The Lost History of Bengali Harlem

 

The stories of working-class South Asians in New York City point to a history beyond the narrative of assimilation.

A 1952 banquet of The Pakistan League of America, an organization whose membership consisted predominantly of former seamen from East Bengal (via Bengali Harlem, a project by Vivek Bald and Alaudin Ullah)

During the Harlem Renaissance, in the early decades of the 20th century — when some of America’s greatest writers, thinkers, and artists were transforming a New York neighborhood into the heart of Black politics and art — Bengali sailors were jumping ship and sneaking into American ports on the East Coast. Hearing the rumors from Ellis Island, where immigration officers were imprisoning the “tired, poor and huddled masses yearning to be free,” the sailors came to port cities like Boston, Baltimore, and New York, making their way into Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, buying Puerto Rican birth certificates to hide their true identities. In 1917, the U.S. government had banned Asian immigrants, and so these sailors survived by “passing” amongst people of color. From the Lower East Side and downtown Manhattan to Harlem in New York City, these refugees married Black and Latina women, and soon were rubbing shoulders with revolutionaries and Black separatists.

“‘Malcolm X used to come to the house at 100 and Western Avenue,’” said comedian-turned-historian Alaudin Ullah, recalling the words of one descendent. “He was like, ‘I remember I used to give him rasmalai and tea.’” In the 1950 to 1960s Harlem, Muslim civil rights leaders like Malcolm X would debate the tenets of Islam with Bengalis, and jazz musician Miles Davis would sift through the records of Bollywood playback singers like Mohammed Rafi. Black Muslim celebrities like Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul Jabbar frequented restaurants like the Bombay India Restaurant, for the halal food and the Muslim company. Through the 1950s and 1960s, Black and Brown radical politics commingled — almost forgotten, lost between the cracks of American history.

“Bangladeshis are kind of invisible,” said Ullah. “Even in the South Asian circle, we're like the wretched of the earth.” Bengali Muslims, however, were some of the first South Asian migrants to the East Coast due to their predominance in the Calcutta maritime trade. Ullah — the son of Habib Ullah, a Bengali activist who married Puerto Rican Victoria Echevarria — met filmmaker Vivek Bald in the 1990s and started talking about Bengali Harlem, and the men who lived there to hide from immigration officers. “It fascinated him because he didn't know about this, no one knew about this.” The result was Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, a book on early Bengali migration, and In Search of Bengali Harlem, a soon-to-be-released documentary.

"In Search of Bengali Harlem" a documentary film by Vivek Bald & Alaudin Ullah

“There was never a kind of Bengali Harlem in the sense that we think of like Little Italy or Chinatown or Little India,” Bald told me. “This was a population that, by necessity, could not create an ethnic enclave because they were undocumented, and they had to remain under the radar.” Instead, said Bald, “it was invisible to outsiders but visible to insiders”: Bengali-run hotdog vendors scattered through East Harlem, a handful of Indian restaurants.

“I’d read about Indians passing as American, but they were always histories of Indians passing as Caucasian,” said Priyanka Dasgupta, a Harlem-based artist who came across the book while pursuing her M.F.A. Dasgupta and her partner Chad Marshall were inspired to create an art exhibit, centered on a fictional jazz performer called Bobby Alam. “Bengali Harlem disrupts that narrative and points to this history where Indians passed as Black and found solidarity with Black and Hispanic communities.”

“For many decades since 1965, the story of South Asians in the United States has come to coalesce around the story of the middle-to-upper class, doctor-engineer, model minority,” said Bald. “But both before 1965 and afterward, there has always been a continuous presence of working-class South Asian immigrants and their families in the U.S.”

Bhagat Singh Thind in his U.S. Army uniform, in 1918. (South Asian American Digital Archive)

This history of South Asians trying to pass as white to survive has an ugly and well-documented history: from the 1923 Supreme Court case United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind — where an Indian American argued he was Aryan and thus white to regain the community’s stripped citizenship — to Mahatma Gandhi, who as a young lawyer argued that Indians, unlike Africans, were “civilized.” The early migrants to the East Coast were mostly working-class Bengali Muslims, people who would remain banned from America even after the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which abolished U.S. immigration’s race-based quota system but implemented skills-based requirements. Their descendents, who lived as people of color, slipped out of the annals of history, merging seamlessly into Black and Hispanic families.

“I have a bunch of [Bengali] friends who have half-brothers and -sisters that are Hispanic,” said Kamrul Khan, who founded the website Bengalis of New York. “A lot of Muslims [back then] had multiple wives, and so a lot of my friends’ dads had a Spanish wife here and a wife in Bangladesh. Eventually, they’d bring their Bengali wife here. It would cause all sorts of mayhem.”

Mohima Ullah with her sons in 1973 (Courtesy of Vivek Bald and Alaudin Ullah)

Bengali language, culture, and practices largely disappeared from these communities; children would take on the culture and religion of their mothers, and their mothers’ extended families. But echoes of the subcontinent sprung up occasionally, causing descendents to investigate. “Those genes are strong,” said Sydney Magruder Washington, the 28-year-old great-granddaughter of a Bengali immigrant. “My mother and her sisters all married Black guys, but all of us cousins are light-skinned, with that dark, long hair.”

After 1870, when the 15th amendment gave Black men the right to vote, U.S. immigration law saw only two colors: Black and white. A wave of anti-Asian legislation specifically banned Chinese immigrants from naturalization, leaving the path of citizenship open only to people of white skin or African descent. But defining Blackness and whiteness proved difficult — as legislators struggled to formulate legal categories for race, some people of color took advantage of that ambiguity. In Bengali Harlem, Bald records how Black men would occasionally don turbans, pretending to be “Hindoos.”

“[The men] are all so dark as to be taken easily for Negroes, but their features are Caucasian and their hair is straight, stiff, and wiry,” reads a newspaper article from 1900 describing the new arrivals. Census workers classified these predominantly Muslim Bengali immigrants as everything from “Hindoo” to “Mulatto” to “Black” and “White.” Bengalis, caught within a country that could only see them as elements of America’s racial struggle, donned different identities depending on the situation.

Mohima Kareem Ullah, mother of Alaudin Ullah (Courtesy of Vivek Bald and Alaudin Ullah)

“They were ‘white’ when they attempted to claim citizenship, ‘Hindoo’ when selling exotic goods, ‘black’ or ‘Porto Rican’ when disappearing into U.S. cities or actively attempting to evade the immigration authorities,” writes Bald in Bengali Harlem. “They were ‘Indios’ on the streets of Spanish Harlem, and their Puerto Rican and African American wives were ‘East Indian’ when they ran their Oriental gift shops or greeted customers in their restaurants.”

“My great-grandfather Mohamed came here from what is now Bangladesh, at the turn of the century, with a lot of other immigrant waves,” said Magruder Washington. According to family lore, he was a stowaway. “Upon settling here, he was told very specifically to find a Black bride. Because we were apparently the prettiest and the best cooks.”

Sydney Magruder Washington's great-great grandfather Mohamed, a Bengali immigrant in Harlem (Courtesy of Sydney Magruder Washington)

In Harlem, many of the migrants began working as dishwashers, hot dog vendors — Jews and Muslims alike could trust that there was no pork — and made their way up as restaurant owners and political activists. Some of America’s first “Indian” restaurants were founded by New York Bengalis: places such as the Pakistan India Restaurant founded in 1950 — East Bengal was at the time part of Pakistan — at 135th Street and Eighth Avenue, and the Bombay India Restaurant founded 1958 on 125th Street and Amsterdam. Introducing spiced cuisine to the bland American palate was no small feat, and they were aided by Black Muslim patrons.

“When the ’50s and ’60s came along, and the Nation of Islam got a little more developed, these restaurants had halal food,” said Ullah. Nation of Islam, founded in 1930, was a Black separatist political and religious movement based on Islamic teachings. Its most famous member was Malcolm X, who would later leave the sect and pursue mainstream Islam. “Malcolm X and members of Nation of Islam would come there, and there was this discourse between the Nation of Islam and my father’s friends...Whenever they would bring people from out-of-town, organizers, activists from Chicago, they would bring them to these restaurants.”

In the 1940s to 1950s, anti-colonialist movements were at their height, spurring the collapse of European empires and the emergence of new nations. Nationalists like Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt were building alliances across continents, and former empire-worshippers like Gandhi were now in correspondence with pan-Africanists like W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. In general, Black American activists paid close attention to the Indian Independence — Malcolm X described how Indians, led by Gandhi, “twisted the British lion’s tale.”

“Excepting the African slave trade, nowhere has history recorded any more unnecessary bestial and ruthless human carnage than the British suppression of the non-white Indian people,” said Malcolm X in his autobiography. He eventually broke with the leader of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad, and went on a pilgrimage to Mecca.

“My father used to always say they’d tell Malcolm, ‘Elijah Muhammad is just a Black man from Chicago,’” said Ullah. “‘The real Muhammad came from Medina. You have to do hajj.’”

A meeting of Muslim Bengali immigrants in Harlem (Courtesy of Sydney Magruder Washington)

By this point, Habib Ullah had co-founded the Pakistan League of America, a political group that lobbied for South Asian citizen rights. Unlike the India League of America — which, led by J.J. Singh, adopted a different lobbying strategy, emphasizing the “respectability” of upper-class South Asians, and the Aryan argument — the Pakistan League worked in tandem with Black Muslim groups and the pan-Islamic world. Magruder Washington found photographs of her great grandfather at one of these meetings, though she doesn’t know much about his work.

“I do get frustrated with the lack of information,” she said. “All the people I have questions for are dead.”

Bengali Harlem isn’t a full story — even the people Ullah and Bald managed to find could be challenging to talk to, with complicated relationships with their immigrant fathers. Magruder Washington has been left with fragments: unsmiling photographs of her grandfather, genetic data, family legends, an old Quran. “I don’t think he taught anyone to speak the language — just the food. My mom has this very specific curry recipe, and I wish I had more. But that’s all that we’ve got.” She wants to go to Bangladesh someday but is afraid she will feel like an outsider. “When you see other Desi people, you recognize them as Desi, but do they recognize you?”

'In Search of Bengali Harlem,' a documentary film by Vivek Bald and Alaudin Ullah

But Bengali Harlem still gives us an alternative history, one in which Brown and Black people were not only neighbors, but political allies. The American immigration system — which after 1965 began letting in more educated Hindu Brahmins and excluded working-class Muslims — eventually divided Black and Brown people along the lines of class. If history had gone in a different direction, South Asian immigrants may have found a very different place in the America, one closer to that of Black working-class and Hispanic immigrants, the inner city rather than the suburbs.

“America produced Bobby Jindal, and Nikki Haley, the kind of South Asians who come from a reactionary place of growing up with a Eurocentric understanding of America — they don't want any solidarity with Black people,” said Ullah. “I grew up in East Harlem. I listened to hip hop. I’m a child of Gil Scott Heron and Public Enemy — resistance is in my blood. But that's not the South Asian circle that exists today.”

“[This history] has the potential for changing the narrative around the relationship between South Asians to other communities of color, and also changing the narrative of what our horizon should be as a community in the U.S.,” said Bald. “Is our horizon about succeeding in a white world? Or is our horizon about understanding and grappling with the racial inequalities that define this country?”

Published/Broadcast by: The Juggernaut
Date published: February 8, 2021
Author: MICHAELA STONE CROSS

Entry Type: অপিনিয়ন পিস
Source:   https://www.thejuggernaut.com/bengali-harlem?s=ckkx4hv1d0n3l0763ci61p3dn&fbclid=IwAR12vNekwb2lzxjWt_qhSGFBakyZLiY1cjLqqcDHepUqvNfLvg4vfh8hWK0