#vivek bald

[sivavakkiyar]

Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem

[sivavakkiyar]

as quoted in Vivek Bald’s Bengali Harlem and the lost histories of South Asian America

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‘Indian Sailors Strike for Grub’ In 1925, around the time Amir Haider Khan was leaving the United States and Mustafa ‘John’ Ali was arriving, the Baltimore Afro-American, one of the country’s national black weeklies, ran a banner headline across the top of page 9 about a group of Indian seamen who had arrived in port in Baltimore. In some ways, the article resembled those stories about ‘curious lascars’ that had run in more mainstream U.S. newspapers at the turn of the century, and continued to appear in those papers even in the 1920s. The Afro-American’s article, for example, spoke of a 'mutiny’ on the high seas; it focused in on one of the Indian men’s 'peculiar red whiskers’ (presumably his beard, died with henna) and mentioned that the men would not eat food 'prepared by unbelievers.’ But the similarities ended there. The main point of the article was in fact to explain how a group of Indian seamen now under arrest in Baltimore had come to the verge of attacking their employer. It described the men’s poor working conditions on their ship and detailed their mistreatment at the hands of the ship’s officers. It explained that the captain had refused to provide them with food prepared according to the tenets of their 'Mohammedan faith’ and highlighted the stand they took midvoyage by refusing to work. The Afro-American dispatched a reporter to speak not to the ship’s captain, but to the arrested men, to hear their story in their own words. The paper also sent a photographer, so they could show their readership the six sailors who stood up for their rights on board. The headline that ran in bold letters across the full length of one page of the newspaper spoke of the 'alleged’ mutiny of these men, and the subheads fleshed out the details: 'Indian Seamen Arrested; Tell Harrowing Tale – Five Dollars Monthly Wage and Meatless Diet Caused Near Mutiny on Ship – Brutality and Hard Life of Jack London Stories Are Recalled at Police Station.’ Above the photograph of the six men, displayed prominently at the top of the page, was the heading: 'East Indian Sailors Strike for Grub.’ Just below, the photo caption indicated one man among the Indians who was more likely of Somali or North African descent and pointed out that he was 'undoubtedly of African parentage.’ In its important respects, the Afro-American’s article could not have been more different from those of the era’s white-owned papers. The six seamen were presented here as human beings and, specifically, as workers of color, whose stories were important and whose actions were logical, reasonable, and even commendable. Their dietary observances were not the focus of ridicule or voyeurism but were rather aspects of their faith that their captain was wrong to deny them. Just as Mami Chase’s family and others on Baltimore’s African American Westside welcomed Indian men into their families and communities – men who had otherwise been rendered 'illegal’ by the nation’s racialized immigration regime – this black newspaper embraced a group of Indian seamen who had struck against an injustice and ended up in a Baltimore jail. Their story would have resonated with the others that filled the Afro-American’s pages every week, of African American women and men subjected to the violence and injustice of white supremacy and criminalized for fighting back. The affinity of the Afro-American showed for these Indian 'mutineers’ was not isolated; this was a historical moment in which African American and Indian nationalist leaders were coming to recognize and articulate the connection between their struggles. Maritime desertion, however, let to its own arena of contact between the two groups, and as the story of Dada Amir Haider Khan makes clear, that arena could produce its own understanding and transformations.

Bald, Vivek. Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. 135-136.

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John Ali Sr. and other ex-seamen like him managed to stay in the United States because of a three-year statute of limitations on their desertions. If these men jumped ship in the United States and managed to evade capture for three years, the immigration authorities could no longer arrest and deport them; they could stay in the United States. But these men were not welcomed as other immigrants might have been; they had no legal footing in the country and lived for years in this marginal status. Yet they did find homes and build communities – largely because they joined and were accepted by others on the nation’s margins. John Ali and other Indian Muslim men simultaneously integrated into working-class families and neighborhoods of color in U.S. cities and built pockets of Indian community within those spaces. In fact, the latter phenomenon depended on the former. While localized Indian networks in places like Chester supported and sustained an ongoing flow of deserters from British ships, these networks were themselves made possible by Indian intermarriage within African American and other communities of color, and, more broadly, by these communities’ acceptance of Indian and other immigrant men of color in their fold.

Bald, Vivek. Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. 133.

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If, in the courts, the subjectivity of racial judgments could work in the peddlers’ favor, in this other arena of their daily lives, the subjective execution of segregation could just as easily turn against them. This is brought home in another incident involving a Bengali on the streets of New Orleans in 1922. The case of Abdul Fara is recorded in The Negro in Louisiana, an unpublished manuscript authored by the African American poet and historian Marcus Christian, based on research he directed as head of the Works Progress Administration’s Louisiana Negro Writer’s Project in the 1930s. In a chapter describing the evolution of Jim Crow laws in post-Reconstruction Louisiana, Christian wrote that by the 1920s, a variety of New Orleans residents, including ‘persons of colored races such as Japanese, Chinese, American Indian, Puerto Rican, Philipinos [sic],’ as well as persons whom he described as 'dark whites… Turks, Indians, and Spaniards,’ and some number of 'light-skinned Negros,’ were all regularly seating themselves in the 'white’ section of the city’s segregated streetcars. The conductors of these streetcars, he continued, normally let these riders be, 'having been warned of the costly consequences of mistaken racial identity.’ In Abdul Fara’s case, however, the conductor was not the problem. Fara boarded a streetcar on Canal Street and took a seat in the last row of the 'white’ section, next to a white World War I veteran named Fitzhugh Davis. After two blocks, Christian writes, the conductor left the back of the streetcar and came to investigate. He approached Abdul Fara and asked him 'whether he was a white man or Negro.’ Fara claimed neither identity; he 'replied that he was a native of Calcutta, India, whereupon the [conductor], apparently satisfied, returned to his place on the platform.’ Soon afterward, however, the white passenger sitting next to Fara took matters into his own hands. After an exchange of words, he grabbed the 'screen’ that marked the dividing line between the 'white’ and 'colored’ sections of the streetcar – a heavy wooden sign with two thick metal prongs that was slotted into the back of his seat – pulled it out, and attacked Abdul Fara with it, striking him twice over the head. When Fara later brought suit against Davis, the white judge hearing the case declared that it was reasonable that Davis might have thought Abdul Fara was a 'negro’ and that he was thus justified in having become incensed at Fara’s riding in the 'white’ section of the car and in striking him. The judge held in favor of Fara’s attacker and ordered Fara to pay the costs of the court. In an arena in which individuals were empowered to enforce white supremacy in its multiple daily manifestations, the Bengali peddler’s access to white spaces and privileges was always going to be provisional and subject to revocation at a moment’s notice. These spaces may have provided them with customers who would buy their goods, but black neighborhoods were where the Bengalis became rooted and built their lives.

Bald, Vivek. Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. 63-64.

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It is difficult to say exactly what the peddlers experienced in the ensuring years, how they were regarded and treated as men of color operating within a volatile racial order. Even the most exoticizing descriptions of Bengali peddlers in turn-of-the-century U.S. newspapers – and of the Bengali, Punjabi, and other Indian seamen who were now beginning to appear with frequency in U.S. Ports – focused in on the men’s complexion and tried to place them according to the United States’ binary racial logic. One 1900 story about Indians in the sailors’ quarter of New York City stated that these men were ‘all so dark as to be taken easily for Negroes, but their features are Caucasian and their hair is straight, stiff, and wiry.’ It described their character in terms that drew on notions of both Asian ‘inscrutability’ and African American 'criminality,’ saying that they 'are peaceable and orderly up to a certain point and then they lose all self-control and generally resort to the knife.’ Another story, focusing on a group of Bengali peddlers who were working on the streets of Atlanta, Georgia, declared that these Indian men were 'not like American Indians, of course, but look like Mexicans only three shades darker.’ In this case, the peddlers were represented, As African Americans often were in the white press, simultaneously as wily and dim-witted. Government documents from the same period reflect a certain confusion about the 'color’ and 'race’ of the Bengali peddlers. In 1900 and 1910, federal census takers marked most of the men 'Black,’ others 'Mulatto,’ and a few 'White,’ before a supervisor often scratched 'Hin’ for Hindu over the top of the original classification. During the First World War, draft registrars described the peddlers’ 'race’ variously as 'Black,’ 'White,’ 'Oriental,’ 'Turkish,’ and 'Malaysian.’ The officials who processed a handful of the Bengalis’ passport applications in the 1910s mostly described their 'complexion’ as 'dark’ but in one case wrote 'coppers,’ in another 'ruddy,’ and in another 'light.’ There was clearly a difference between these official classifications and the lived experiences of segregation the peddlers faced. While the Bengalis may have benefited from the kind of ambiguity that is apparent in official attempts to classify them, their position within the racial order ultimately appears to have been provisional and uncertain. Like the distinctions between 'Creole,’ 'free person of color,’ and 'negro,’ the various ways of describing, categorizing, and distinguishing these Indian peddlers meant little when it came to the most basic aspects of Jim Crow. 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, boardinghouses, neighborhoods, and communities in which to live.

Bald, Vivek. Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. 58-59.

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It is difficult to pinpoint the exact origins of the operations that brought Hooghly’s handicrafts halfway around the world to the United States. In what is perhaps the only detailed narrative account of the network’s activities in the United States, the expatriate Indian nationalist newspaper the Hindusthanee Student suggested in 1917 that the peddlers had first been forced beyond their regional orbit under the rule of the British East India Company. In the early nineteenth century, the British had flooded Indian markets with their own machine-made textiles and imposed high tariffs on Indian goods, undermining the indigenous textile industry and weakening internal demand for cotton and silk handicrafts like those of Hooghly’s villages. The British also pushed aggressively to regulate and dominate the arenas in which goods were bought and sold on the subcontinent, the bazaars in which Hooghly’s chikondars would have operated. During this period, to which the Hindusthanee Student simply referred to as ‘the decline,’ men from Hooghly were forced to find new markets for the chikan goods and began to travel overseas. These small traders, or chikondars, first made their way outward from Calcutta to South Africa and Australia, and by the 1880s, after prospering in these locations, ‘the first batch, consisting of ten or twelve men, dared the perils of the unknown’ and set out for the United States. Having been displaced by colonial pursuits on the subcontinent, these men used the very infrastructure of the British Empire to go beyond the empire’s reach. They traveled thousands of miles through the circuits of colonial seaborne trade to a place where the scarves, handkerchiefs, tablecloths, and wall hangings embroidered in Hooghly villages had become the stuff of fashions, fancies, and fantasies.

Bald, Vivek. Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. 20.

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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. In the American context, the Orientalist notions were more free-floating. Unmoored by the daily exercise of colonial power, they entered the realm of the United States’ growing cultures of self-improvement, mass entertainment, and mass consumption. Ideas about India took on new life and meaning in a society in which people’s identities and social standing were increasingly defined by what they consumed and displayed. This was nowhere more apparent than in the turn-of-the-century fashion for 'Oriental goods.’ As 'Indian’ and 'Oriental’ ideas, images, and amusements proliferated, Americans developed a seemingly insatiable desire for items that connected them to the East of their imaginings: silk scarves and shawls, cushion covers, wall hangings, rugs, brassware, carved and enameled boxes, jewelry, incense, perfume. This was a trend that had, over a very short span of time, traveled across both geographic and class lines. Earlier in the 1800s, the fashion for fine silks, rugs, and porcelain from India, China, Japan, and the Middle East had begun among the upper classes of London and Paris, for whom the display of luxury goods from the far reaches of empire was a sign of both power and sophistication. Elites in U.S. Cities quickly followed the lead of their class counterparts in Europe, using 'Oriental’ and other foreign commodities to assert their own worldliness – at precisely the moment that the United States itself was growing as an imperial power. Men in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere outfitted their smoking rooms with plush Oriental rugs, hookahs, tiger skins, elephant tusks, daggers, scimitars, and images of 'eroticized Eastern women’ – goods that simultaneously conveyed the conquest of far-off lands and conjured the fantasy of the Eastern harem. Upper-class women used Oriental goods to creat lavish schemes for the interiors of their homes. Chicago’s society matron Bertha Honore Palmer, for example, decorated her Lake Shore Drive mansion in a series of regionally themed rooms. According to historian Kristin Hoganson, the home 'had a Spanish music room, English dining room, Moorish ballroom, Flemish library, and French and Chinese drawing rooms. Upstairs, Bertha Palmer slept in a bedroom copied from a Cairo palace.’ Such women, Hoganson argues, used themed interiors to push beyond domestic constraints – to assert their connection to a wider world. At the same time, American women drew upon the cache of meanings that surrounded Oriental goods to challenge the propriety of the Victorian era; as the century came to a close, the American 'New Woman’ marked her independence and liberation by owning, wearing, and displaying goods that conjured Western ideas of a sensual and exotic East…Oriental goods thus became a marker of class status, and a vehicle of class striving, at multiple levels of society.

Bald, Vivek. Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. 17-19.