dispensation, both in Canada and the U.S. But they don't seem to connect with the history of South Asian migrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I have always been puzzled by that
AA: Are there established reasons for that, or is it just a lack of information?
AS: I think it's both. There are still class attitudes. For example middle class Indians are very snobbish towards Indian cabbies and kiosk workers who are often educated people forced to do those jobs. Middle class Indians tend to be very dismissive about their presence. In Canada and the UK the population has been much more mixed and much more working class. Since 1965 the migration into the States has been mostly professional people. The proportion of doctors who came from India and nurses who came from India in the 70s is a mind boggling figure.
Of course the same professional who had a condescending attitude towards working class people now has his own brothers and sisters doing working class jobs. So it's a little bit difficult to shun your own brother or sister because they are working as cabbies, or they are working as clerks in banks, compared to people who are not related to you. Predominantly, South Asians are considered among the most highly educated, but we are very small numbers and people have to remember that. We don't make a dent on the ethnic consciousness or the mainstream consciousness.
AA: What sort of numbers are we looking at?
AS: The numbers, I think this is an estimate, but if you include Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans and especially if you include Fijians and Guyanese, the total number has to be four million. In terms of the breakdown, desperate poverty does not exist among the South Asians. I think the kind of desperate poverty you see among Appalachian whites and southern blacks, that does not exist. But I would say one fourth of them is working class struggling with day-to-day problems, not able to hold on, not able to buy a house etc. There's also a lot of ignorance. Some level of middle class and upper middle class – the number of very rich is not very high – make up the rest, although I could not be precise.
AA: Could you compare the Indian community to the Jews? Are they also starting to punch above their weight (or numbers)?
AS: To a degree you can see that role with the nuclear deal. There are some individuals who are very active; some presidential candidates are contributing a fair amount. But I would say that we are still not a particularly active political community. My impression is that politically we are still apathetic, uninterested, you know a non-active group. I don't think there is a sense of the need to form a lobbying group, or pressure group. Part of it may be that the focus is on upward mobility and education and children. Part of it may just be diversity the linguistic diversity, the religious diversity, for example. There are so many Telugu groups, Gujarati groups, Punjabi groups. Ultimately, we have to learn to do coalition politics with our Asian friends, with African Americans whenever necessary.
Our interest is connecting the current population to the past days when all these things have happened. People like Lala Lajpat Rai, they came and connected with people like black leader W.E.B. Du Bois and Tarak Nath Das was very much connected to the African Americans. They saw India's freedom struggle as inspirational for the civil rights movement during the early years. People don't realise the link from around 1900. Du Bois wrote a novel, Dark Princess, which was shaped a great deal by his conversations with Lala Lajpat Rai.
AA: Not many people realise that Lala Lajpat Rai visited America.
AS: Yes, definitely and you have to think of other people like Kumar Ghoshal, who was a leftist. Kumar Ghoshal's wife, Mary Keating, was a founding member of NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People). Later on of course Du Bois realised that Indians tend to be racist. That conception of the black in the UK does not exist in the U.S. I have written two pieces on how Indians and other Asians can be racist towards blacks. I think the Indian resistance to learning about early history is a resistance to self-understanding. My sense is that if you do not want to acknowledge and process patterns of certain parts of your history – whether that is in India or North America – then there is a gap in sensibility and that is ultimately damaging.
AA: What gaps are you talking about?
AS: They do not want to know, for example, about the Sikh farm workers who came to the U.S. in the 1890s. They do not want to know about the lynch mobs that were formed against them. They do not want to know about the Alien Land Act that excluded Indians and other Asians from owning land. Some are absolutely fantastic stories. They do not want to know how the Supreme Court – even though Indians were considered Caucasians – issued unanimous decisions in 1922/23 saying, 'Yes, we know you are Caucasians, but you are not the same kind of Caucasians as the French and the others. So your petition is rejected. An early success story is Dalip Singh Saund who became the first Asian American Congressman. He became a Congressman from California in 1959 and he had three terms. When he was campaigning for a fourth term, he had a stroke and was bedridden until the 1970s. Now people are paying attention to him. His wife lost her citizenship when she married him because the law at the time said if a white woman married someone who was not eligible for naturalisation, she also lost her citizenship, although she was able to retain her status as a Resident Alien. But what we as South Asians experienced pales in comparison with what the blacks went through. That was apartheid. Jim Crow was apartheid.
AA: Could you elaborate on Jim Crow?
AS: Jim Crow was an unofficial appellation for the set of local and state laws that allowed African Americans to be stripped of their civil rights. In 1877 there was an election like the election in 2000 in Florida. There was a man called Rutherford Hayes, a decent human being, a Republican when Republicans were in favour of the Negro at that time. But his electoral college votes were in doubt, so they cut a deal where he would become the president but as part of the deal the Republicans agreed to what the southern Democrats wanted. They withdrew the federal troops from the South and that was the beginning of Jim Crow. It was what the South wanted – keeping blacks in their place. Just to give you an example of a Jim Crow Act. You cannot vote if you do not have a high school degree, you cannot vote if you don't own land, if you do not have a house. Now how were these newly freed slaves going to have a high school education and own property overnight? These were grandfather laws that applied in the American states. The federal government was trying to make sure that these laws were not applied, but as soon as the federal troops were withdrawn, it started again. That's the grandfather of racism, but South Asians feel this is nothing to do with them. But if you notice from our outline, we believe that class and race, especially race, have been a major part of South Asian history.
AA: You alluded to lynch mobs against South Asians.
AS: Oh yes, in a place called Bellington near Seattle in Washington state, in 1907, these were mostly turbaned Sikhs, they were forced to hide in a building, a mob gathered outside and they were asked to leave. In places like Oregon and Alaska they were given the same treatment. Then you had the incident of the Komagata Maru, an example of the racist treatment that South Asians received in Vancouver in 1914. The Komagatu Maru was a chartered ship with South Asian passengers that was forced to stay in Vancouver harbour for two and a half months. A very small group of Indians who were already in Vancouver kept supplying them with food, fighting their legal cases. The first court order was in favour of the South Asians and the second decision went against them. Then they were asked to leave. They came back to Calcutta, where they were arrested and thrown into jails.
One thing that is interesting is why Nehru and other leaders never acknowledged the Ghadr Party people as exiled freedom fighters. They were never given any pensions and there were even suggestions that their papers were destroyed, they were manipulated. I have a feeling it stemmed from some political attitude of the time.
AA: Coming back to the comparison with the Jews, are you saying that the Indians are not as well organised and also that they have not reached out to other minority groups like the blacks ?
AS: Yes. Jews were very active in the civil rights movement, even though their coalition with the blacks did fall apart at some point. But I still find that a very inspiring story – what the blacks and Jews were able to do together, even though they drifted apart from the 1960s. We Indians don't have those kinds of skills, but fortunately the younger generation is different. There are changes and there are younger South Asians involved in programmes that help blacks and native Americans, although the numbers are still very small. Indians still live in this circle of illusion that we are not affected by prejudice and racism, that we are outside that web. But they are not.
AA: What can you tell us about the Ghadr Party?
AS: That was formed in the early part of the 20th century. They were a group of revolutionaries. Here is my sense of the Indians around 1914, post Komagatu Maru. Indians in California were of three kinds. Most of them were Sikh farm workers, along with some Muslims and Hindus. They were not allowed to bring their women, worked in horrible conditions. They were the early settlers, or Asian pioneers. Second group were students who kept on coming to places like Berkeley and Stanford. Even Pratap Singh Kairon was a student. Dalip Singh Saund came to Berkeley, he did a Ph.D in maths, could not get a job and remained a farmer for 25 years before he became a judge and a Congressman. So these were students and you can see how people like Saund did not become a revolutionary, although there was a lot of passion about India and her freedom. The third group were the revolutionaries, who based themselves in the West coast, by trying to get to Canada through Shanghai, to Hong Kong, via Germany, whatever way they could find. Those people included Tarak Nath Das, Lala Hardayal, founders of the Ghadr Party.
Around 1915 the German government wanted to help them and there is a whole chapter about this called the Hindu-German conspiracy. The Germans were willing to kick in millions of dollars to destabilise the British Empire. The British became aware of it and the British ambassador in DC kept telling the Foreign Office in London, 'Let's not press this issue at this time' because William Jennings Bryan, then the secretary of state, was sympathetic to Indian aspirations. Once Bryan stepped down, a lot of Ghadr Party members were detained, as well as members of the German consultate in San Francisco. The Germans were deported but many of the Indians were sent back to India and executed. One of them was a young man called Parkhana.
AA: Are you saying among those early Indian pioneers the Sikhs were the most dynamic and forward looking?
AS: Well, let's put it this way, they were very aggressive travellers and the Ghadr Party was full of Sikhs. The first 'paper was full of passionate poetry. It was the Ghadr magazine published in Punjabi. One of the things I found was that because they were frequently raided by the police, they never left behind any mailing lists wherever they used to meet. Every student was asked to memorise maybe 30 addresses and they sent any paper out of their memorised list. They never left any paper work. One estimate is that 90 per cent of those who were executed during the freedom movement were Sikhs. I have not verified the figure. Apart from Bhagat Singh, a lot of people were outsiders. Even in the INA (Indian National Army founded by Subhash Chandra Bose) most of the members were diaspora Sikhs. It's very interesting how these early people were trying to work with Japan and Germany, there was definitely that attraction to fascism. Tarak Nath Das was very open to working with the Germans.
AA: How would you list the groups from India that have settled in the U.S.?
AS: In terms of numbers of those who have settled in the U.S., I understand that Gujaratis are the largest group, the south Indians together and the Punjabis are the next two largest. Certainly the Sikhs have had the longest history in Canada and the U.S. We are leaving out what happened in the Caribbean, don't forget that. Very few Sikhs went there. Those were mostly people from UP, Bihar and elsewhere. We are not doing too much on that, but our focus is mostly on Canada and the U.S.
The fact that the early arrivals were Sikhs is less important than the fact that the history of the pioneers is not part of our awareness and we do not see that some of the same patterns of treatment continue in the post 9/11 world. Indian doctors were helping people at Ground Zero and 20 yards from Ground Zero they were beaten up by hoodlums. I think 9/11 was a bit of a wake-up call because generally the attitude of Indians and other Asians is that they can cover themselves in the cloak of class – become an engineer, or doctor, or architect. And they think that race will not affect them. And then they're shocked when race does affect them and that's when they begin to see some relevance of the history of native Americans and Chicanos and black Americans to their own history. And I think there is a fledgling recognition of those connections, but not a very strong one.
AA: Is there much difference in the settlement of South Asians in Canada and the U.S.?
AS: Have you noticed a difference in their visibility? South Asians are very visible in the politics of Canada. Part of it is due to the difference in the size of the two countries' populations. If you have 500,000 Sikhs in Canada in a population of 30 million versus 500,000 Sikhs in a population of 300 million in the States, that partly explains the visibility difference. I am so happy when I come to the UK, or Canada or Australia and I see South Asians and turbaned Sikhs working as immigration officers. The U.S. would never allow that. They are very suspicious. Come to New York and you will never find a foreign-born individual at immigration.
AA: Are there any specific geographical areas in the U.S. that are especially popular for settlement among South Asians ?
AS: California, New York, Houston and Dallas, New Jersey, Chicago and the surrounding areas, Florida. Those are the main areas. No-go areas are where they can't find other South Asian communities. For example I know a friend who was offered a job in South Dakota and she didn't go. Immigrants tend to hover around the cities. That's another one of my perceptions about blacks and Asian immigrants. They need the cities. But they occupy the cities without any connection with each other and that is harmful to both sides. They come to the cities for jobs and employment and the Indians rush to the suburbs as soon as they can afford it and they rush to the cities because they want to run away from the blacks – that's part of it. So they don't go to areas where there are no South Asian populations and they don't go to areas where they are not going to get jobs.
AA: You seem to be very concerned that South Asians by and large have not been sensitive to black community concerns, despite previous connections with such distinguished black leaders like Du Bois.
AS: Du Bois was a very fantastic figure, more and more central to any work on race and ethnicity for all of us. He was an interesting contemporary of Gandhi, born in 1868, one year before Gandhi, and he lived to be 95. He gave up U.S. citizenship, joined the U.S. Communist Party and was invited by Nkrumah to live in Ghana. At the age of 90 he moved to Ghana. He was very badly treated under Eisenhower. Nehru sent telegrams protesting the treatment of Du Bois. Nehru knew what a great man he was. At the NAACP he was the editor of their journal, Crisis, from 1910-1934, as well as being the author of numerous books.
You raised a question about links to the black community. We don't need to do it for the blacks, we need to do it for ourselves. We can learn a lot from their history. We also need to know that we are the beneficiaries of the civil rights movement, not just Martin Luther King but also what the NAACP did. Rajender and Anupama share my view that there is this conflict within the Indian consciousness between wanting to build on what is a corollary of white privilege and trying to suppress any possibility that they might also be part of the racialisation of minorities, including by the way the Italians and the Irish and the Poles. Racialisation has not been applied only to people of colour.
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