How many of us were aware of the wave of Muslim peddlers who washed up at Ellis Island, each summer, in the late nineteenth century, from tiny villages in Bengal, to sell exotic Oriental wares on the boardwalks of New Jersey?
Or how these hawkers eventually journeyed to the Deep South and settled there?
Or of the Indian Muslim sailors who escaped their responsibilities on British steamers to find work ashore in New York and Baltimore?
Vivek Bald, MIT professor of writing and digital media, musician and documentary maker, meticulously tracks these unusual, unknown journeys in Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, recently published by Harvard University Press
The stories of these early working-class migrants are little known but in his colorful book they come alive. At a time when Asian immigrants were vilified and criminalized, he points out 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, while many started families with Creole, Puerto Rican, and African American women.
He offers intriguing stories how 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.
In his recent book Bengali Harlem, Vivek Bald sketches hitherto unknown patterns of migration to the US from Southeast Asia. Arthur J Pais reports
The book has received praise from academics and award-winning novelists. Says Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, ‘Bald’s work on this untold story is meticulously researched, movingly told, and absolutely timely.’
Bald is also a major force behind the new South Asian music in New York City. Over the years, he has forged ties across the South Asian second generation with British Asian artists such as Asian Dub Foundation, Talvin Singh, State of Bengal, Fun Da Mental and others, documenting the development of the British Asian music scene in his second full- length documentary, Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music.
How were you drawn to this interesting chapter of history?
Part of what interested me about this history, I suppose, is that fact that I am also of mixed descent.
My mother is Punjabi and my father was Scottish- Australian as is my partner she is of Southern Italian, African American, Native American, and Chinese descent. She is also a writer and for years, in different ways, we’ve been exploring issues that have to do with mixed identities, families, and communities, as well as cross-racial solidarities. When I was growing up in California in the 1970s, there wasn’t a large Indian population, but because my mother was a young professor teaching international, post-colonial, and feminist politics, I gained a sense of myself as “Indian” that was centered in politics and history, rather than, say, Bollywood film, which wasn’t even accessible where I was.
I heard stories about the independence movement and about my grandmother and great-grandmother, who were politically active going back to the 1920s and 1930s. Also, we were surrounded by my mother’s graduate students, who were from all over the de-colonizing world, so I got a strong sense of the pan-Third Worldist politics of the early 1970s.
That sense of historical grounding has also carried over to the way I think about “mixed-race” identities. People often speak of “mixed-race” identity in way that simply celebrates, for example, the different foods and cultural experiences to which mixed folks are exposed. But the fact is that every instance in which people from different places end up inter- acting or building intimate lives together, every one of those instances is tied to larger histories — of voluntary or forced migration, of displacement by colonialism, violence, wars or economic deprivation.
And in the US, different migrants of color have often mixed because they came to share neighborhoods, and circumstances, in large, diverse, but racially segregated cities. Those are the dynamics that I think are important to document and explore, as a person of mixed descent, and as a filmmaker, historian, and writer.
When I was in my early 20s, I moved to New York City to pursue a journalism degree, with the plan that I would go “back” to India to pursue a career as a foreign correspondent or something along those lines.
When I got to New York, though, and finally lived in a place with large and diverse home, within this arena of the South Asian Diaspora. The current project is rooted in that time, both in the direct sense that Aladdin and I met in that con- text, and because it was in that context that I gained a clearer sense of what was important to me politically and as a storyteller.
Tell us about the impact of your documentaries.
I am always surprised by the longevity that Taxivala and Mutiny have had.
Taxivala is still taught in Asian American Studies courses, and although Mutiny only had a short run on the festival circuit (it has never been properly released because of the scope of the music rights clearances involved), I still meet people who recount the moment that they saw it screened in one place or another. I recently met Himanshu Suri from Das Racist, for example, and he told me he saw Mutiny as a college student — when I screened it for his class at Wesleyan many years ago — and that it contributed to his own trajectory into music.
It is partly because of those experiences that I am trying to be more conscious of South Asian communities, I realized that I was much more Vivek Bald
Bengali Harlem’s afterlife. I see the film and book merely as starting points for a a person of the Diaspora, that going “back” to India was pure fiction for someone who had been born and brought up in the US — and that I just had more to say, more I could contribute, within the Diaspora. That’s when I started working independently on my first documentary, Taxivala/Auto-biography (1994), which focused on South Asian taxi drivers in New York City and addressed some the class divisions that were emerging in South Asian communities at that time.
How about your second film?
It grew out of my background growing up with punk, reggae, and ska in 1970s-1980s California.
Asian Dub Foundation’s Master D (Deedar Zaman) in a still from Vivek Bald’s 2003 documentary film, Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music
By the 1990s, I realized that there was an entire generation of South Asian youth across the Atlantic in Britain, who had come up at the same time with the same music, and were combining all of those musical forms with South Asian sounds – and using music to address the racism and xenophobia they faced in the UK. That generation — their music and their politics — became the focus of my sec ond film, Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music (2003).
American Studies classes — so I was regularly traveling to different colleges with Taxi-vala and Mutiny, interacting with students, using the films to engage with them about different aspects of the South Asian experience in the US and Britain. Each film was continuing to have a life in this way long after I had completed it.
Since I already had this relationship with academia, and since the questions at the center of Bengali Harlem were going to require such dedicated research, it seemed like a logical next move to step a little further into the academic realm. I felt that academia might give me a more solid platform on which to work in the long term, both to pursue this one specific historical project and to deepen the ways I was operating, using each film as the beginning of a larger public engagement and working across different platforms with film, writing, and web- based media forms. I’m lucky to have found a position at MIT that is allowing me to do exactly that.
Why is it important for us to know about this unknown (to most people) episode in the South Asian Diaspora?
These stories are important for multiple reasons.
At a very basic level, the history of South Asians in the United States is incomplete with- out them. A lot of important historical research has been done on Indian migration to the West Coast in the early years of the twentieth century, but we have somehow assumed: a) that the Pacific route was the only path Indian migrants took to the U.S. in those years, and b) that migration from the subcontinent simply stopped in the late 1910s and early 1920s when racist immigration laws were put in place excluding the entry of Asians, and only started again after 1965, when the doors were opened to doctors, engineers, and other professionals.
Left out of that picture are hundreds of immigrants and thousands of transient laborers and
Abdul Rub Mollah, a member of the Bengali peddler network that sold chikan embroidery to U.S tourists at the beach boardwalks of New Jersey and throughout the U.S. South in the 1890s-1920s. Source: U.S National Archives, Washington, DC
But when he told me about his father, it was still really surprising. He told me that his father had come to the US in the 1920s. He had been a worker on a British steamship, had deserted, and then had settled in East Harlem in the 1930s.
Habib’s first wife was Puerto Rican, so Aladdin, had half-siblings who were Bengali and Puerto Rican who were now in their 60s. It just ran so counter to everything I had been taught about the South Asian experience in the US. According to what I had learned, there weren’t supposed to be any Indian immigrants settling in the US in the 1920s and 30s.
So although I was working on another film at that point (Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music) Aladdin and I started talking and then doing interviews bit by bit, trying to learn more. Aladdin’s father had died years earlier, when Aladdin was just 12, and there was a lot that was unclear about Habib’s early life in Harlem. So we began, around 2003, by interviewing Aladdin’s older half- brother Habib, Jr, who grew up in Spanish Harlem in the 1940s and 50s, as well as one of Habib, Sr’s close friends, Masood Choudhury, a former INA member and merchant seaman who was in his 80s and still living in a housing project uptown on the West Side.
Around the same time, I had got into a PhD program in American Studies at NYU. I went into that program with a single question in mind: was Aladdin’s father just one person — one isolated case of someone who somehow made his away across the word from East Bengal to East Harlem — or was he part of a larger history that had been completely overlooked?
For the next several years, I searched the archives to try to answer that question. I looked at census records, marriage, birth and death certificates, ship manifests, old news clippings, British colonial correspondence traders who came through Atlantic ports and made their way across the US Northeast, Midwest and South. These migrants traveled to the US in small but significant numbers as early as the late 19th century and continued to come throughout the exclusion era, even after being demonized in public discourse and rendered “illegal” by US law. The majority appear to have been Muslim men from rural and working-class backgrounds in Bengal — modern-day Indian West Bengal and Bangladesh although this group included others from Punjab, Kashmir, and the Northwest Frontier in what is now Pakistan, from Goa, and from modern-day Sri Lanka.
While the public profile of South Asians in the US has centered on Indian professionals connected to post-1965 migrations, there has, in fact, been a continuous and unbroken presence of working-class Muslim migrants from the sub- continent in the US for more than a century. So in this way, I’d argue that these stories not only fill out the picture we have of “South Asian America” but fundamentally change it. They also challenge the depiction of Muslim Americans as newcomers, aliens, and outsiders.
These histories also offer a different picture of “immigration” and “assimilation” — the mythic story that we still hear about the US is one in which immigrants leave their home- land behind for a better life here, reconstitute families and communities in ethnic enclaves (Little Indias), accumulate wealth and then move out to the predominantly white suburbs, assimilating into that world. The truth is, this describes the experiences of only a portion perhaps a small portion of people who migrate to the US and for many especially working class immigrants of color, and those who are not openly welcomed, or who are at odds with the immigration laws of their day the story is much more difficult and complicated.
In the case of the migrants whose histories I’ve been piecing together for this book, they had to navigate both Asian exclusion and racial segregation. The Bengali peddlers who operated in the US South did so at the height of Jim Crow, and although their Indian-ness might have given them slightly greater safety and freedom of movement in some circumstances, this “safety” was always provisional, never stable and certain.
How did you come across the subject?
This whole project started with the story of one person, Aladdin Ullah’s father, Habib. Several years ago, after a screening of my first documentary, Taxivala/Autobiography, Aladdin (distinguished stand up, film and theater actor and writer) approached me saying he wanted to make a doc- umentary about his father. At the time, Aladdin was doing stand-up comedy and his act incorporated a lot of material about his experiences growing up in Spanish Harlem in the 1970s, so I already knew that Aladdin had had a very different second-generation experience from most other people I knew.
Anything I could get my hands on. Although I already had a sense that Habib, Sr was not an isolated case, the history quickly snowballed from his story. It became much bigger than I imagined.
What kind of challenges did you face in working on this book?
One of the biggest challenges was the fragmentary nature of the archives. The interviews with Habib Ullah, Jr, and Masood Choudhry and others provided a rich picture of one circle of South Asian ex-seamen who had settled in New York, but it didn’t extend much further back than the 1940s. Working outward from their stories — and backward chronologically, I had to rely on all kinds of official docu- ments as I said, ship manifests, census records and so on. Each one of these provided little bits of information — names of the men and those with whom they lived and/or worked, addresses where they were living, names of regions, cities or villages they had come from, their ages, occupations, etc. But from one document to another, the same names were often spelled completely differently, as British and US officials misheard, misunderstood, and mis-transliterated what the men told them.
The seamen, like others in South Asia in those days, didn’t necessarily know their exact ages and birth dates. Men who had jumped ship also likely changed their names or used different configurations of their names at different times in order to evade authorities.
So, the challenge was not just finding early South Asian migrants in the archival records, but putting all the pieces together, tracking the movements and experiences of specific people over time, connecting the dots in order to be able to understand what the story was in all these bits of information.
domestic workers were organizing politically. There was a constellation of overlapping South Asian organizations at that time devoted to different kinds of artistic and political work.
In earlier years I had found a kind of home within punk rock, but in the 1990s I found another, in a sense deeper much larger project of historical recovery that I hope to achieve through the Bengali Harlem website.
The book, film, and website are three overlapping components of a single project: as people find out about the project through the book and film, my hope is that more people who are personally con- nected to these histories — descendants of the early migrants, the peddlers and seamen — will come forward. The web- site will be a space where they will be able to contribute their own stories, share photographs and video, etc. I will also be building out dynamic maps and timelines that will allow users to navigate these stories themselves in various different ways. So the web component will make this a long-term, ongoing social history project.
How did your work in the documentary world and as a musician lead you into academics?
This might sound odd, but I first entered into academia as a means of Mutiny also brought me back to club- based music. In 1997, I teamed up with DJ Rekha to start a club devoted to new forms of South Asian electronic music (ie: beyond bhangra and Bollywood). We played drum ‘n bass, jungle, dub, and hip hop — all mixed with South Asian music and instrumentation.
The club, which was also called Mutiny, started as a fundraiser for the documentary, but it quickly took on a life of its own. Our crew of DJs and producers included the two of us and DJs Navdeep, Anju, and Zakhm, and we drew on other NYC musicians and DJs — Karsh Kale, DK, DJ Spooky, Mutamassik, Badawi, and a lot of the British musicians who were in my film: Talvin Singh, State of Bengal, and members of Asian Dub Foundation, Black Star Liner, and the Outcaste Records crew. It was a really dynamic Diasporic space.
The 1990s were also just a time of cultural and political consolidation. The post-1965 second generation was coming to a critical mass, and newer immigrants taxi drivers,
Asian Dub Foundation’s Master D (Deedar Zaman) in a still from Vivek Bald’s 2003 documentary film, Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music surviving as a filmmaker.
For years, when I was working on Mutiny, I was supporting myself and my film work by doing web production. I would work freelance jobs, save up money, fly to the UK to shoot some interviews and live performances, use up all the money, then come back to New York and get more freelance web production work.
In part this was a response to the shrinking of grant-based support for the arts in the 1990s, and I knew a lot of other artists who were working in this way, taking advantage of the high hourly wages in web production to support their other creative work. But ultimately this wasn’t a viable way to function as a filmmaker.
I already had sort of a foot in the academic world as I mentioned, both Taxivala and Mutiny were being used in college-level Asian
Source: India Abroad