and the “Hindu-yogi science of breath,” published under pseudonyms such as Swami Panchadasi, Yogi Ramacharaka, and Swami Bhakta Vishita.11

Meanwhile, the sexualized figure of the Indian “nautch” dancer became a staple of American burlesque theaters. Southern growers marketed tobacco under brand names such as Hindoo, Mecca, Mogul, and Bengal, with labels that depicted Ameers and maharajahs, palaces, hookahs, and dancing girls. Tin Pan Alley songwriters churned out show tunes such as “My Hindoo Man” and “Down in Bom-Bombay,” which middle-class Americans sang to amuse themselves in the piano parlors of their homes. Circuses and exhibitions competed to present ever-larger menageries of Indian elephants and camels and ever-more spectacular re-creations of Indian, Sinhalese, and other “native” villages. Such exotic public spectacles reached new heights in 1904, when the owners of Coney Island’s Luna Park turned fifteen acres of the Brooklyn amusement park into a replica of the city of Delhi and “imported” three hundred Indian men, women, and children, forty camels and seventy elephants to live there for the summer season. Several times a day the “natives” and their animals marched through Luna Park, performing a re-creation of the Delhi Durbar—the grand procession that had occurred in India the year before to mark the ascendance of King Edward VII of England to the imperial throne. By 1909, even the Wild West showmen Buffalo Bill Cody and Gordon “Pawnee Bill” Lillie joined in the craze, touring a “Far East Show” across the U.S. Midwest and South that featured Arabian horsemen, a troupe of Sinhalese dancers, a “Hindu fakir,” and a “nautch dance ballet.”12

For Americans of the era, “India” was presented as part of a mysterious and exotic “Orient” that took in the entire swath of North Africa, the Middle East, India, and Ceylon. This “Orient,” in turn, was a blur of images, stories, references, and fantasies, derived from the contexts of the British, French, and other European empires. In their original context, Orientalist narratives and imagery had performed a particular kind of work. The British portrayal of India as the seat of a once great but now decaying civilization provided moral and political justification for the imposition and maintenance of colonial rule.13 In the American context, Orientalist notions were more free-floating. Unmoored from the daily exercise of colonial power, they entered the realm of the United States’ growing c...