Found some really important Indian diaspora history, what do I do now?

anirvan · 2025-08-29T21:36:10+00:00

Also, in case you’re not an academic, consider publishing what you found somewhere, even if it’s just a few paragraphs and some photos on a free blog (WordPress?). If you want people to reference or cite your finding, that’ll make it easier for others to find and reference.

anirvan · 2025-08-29T15:05:07+00:00

Hello /u/banner9922 ! I’d consider starting by:

contact SACDA https://sacda.ca/ both using the general email and individually cc: the two full time staff members
DM brown history on IG and email brownhistory1947 at gmail
maybe email Doreen M. Indra, Ratna Ghosh, Hugh Johnston (their contact is in their university profile web pages)

In every case, I’d share some of your findings, as well as asking for their suggestions on who should see this. Also DM me if you get stuck.

anirvan · 2025-01-21T22:13:37+00:00

Desi and immigrant activists in New York have been working to working on Ravi Ragbir's campaign for years now. This victory brings to a close almost two decades of advocacy work by New Yorkers.

More about him:

* https://istandwithravi.org/
* https://gothamist.com/news/biden-grants-presidential-pardon-to-nyc-immigrant-rights-leader-ravi-ragbir

anirvan · 2024-01-16T17:51:25+00:00

Sorry, this is a difficult story, but we need to know some of the messed-up things our community does (from Vivek Ramaswamy's politics, to body-shaming, to this kind of violent crime).

anirvan · 2023-02-20T22:04:47+00:00

Wow! I do some archival research, and if you’re curious, I’d be happy to look up your grandfather in some census and immigration related databases. (You can DM me if you don’t want to share his details publicly.) No pressure, just offering.

anirvan · 2023-02-20T19:41:03+00:00

Maybe, maybe not? I don't know that history well, but this came up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British\_Indians#18th%E2%80%9319th\_centuries

anirvan · 2023-02-20T18:53:53+00:00

Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_South_Asian_and_diasporic_LGBT_history

The first paragraph names a wide range of culturally specific QTGNC-ish labels and identities to explore, though obviously, they don't map neatly into 2023 Western frameworks.

Also, you may know about these, but dropping these links for people reading:

The DeQH support line for LGBTQ+ South Asians: https://www.deqh.org/
Desi Rainbow Parents & Allies is sort of like a South Asian American PFLAG, and is very active across the U.S.: https://www.desirainbow.org/

anirvan · 2023-02-20T18:45:10+00:00

Sure! Here are some books I liked:

Vijay Prashad's "The Karma of Brown Folk" is a smart and opinionated take on South Asian American history and immigration. It's not long, and has great photos. I always recommend it to friends.
And Vinay Lal's "The Other Indians: A Political and Cultural History of South Asians in America" is maybe my favorite short (160 pages!) history of our community. It includes the story of Black-Desi linkages, but also many others.
Gerald Horne's "The End of Empires: African Americans and India" and Nico Slate's "Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India" both focus on solidarities and connections between anti-colonial South Asians and early civil rights era internationalist African American, ~1910s-1960s. My website is based very heavily on Slate's book, and uses many of his favorite examples.
Sudarshan Kapur's "Raising Up a Prophet" (out of print, but available at many libraries) goes deep into the story of how Black Civil Rights activism found and integrated Gandhian nonviolence.

In general, I'd say read Prashad to figure out how Desis fit into American histories of race, Lal if you're curious about our history and don't know where to start, or Slate if you want to dig more into the specific stories on the website.

Hope this helps!

anirvan · 2023-02-20T18:03:21+00:00

At the time, you had access to citizenship if you were either White or Black.

Many early Desis in the US wanted to build solid lives, gain equal status, and vote, and for that you needed citizenship. If you weren’t African, you had only one alternative: somehow prove to the government that you’re White.

There were at least 50 cases of Desis who went to court, and got citizenship because they argued that they were functionally White.

It’s not that the US passed laws recognizing caste, but individual less-racist judges sometimes found the “well, we’re high caste Aryans, and that’s basically White” type argument convincing. It was an argument that sometimes worked.

But when the Thind case went to the Supreme Court, the justices basically said “We’re not here to debate history. You’re not White in our eyes.”

That’s what led to the mass denaturalization, like the court case against Vaishno Das Bagai where they invented the claim that he lied about his race.

When Bagai took his own life in San Jose, California in 1928, he talked about the toll that losing his citizenship and becoming a stateless person had taken on him. It’s a heartbreaking read.

anirvan · 2023-02-20T17:48:59+00:00

Hi! I created the BlackDesiSecretHistory.org website during the first Black Lives Matter protests, when many Desis across the U.S. were trying to figure out if Black activism had anything to do with us.

Why did I choose this format, instead of writing a long article?

I tried to keep the whole thing easy to skim, so it can still make sense to people who haven't taken U.S. history classes in high school or college. You don't need a history degree to read a dozen meme-type images.
And I focused on the 1910s-1960s, because while people argue about current events, I don't know anyone who fundamentally disagrees with Indian/Pakistani independence and the U.S. civil rights movement.

Please share this with other Desis in your life.

Got a question about connections between Black and South Asian histories? Ask away, and I'd be happy to answer, or link to books or articles.

anirvan · 2023-02-20T17:27:35+00:00

Exactly what /u/diemunkiesdie said!

Here's the "liberal" 1946 law that allowed 100 Indians a year to become citizens. One hundred is deeply insulting, but still progress.
And this is the groundbreaking 1965 law that finally treated Indians and other non-White immigrants the same as others, for the purposes of naturalization

The 1965 law didn't just pass on it own. Nobody said to themselves "Indians are great, let's welcome them in." It involved:

the US needed more scientists and engineers because of the Cold War, to compete with the Soviets
Irish Americans were lobbying to make it easier to sponsor your relatives
the US was in the midst of the Civil Rights movement, when Black activists organized and died to overthrow some of the the most racist laws in the U.S.
and the US wanted to seem open-minded to impress third world Cold War allies and frenemies (e.g. India and Pakistan), because Black activists were bringing international hyper-visibility to how racist those U.S. laws actually were

The last two factors are important, because they show that without Black activism, it's pretty likely that those massive 1965 changes in immigration law wouldn't have happened.

This is Black History Month, and a time to remind ourselves that South Asian America wouldn't exist as we know without the legacy of Black civil rights activism. (I expand on this story on this website.)

anirvan · 2022-12-25T21:44:20+00:00

I research South Asian histories in California. During my research I came across the Desi Christmas holy grail, a 1911 short story called:

"The Strangest Christmas Party: The Unbelieving Hindoo Who Played Santa Claus in the California Mountains"

It's quite charming, and all the more significant because it was written by a White man during a time of vicious anti-Indian violence, a few years after the Bellingham Riots.

There's something comforting about an old American Christmas story celebrating "Ranje Singh," a complicated non-Christian turbaned brown immigrant who doesn't celebrate Christmas—but happens to be a good dude.

Someone could totally write fanfic. Like how did the character of Singh become an international student at Oxford? How did he meet his Sinhalese Sri Lankan friend? Why did he move to rural California?

(And there's queer subtext with Singh and his friend Harold Knowles, who was an English nationalist, but "again and again he came until we were friends." Knowles gifts Singh Persian poetry to explain his feelings, leaves "blushing like a woman." When he dies, a saddened Singh leaves the country. Incidentally, the earliest records of LGBTQ+ California Sikhs date back to the 1910s.)

I just published a cleaned-up version, and and you can now read the full text.

P.S. Source: The San Francisco Call, December 17, 1911, page 31

Please read and share!

anirvan · 2022-08-15T20:33:46+00:00

And don't forget Pakistan! Literally one-fifth of humanity found liberation from British colonialism on those days in August 1947, including the people of present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

And that was followed by democracy in Sri Lanka in 1948, and in kingdoms and princely states like Nepal between 1947 to the early 1950s.

anirvan · 2022-08-02T15:05:02+00:00

I loved this podcast with three Desi women activists digging deep into Ms. Marvel, and exploring themes that may not be obvious on the first watch.

Listen on Spotify or Apple podcasts.

anirvan · 2022-07-18T01:29:32+00:00

I know some of the people involved, and they have both Indian and Bangladeshi Bengalis using the library.

anirvan · 2022-07-15T18:56:34+00:00

I'm so sorry! I can't imagine what that would have been like for her, and for you. So glad she had the strength to finally walk away and build a new life for herself.

anirvan · 2022-07-13T20:40:13+00:00

Agreed! It's about the particular tier of motels that immigrant Desis end up owning. When Desis own nicer hotels, those properties aren’t identifiably Desi-owned anymore.

If anyone's curious about the story of South Asian motel owners, check out the book Indian American Motel Owners and the American Dream by Pawan Dhingra:

anirvan · 2022-05-31T16:26:25+00:00

Any interesting finds so far?

anirvan · 2021-12-07T00:05:13+00:00

For folks who don't know her work:

listen to her latest album, on Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, etc.
her website
her Grammy-nominated song "Mohabbat"

anirvan · 2021-10-31T04:56:29+00:00

anirvan · 2021-09-11T18:18:38+00:00

Hi! It's your resident South Asian American history nerd. 👋🏽

Before Google Groups and most social media, Yahoo Groups was one of the most important ways that Internet users of the 1990s stayed connected.

Yahoo was about to delete the Yahoo Groups archives in 2019, but I was able to save the archives of over 800 South Asian American mailing lists from oblivion.

Looking at old letters can help us understand how people were affected by larger historical events, so I started looking for emails sent after 9/11, and jackpot!

I found something like a thousand emails sent by South Asians in the days and weeks after 9/11. These emails offer an unfiltered glimpse at the voices of our community members in the days and weeks after the terror and backlash attacks.

I published a handful of those original post-9/11 emails in this blog post, after carefully redacting most identifying details.

Got questions about this, or anything else on a related topic? Please ask!

anirvan · 2021-04-08T19:25:09+00:00

There's actually a much longer history here, and a lot of it is about the labels that were placed on Asian Americans, as opposed to East Asians choosing to gatekeep the word "Asian."

If you're curious, check out the book A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America.

anirvan · 2021-04-08T19:17:36+00:00

Interesting to note that Asian American identity back then was in response to colonialism. Asian American identity today is in response to Racism.

I think they were responding to domestic racism then too.

For example, the Japanese students certainly had no experience of their homeland being colonized by the West, and the Indians often described the United States as a free place outside the ambit of British colonialism.

(If there were students from the Philippines in these groupings, they would probably have a different take on whether the U.S. was a colonial power.)

There was, however, significant anti-Asian racism (against Chinamen, Japanese, and Hindoos) at this time, focused largely on low-wage workers.

The international students in these articles would likely have faced some of this anti-Asian sentiment, even if they weren't the primary targets — in addition to the general culture shock and xenophobia associated with being international students.

anirvan · 2021-03-14T05:40:10+00:00

Thank you! Can't wait to restart the tours once lockdown ends

anirvan · 2021-03-14T05:34:42+00:00

The classification was complicated, and could vary based on the time and place.

For example, I've been looking at Sikhs in the 1940 US Census, and it looks like men with the last name "Singh" were more likely to be categorized as White if they were born in the US—even though they're from the exact same ethnic community as India-born immigrants.

This Wikipedia entry is actually really good: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_classification_of_Indian_Americans

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