Between Representation and Reality

Between Representation and Reality: Orientalist Imagining and Racial Construction of the Early South Asian Diaspora in the United States Bud Erdene-Gankhuyag Ithaca College

Between Representation and Reality: Orientalist Imagining and Racial Construction of the Early South Asian Diaspora in the United States Bud Erdene-Gankhuyag

Ithaca College

The experiences of the early South Asian diaspora in the United States took many different faces, as they weaved through the contradictions and ambiguities of their “race.� The attitudes, occupations, and behavior of South Asian-Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were deeply influenced by U.S. cultural and representational pressures on the migrants to embody Orientalist, often contradictory representations, but such contradictions conversely allowed them to navigate treacherous racial landscapes to their advantage. Their histories reveal the historical process of racial construction and its dependence on concurrent political and social factors, as well as the ontological dimension of race, or, how what was believed to be true shaped the social truths for themselves and others. I argue that South Asian reconciliation of the distance between representation and reality, from the imposed definition of themselves to the push for selfdefinition, was propelled by the understanding that their survival depended on either adhering to or resisting against the false premises of Orientalist epistemology.

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efore South Asians ever arrived in the United States, popular depictions of “Orientals” had already been inherited from Europe and heavily imbued in American culture. A myriad of contrived representations, ranging from the enlightened Swami to the Oriental despot, permeated perceptions of South Asians in the U.S.-ian collective imagination, yet by the time South Asian migrants first settled in the United States in the late 19th century, the racial construction of South Asians remained unclear. Claims to Caucasian/Aryan descent, coupled with the purported backward nature of South Asians, found no solidified place for South Asians within the rigid racial binary of white and black. As a result, the experiences of those of the early South Asian diaspora in the United States took many different faces, as they weaved through the contradictions and ambiguities of their “race.” In what ways did people in the United States inherit popular views of South Asians from European traditions? How did the United States first encounter South Asia and South Asians? To what extent did these varied preconceived notions, centered on an authoritative definition of the “Orient,” shape the experiences of the first South Asians who physically encountered the United States? Upon arrival, these South Asian migrants were confronted with these depictions of themselves, and just as these necessary conjectural images were varied, so too were the South Asian migrants’ responses to them. The attitudes, occupations, and behavior of South Asian-Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were deeply influenced by U.S. cultural and representational pressures on the migrants to embody Orientalist, often contradictory representations, but such contradictions conversely allowed them to navigate treacherous racial landscapes to their advantage.

Before the 1965 abolishment of national quotas widened the gates to waves of immigrants from around the world, the population of South Asians in the United States was limited to the tens of thousands. Despite a relatively small population, the cultural presence and visibility of Indians and Orientals was persistent. In one of the first motion pictures ever made, Thomas Edison’s 1902 “The Hindoo Fakir” was a short production that depicted a man dressed in ornamental, patterned garments performing ghastly magic tricks on a female subject. In a clear attempt to exemplify the wonders of special effects in film, the woman levitates, appears and reappears, and is punctured with swords. For the ecstatic viewers, many of whom had never before witnessed a motion picture, to gaze into a screen and be virtually transported into the Orient was a profound moment of authority inherent in the act of representation. In this essay, I will be extending similar ideas of power, truth and representation to the history of South Asians in the United States. I draw significantly from the thought of Edward Said, who defined the term “Orientalism” as “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and ‘the Occident.’”1 The division of the world between East and West, he argued, was first a European invention, and that European and American representations of the Orient implicate the depicter in the inherent relationship between knowledge and power. Following these thoughts, the designation of “South Asian” is by no means an apolitical term; although most South Asians were often indiscriminately 1 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, NY: Vintage, 1994), 3.

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labelled “Hindoos,” I will use the term South Asian to denote those who descended from the Indian subcontinent and were subsequently subject to fallacious labels.

european Foundations The immigration of South Asians to the United States was first preceded by American interactions with the Indian subcontinent, and this dialogue begins in the European heritage of the thirteen colonies and India in the context of the British Empire and Western expansion.

At this time, what set Asia apart in the Western mind was a set of complex negotiations that sought to neatly explain Asia’s purported dilapidated present and mythic past. These ideas comprised a cultural and discursive continuity between Europe and the United States and influenced popular views of South Asians in the United States and their resulting racial construction. To European social scientists in the 18th century, the East seemed to be saturated in an individualized, ancient kind of lifeblood called “Oriental.” Born from this time were the discourses of modern Orientalism, the Indo-Aryan and Caucasian myth, and biological theories of race that sought to essentialize, but whose contradictions confounded, the definition of the South Asian, who Westerners often amorphously titled “Oriental” or “Hindoo.” Scientific and anthropological “discoveries” in the “Orient,” such as the English translation of the ancient Vedic text Upanishads in 1786, gradually lifted these lesser known regions out of mystery. Emphasizing ancient “discoveries” in the East that suggested a once great but fallen civilization, Asiatic Society founder Sir William Jones remarked that Indians are the “adorers of those very deities, who were worshipped under different names in Old Greece and Italy.”2 Delineating this common heritage with Europe, “the Indians were the wisest of nations; and in moral wisdom they were certainly eminent.”3 Jones’ perpetual use of the past tense aimed to grasp at some kind of invaluable, antiquarian object, of which modern Orientals were merely the remnants. “The Hindus are said to have boasted of three inventions, all of which, indeed, are admirable; the method of instructing by Apologues, the decimal Scale adopted now by all civilized nations; and the game of Chess.”4 Sir William Jones found value in South Asian civilizations only to the extent which the Orient aligned with his scholarly interests. This matrix, therefore, could not consider the modern Oriental in all of his/her materiality and humanity, because (s)he was always placed in the peripheral position of the access point from which Europeans could uncover their true object of desire, historical knowledge and the East’s connection to the West. In the same address, Jones quoted John Shore, East India Company official and later Governor-General of India, who observed that the present Indians were “maidenly and well nigh effeminate, of a countenance shy and somewhat estranged, yet smiling out of a glozed and bathful familiarity.”5 To English statesmen and scholars, then, the modern Indian had nothing original or valuable to offer but only that which their ancestors had passed down.

Then-recent philological conclusions spurred the fascination with Eastern texts and 2 Sir William Jones, The Works of Sir William Jones, Vol. 1. Archive. https://archive.org/details/worksofsirwillia01jone.

3 Ibid., 32.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid., 23-4.

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languages, specifically the similarities among Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin observed by Sir William Jones in 1786.6 27 years later, Jones’ proposition that the three languages shared a common ancestry was systematized by Thomas Young into a linguistic family called “IndoEuropean” or “Aryan” (a word meaning “honorable one” taken from the Rig Veda).7 The linguistic commonalities among the three languages are historically qualified, but from this conclusion Europeans extrapolated an apparent relationship between language and race. After the philological propositions of Sir William Jones, Blumenbach published the third version of his essay On the Natural Variety of Mankind in 1795 which grouped Europeans and Indians together into a category he called the “Causasian variety… In general, [they possess] that kind of appearance which, according to our opinion of symmetry, we consider most handsome and becoming. To this first variety belong the inhabitants of Europe… and those of Eastern Asia… and lastly, those of Northern Africa.”8 From Blumenbach’s categorization came the popularization of the designation “Caucasian,” which he first used after he acquired “a most beautiful skull of a Georgian female” from the Caucasus Mountains and consequently likened beauty to race.9 Because of recently delineated linguistic connections, Blumenbach felt compelled to include “Indians,” a term meant to encapsulate all people in the subcontinent, in this racial category, but this cultural capital was ultimately piecemeal. With technical precision, he added that while Europeans and Indians may be of the same racial stock, “India…has been frequently subdued by the most different nations, because the first conquerors becoming effeminated [sic] by living in such a soft climate [and] were at last conquered by other and stronger northern nations… The more modern conquerors of India, that is, the Mongolians, have lost much of their original features under a new climate.” Blumenbach further discredited modern Indians by emphasizing that “we only know the racial aspect of the old possessors of India and their manifest characteristics from the most ancient works of Indian art.”10 Similar to Sir William Jones, Blumenbach felt Europeans could find common ground only with Indians of the past, those who wrote the Rig Veda and other classical texts, and not the contemporary inhabitants of India. Such complicated racial renditions allowed Europeans to continue to rest themselves above South Asians while giving credit to their lineage for the literary and civilizational achievements of the Orient. Such a discourse strongly suggested that while the modern-day inhabitants had fallen into a cycle of “Oriental” irrationality, Europe had evolved from the so-called best qualities of the “Orient” and progressed into a robust, dynamic civilization.

The discourses of Orientalism and biological racism were powerful enough to be transmitted to similar cultures in the United States, ultimately shaping the first ideas within the U.S. surrounding “the Orient” and South Asians. In Europe, Orientalist scholarship grew to become an integral and respected field of study, having been institutionalized in such 6 Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), 81.

7 Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (New Delhi: Yoda, 2004), 13.

8 Johnan Friedrich Blumenbach, “One the Natural Variety of Mankind 3rd Edition,” in Ibid., 265, Archive, last modified August 17, 2009, https://archive.org/details/anthropologicalt00blumuoft.

9 Ibid., 237.

10 Ibid., 230.

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organizations as the Société asiatique, the Royal Asiatic Society, and the German Oriental Society. As leading authorities of a world then unknown, the Orientalist’s word was trusted, with his/her subjectivity labelled as fact, rather than that of the Oriental. “Most important,” argued Said, “such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe.”11 The relationship between scholar and subject were (and are) necessarily regulated by the tools given to view said subject, and the danger lay when these tools were always thought to be neither assembled nor given, but rather natural. As this intellectual tradition and colonial gaze continued to solidify, its influence reached the United States and gave the new nation’s subjects similar tools with which to decipher the Orient.

Historian Philippa Levine states that after the American Revolution, “India became more and more important not only for its products but increasingly as a symbol of Britain’s overseas power after the loss of America.”12 For the newly sovereign Americans, then, Great Britain remained to be recognized as a symbol of wealth and power, the imperial leviathan whose reach stretched to that other world, India. Global trade administered under the British flag transported tea, spices and other goods for American enjoyment even after the revolution.13 Benjamin Franklin, embarrassed in the wake of the Boston Tea Party incident, wrote that “the India Company however are not our Adversaries,” and that “to destroy private Property” was a grievance that required the colonies to “repair the damage and make Compensation to the Company.”14 Consuming resources sold by their English counterparts, and having been encroachers of native nations themselves, the colonization of India seemed justified in the eyes of the formerly English, whose American nationality had only begun to teeth. At the dawn of the nation in 1780, Timothy Dwight, academic and 8th president of Yale, expressed his vision of the United States as the torchbearer for Europe’s global glory: Hail Land of light and joy! thy power shall grow Far as the seas, which round thy regions flow; Through earth’s wide realms thy glory shall extend, And savage nations at thy scepter bend.

Around the frozen shores thy sons shall sail, Or stretch their canvas to the Asian gale, Or, like Columbus, steer their course unknown, Beyond the regions of the flaming zone…

For thee, proud India’s spicy isles shall blow Bright silks be wrought, and sparkling diamonds glow; Earth’s richest realms their treasures shall unfold And op’ning mountains yield the flaming gold.15

Dwight’s sentimental poem, titled “America, or a Poem on the Settlement of the British Colonies, Addressed to the Friends of Freedom and Their Country,” elucidated the hopeful 11 Said, Orientalism, 94.

12 Philippa Levine, The British Empire: From Sunrise to Sunset (London: Pearson, 2007), 62 13 Nick Robins, Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational (2nd Edition) (London: Pluto, 2012), 113.

14 Benjamin Franklin, “a letter to the Committee of Correspondence in Massachusetts, February 2, 1774,” in The Political Thought of Benjamin Franklin, edited by Ralph Ketcham (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2003), 278-9.

15 Malini Johar Schueller, “Introduction: A Cultural Aesthetics of U.S. Literary Orientalisms,” in U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790-1890 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 2001), 1-2.

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patriotism that contextualized the relationship between the United States and Asia. Malini Johar Schueller argues that “in Dwight’s poem, the Orient is a naturalized trope for the imperial imaginary because it is simply a part of historical progression… the idea of civilization and empire moving west, culminating in the New World, is a powerful raced one that thrives on distinctions between EuroAmerican uprightness and Oriental degradation.”16 The importance of India and South Asia to the West was not due to the native peoples, but rather found in its “spicy isles” and “bright silks,” a signal of prioritization of capital over people, essentialism over humanity.

HeatHens anD HinDoos: soutH asians in tHe ameriCan imagination Due to unclear and developing racial theories at the time, South Asians as conceived by the collective imagination of the United States never quite took on Said’s single discursive regularity.17 Christian perspectives often perceived them through their heathenness, while others emphasized their spirituality. Each representation, however, sought to essentialize them in a single, palatable narrative. Equally crucial was the fact that many of them did not involve an actual encounter with South Asians, and what ideas were distributed as truth thus became the perceived reality of many.

In one of the first U.S. texts relating to South Asia, a Philadelphia-based “Hindu philosopher” by the name of Shahcoolen wrote a collection of letters in 1802 to a friend named El Hassan. Touching on a series of subjects that combined “pure morals, correct politics, and elegant literature” into a web of cultural criticism, Shahcoolen began his letters with a proclamation of spiritual authority:The Sultan is considered, by the Hindu, as the head, the prince and the father of his people… But in this country the Sultan is the servant of the people.

By them, his merits are freely discussed, his failings magnified, and his virtues diminished…I am told that the state of things which I have described, is imputed in part to the influence of the new philosophy. It is the spirit of this philosophy to reduce all things to one common level; to pull down the Gods from their thrones, and to trample the kings of the earth in the dust…

I shall therefore, my dear El Hassan, endeavor to trace the operations of this new philosophy, upon the affairs of this western world; and shall not fail to communicate my discoveries, connected with such other interesting remarks, as have probably never reached the walls of Delhi, nor employed before, the contemplations of a Hindu Philosopher…18 Shahcoolen meant to describe emerging liberal ideas by vaguely labelling them “the new philosophy” and denouncing them with the apparent philosophy of the ancient that he so embodied. His subsequent comments were informed by an air of Oriental wisdom, the spirit of ancient texts communicating to the European-American. These letters, however, were not generated by a South Asian migrant (migration at any scale would not occur for almost another century) but by Benjamin Silliman, a white Yale University chemist who 16 Ibid.

17 Edward Said, “In Conversation with Neeladri Bhattacharya, Suvir Kaul, and Ania Loomba,” in Relocating Postcolonialism, edited by David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 1.

18 Benjamin Silliman, Letters of Shahcoolen, a Hindu philosopher residing in Philadelphia; to his friend El Hassan, an inhabitant of delhi (Boston, MA: Russelland Cutler, 1802), 17-18.

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presumed the character of a “Hindu philosopher” in hopes of widely circulating his written thoughts (even the name “Shahcoolen” itself seems to be totally created by Silliman). Under an Oriental image that permitted him the masquerading sagacity to do so, Silliman notably advanced a socially conservative argument against women’s rights. This legitimation was made possible because Westerners imagined the Indian spiritualist as not only the bearer of ancient wisdom but also an effeminate, hypo-sexual being, as noted by figures such as Sir William Jones. Silliman first legitimized his authority to speak on the subject of gender by proclaiming his objectivity to sexual desire, noting that “often when reclining on a sofa, by the side of a fair American, I have thought, that her white bosom, scarcely veiled at all from my fight… would have excited impure emotions in any heart, less subject to reason, than that of a Hindu philosopher.”19 Silliman, veiled in his brown veneer, critiqued the new philosophy by attacking who he believed to be its strongest proponent, English writer Mary Wollstonecraft.

Mary Woolstonecraft [sic]… discards all that sexual tenderness, delicacy and modesty, which constitute the female loveliness; [she] boldly pronounces the equal to the rougher sex in every thing but bodily strength; and even imputes their deficiency, in this particular, principally to a falsely refined education… O, my dear El Hassan, how opposite her views to every thing, which we deem lovely in the sex! 20

An advocate of women’s equality and education, Mary Wollstonecraft’s radical ideas were met sharply by mostly male critics, but Silliman’s tactic to oppose her based on the grounds of a purported ancient Indian philosophy is especially noteworthy in that it reveals intersecting attitudes of race and gender. Silliman criticism rested on his claim that Wollstonecraft’s ideas of gender equality deviated from some natural sexual order, a state of being elucidated by the imaginary figure of Shahcoolen. Lessons were to be learned from the East, whose purity could cleanse a civilization straying too far from nature, and that Western women should abandon their ideas of equality and return to the supposed preordained gender relationship, akin to the apparent condition of women in India.

Suppose, my dear friend, that a hand of female representatives, beautiful as the thirty Raginis… should mix with a Legislative band; would not the cares of Legislation be excluded by the witchcraft of love!... Smiles, tears and sighs would decide the fate of nations; and beauty would direct the march of armies on the frontiers and the course of navies upon the ocean.21

Through his negative attitudes of burgeoning women’s rights, Shahcoolen’s letters revealed Silliman’s thoughts of not only Western but South Asian women as well. After outlining the details of what to Silliman was a most traumatizing philosophy, he warned El Hassan to “keep this philosophy a profound secret from the fair daughters of Hindustan, for… the idea of independence on man may have over the heart even of the modest, unassuming Hindu.” The suggestion to preserve Wollstonecraft’s ideas from the East, coupled with the scathing critique of her philosophy, ultimately reflected Silliman’s ontology of heterogeneous 19 Silliman, Letters of Shahcoolen, 42.

20 Ibid., 21-2.

21 Ibid., 25.

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worlds, civilized West and essentially other East. Under an assumption that any semblance of women’s rights or agency did not exist in the East but were radical ideas exclusively situated in the West, these sentiments revealed Silliman’s romantic ideas of who the West was and what the East would always be.

In order to have advanced his argument against Wollstonecraft, Silliman had to have imbued Shahcoolen with a capacity for intelligence, a depiction that contrasted other representations of South Asians. Shahcoolen was not uncivilized or barbaric; instead, he possessed patriarchal ideals thought to be rational and orderly. He constructed the character (or caricature) of Shahcoolen as the communicator and embodiment of ancient wisdom, in this case warning of “all the paradoxes of the female philosopher.”22 Other imaginations of South Asians were shaped by themes of timelessness and nature, but unlike Silliman, these attributes were often explicitly negative. A member of the first American missionary trip to India in 1812, Harriet Newell gave insight in her memoirs to prevailing ideas of South Asians.

Her religious mission, removal from her homeland and physical placement in India allowed her to depict a wasteland of sub-human heathens. Through this evangelizing lens, she could not value the natives by anything other than their potential to be converts.

For Harriet Newell, along with her husband Samuel Newell and their group of missionaries, heading to India was a voyage with wildly imaginative expectations. While en route to this other world, she wrote to her mother that she was passing Sagar Island, “the island where so many innocent children have been sacrificed by their parents, to sharks and alligators. Cruel, cruel!”23 What Newell actually found on land were no such violent rituals but rather people living ordinary lives and interacting with the newly arrived foreigners.

However, such a salient Orientalist imagination as Newell’s could only interpret what scenes she found through inherited Eurocentric beliefs. Reflecting Said’s claim that texts help create a reader’s reality, Newell’s preconceived imagination of the Orient was projected onto whatever sights she encountered, so that her presumptions and perceived reality became virtually interchangeable. After having arrived in Calcutta on June 17 and begun her mission, she again sought maternal comfort and professed, “Oh, my mother, my heart is pained within me at what I have already seen of these wretched pagans. Here we are, surrounded by hundreds of them, whose only object is to get their rice, eat, drink, and sleep.”24 A few days later, she and her team encountered a scene at the Ganges River, “where, with prayers and many superstitious rites, they bathed. Miserable wretches! Oh that American Christians would but form an adequate idea of the gross darkness which covers this people!”25 Newell’s religious and racial convictions maintained that the Indians’ human value depended solely on their potential for conversion to Christianity. Similar to Silliman’s representation of Shahcoolen as the communicator of ancient wisdom, Newell’s imagination of Indians did not allow them to possess any inherent, internal worth; they were only significant due to their proximity to a greater, external object. However, whereas Silliman’s Shahcoolen 22 23 24 25

24

Ibid., 29.

Ibid., 117.

Ibid., 119.

Ibid., 122.

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possessed a certain spiritual and intellectual capacity, Newell’s Christian background and mission did not allow her to assign any historical recognition, spiritual depth or civility to the Indians she encountered. Instead, she thought the non-Christians to be animalistic and ultimately dangerous. In this darker world, the conversion of brown bodies was especially miraculous for her, having witnessed what she believed was God’s light cleansing the lowest of humankind. “To hear [the natives] join in singing one of Zion’s songs; to see them kneel before the throne of Almighty grace, and listen with eagerness to the word of life,” she exclaimed, “was sufficient to draw tears of joy from eyes which never wept before.”26 Later expressing her “solid happiness,” the successful task of conversion ultimately seemed to allow Newell feelings of positivity regarding her sojourn, but nonetheless, before succumbing to illness at sea, she expressed utter joy upon news of departing to France.

Leaving India for France meant a return to the familiar for Newell. Even when exposing herself to the unknown for the sake of her faith, and finding solace in it, she described mission trips as a “self-denying life among a savage people.”27 It is likely that had she travelled to Christian missions somewhere in Africa, for example, her sentiments regarding natives might have remained the same, evoking a terror to heathenism and joy in their miraculous evangelism. Indians and South Asians in this context comprised one unit in the homogenous dark world in Newell’s imagination. Fear and beastliness shaped her depiction, one much different from that of Benjamin Silliman. If supposed differences between South Asians and the rest of non-Western peoples, such as an inherent spiritualism or philological connections to Europe, were not delineated, representations used South Asians as the signifier of all darker peoples, which, contrasting Europeans, were always seen to be animalistic.

Newell’s writings of her travels constitute one of the first American depictions of the Orient, which she believed was kindred to the darkness and animalism of the entire nonChristian world. Over time, however, the distinction of “Orientals” and Indians from the rest of the non-West materialized, with perceptions of India’s proximity to civilization and inherent spiritualism becoming understood at a wider level. Through the 19th century, Indians and South Asians were being perceived less as the bottom rung of the scala naturae with other dark peoples and more as a group of their own, a step above the worst. This distinction is evident in the historical need for the label “Oriental,” a designation signifying the difference in ontology of the Orient from the rest of the world but one laden with multiple definitions and contradictions regarding spirituality, Caucasian-ness, and history. Mirroring this development was the proliferation of Oriental studies in the United States, with the foremost institution spearheading this proliferation being the American Oriental Society. Publishing journals, organizing travel, and expanding the knowledge of the Orient in the America, the Society acted as the self-appointed American vanguard for Oriental knowledge. A benefactor of this institution was Ferdinand De Wilton Ward, a missionary and writer whose 1850 publication India and the Hindoos presented a formal, academic definition and history of India that sought, he wrote, to “bring before the reader’s mind India as it was and as it is, in 26 Ibid., 134.

27 Ibid., 130.

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a secular as well as a religious aspect.”28 Similar to Newell, Ward spent time as a missionary “warning [Indians] of their sin and danger:” His academic background not only allowed him to study India and apply a more complex racial and Orientalist discourse than Newell, but it also seemed to confirm for him the intellectual and historical justification for India’s colonization and proselytization.29 Incensed by what he viewed as the moral corruption inherent in Hinduism, Ward further backed this justification by evaluating the Muslim presence in India, which he claimed was a brutish existence that invaded and devolved the once-noble Aryanism of India into what he observed to be the weak, dependent culture in Hinduism.

By outlining a history of India narrated through a binary of penetrative Islam and penetrated Hinduism, Ward sought to explain the discordances of so vast a world called the “Orient” while triangulating and affirming the position of the West as omniscient, superior, and righteous. He asserted that all South Asians were morally corrupt but, by religion, in different manners for different historical reasons. Disseminating a palatable intellectualism desirable to popular thought, Ward’s publications and other similar cultural transmissions enforced the power of Orientalism and racial essentialism through academic jargon. From the beginning of the book, his assertions sought to debase the Hindu from historical and political autonomy: “the Hindoos having no historical records that deserve the name and such accounts as they do possess are mixed up with so many improbable and monstrous fictions, that we are left in total ignorance as to well-determined facts.”30 As the Orientalist who had tasked himself with writing “true” history, Ward connected the present state of Hindus with the history of their lost centuries, down to the bone marrow of Caucasian heritage, claiming that their “national features bear a close resemblance to those of the Caucasian race, of which they are commonly considered a branch, and from which they differ chiefly in the size and projection of their ears, and in general dignity of carriage and address, caused, to a large extent, by their condition as a conquered, enslaved, and of course, obsequious people.”31 For Ward, the Caucasian heritage was undeniable, but, compelled to reassign Hindus to a racially inferior position, he explained their degradation via another racially inferior peoples, Muslims:It is believed that no thoughtful reader of the preceding pages will deny to the Hindoos of former times the praise of much intellectual civilization….In these respects the deterioration has been great and general throughout the country. The decay of Hindoo learning may be dated from the Mohamedan conquest… Insurrections and mutinies have, with few exceptions, been traced to Mussulman craftiness and hate.”32 Ward observed that the centuries of Muslim conquest delegitimized Hindus so much that the only areas in which they exhibited superior skill were in music, art, female beauty, and physical endurance.33 However, despite his belief of the characteristic moral infiltration of Muslim invasions, Ward contradicted himself by suggesting that had India not been invaded by Muslim forces, moral 28 Ferdinand De W. Ward, India and the Hindoos: Being a Popular View of the Geography, History, Government, Manners, Custom, Literature and Religion of that Ancient People (New York, NY: James Miller, 1877), vii.

29 Ibid., vi.

30 Ibid., 61.

31 Ibid., 101.

32 Ibid., 193, 84.

33 Ibid., 101-2, 195, 221.

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backwardness would have prevailed anyway due to the backward tenets of Hinduism. “The people are bad, many of them very bad;” he professed, “but they do not and cannot equal their own gods in wickedness…I really never have met with a race of men whose standard of morality is so low… The good qualities which there are among them, are, in no instance that I am aware of, connected with, or arising out of, their religion.”34 Citing the cruelty of caste and frequency of violence in India, Ward sought to explain the moral degradation of Indians and Hindus in as many angles as possible, in order to set the philosophical grounds on which British colonialism and Western evangelism could “awaken devout gratitude and joyful hope.”35 This was the position that the West will play, Ward essentially argued; the benevolent and supreme savior that could, and must, lift the Orient from its darkness.

For Ward, although degenerated due to Muslim rule and “backward’ Hindu culture, India possessed an idiosyncratic history and character. His religious lens compelled him to sharply denounce both religions, but as a scholar, he acknowledged a Caucasian connection, and described the art of the region with vigor. Although Ward’s description of India was generally denigrating, he conveyed an appeal to the Orient due to the insistence of its unique character. The lifeblood that the Orient and India seemed to take on in writings such as Ward’s contrasted the consumptive blackness of India that Harriet Newell had earlier experienced. Evidently, by the mid-19th century, discourses regarding Indians and South Asians became more complex, but from this complexity came the lack of a unified message and general confusion as to the character of the people from this “land of ghastly and beautiful mysteries.”36 Disharmonious ideas of Indians as Caucasians or Orientals, morally righteous or bankrupt, could construct only a nebulous sensibility; consequently, the allure of the Orient seemed to be in its wispiness, its inability to be fully grasped. Ideas surrounding South Asians contended with and contradicted each other, leaving questions and ambiguities between what was represented and what was reality.

An 1884 cigarette card by Duke’s Cigarettes depicts a man from India, turbaned and with two large snakes at his grasp. A slender and bearded man, the look on his face is menacing, with his pythons appearing coiled and in motion, their tongues tasting the fiber of the paper.37 In another card, this one from Hignett’s Cigarettes, a more innocent depiction of an Oriental is presented. Aside from the sword in his hand, which is rested below his waist, this portly and droll-seeming man looks completely nonthreatening, being dressed in colorful, striped garments and a bright yellow shirt. This card, labelled by English football club Clapton Orient, attempted to lend to some essentialism of India to the masses for recreational enjoyment, but did so in stark contradiction to Duke’s cigarettes. Such is an example of the contention in representing Oriental truth, which seemed to lack a definitive regularity. General themes on which representations were centered emerged, including the Caucasian dilemma and notions of spiritual sagacity, but these themes themselves seemed never to be set in stone. Each representation and argument vigorously enforced their own dialectic and definition of the Oriental.

A story published in 1900 remarked that Indian men were “all so dark as to be taken easily for Negroes, but heir features are Caucasian and their hair is straight, stiff, and wiry…They are peaceable 34 Ibid., 284, 286.

35 Ibid., 307.

36 Detroit Journal, quoted in Vijay Prashad, Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 200), 22.

37 “NYPL Digital Gallery,” last modified March 25, 2011, http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?1195748.

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and orderly up to a certain point and then they lose all self-control and generally resort to the knife.”38 Occupying a liminal existence in the racial binary, Indians seemed to simultaneously possess moral upkeep and unruliness. An 1891 Chicago Tribune piece expressed that “as a rule, they are handsome men with clean-cut features and intellectual faces,” while a New Orleans Daily Herald report in 1900 pondered “they look so preternaturally solemn, and have such an air of oriental mysticism… that I can’t help believing they are as wise as Solomon and are laughing in their sleeves at us poor barbarians while incidentally they are loading us up with their ridiculous rugs.”39 The emergence of rugs and other Oriental home goods seemed to quantify the gradual acceptance of India as an envious place of mystery and desire. Detailed in Vivek Bald’s Bengali Harlem, beginning in the late 19th century, South Asian peddlers of Oriental goods spread through the United States in limited numbers and distributed what for many was material evidence of the Orient’s grandeur, a phenomenon which Kristen Hoganson argued indicated American women’s yearning to convey a cosmopolitan ethos.40 The fashion of Orientalism was also expressed by literary figures such as Henry David Thoreau, who enviously professed that the “Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literatures seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions.”41 The cultural capital signified by the Orient became apparent enough that some African-Americans took to wrapping garments around their heads, in order to create the sense of foreignness and evade antiblack racism. Jazz musicians Dizzy Gillespie and Babs Gonzales employed this tactic, with Gonzales noting that whites would bow to him “because they thought I was an Indian.”42 In such circles, a certain respectful regard was invested in Oriental bodies, albeit an assumptive and one-dimensional ascription of character. Although accepted and admired among many, notions of equality or harmonious coexistence were hardly apparent; this is also indicated by the debate of Aryan and Caucasian heritage of Indians in the United States.

Although many whites included Indians into the Aryan and/or Caucasian race, they did not subsequently admit them into whiteness, or the full acceptance of Indians into the top of cultural and political hegemony. A 1908 article in the Overland Monthly written by Agnes Foster Buchanan walked this tightrope, seeking to reconcile Aryan history with the unwanted influx of Indian immigrants. He felt the newly arrived Indians, although “full-blooded Aryans [and] brothers of our own race,” should not compete economically with white men, and it was impossible to “comfortably accommodate both branches of the Aryan family.”43 More harshly, American Federation of Labor founder Samuel Gompers, additionally the founder of the Asiatic Exclusion League, did not include Indians at all in the parameters of what was Caucasian, imploring that “any ordinarily intelligent person [would deduce] that they have no standards…by which a Caucasian may judge them.”44 Indians and South Asians were 38 Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem: The Lost Histories of South Asian America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 58.

39 Ibid., 23, 27.

40 Ibid., 18.

41 Vijay Prashad, Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) 16.

42 Ibid., 38.

43 Agnes Foster, “The West and the Hindu Invasion,” Overland Monthly, 1908, 308-313, quoted in Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore (New York, NY: Back Bay, 1999), 296.

44 Samuel Gompers and Herman Gutstadt, Meat vs. Rice: American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism, Which Shall Survive? (San Francisco, 1908), p. 18, quoted in Takaki, 296.

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grouped by many with other Asian nationalities as unwanted yellow peril, which culminated in the Asiatic Barred Zone in 1917.

These conflicting designations and representations reflected the reality of power relations in the United States; like the European Orientalist during colonial times, the ability itself of someone to represent another was created and conditioned by an unequal relationship. Descriptions, incisions and conjectures of “Oriental” people never could consider the perspective of the represented themselves.

Akin to Said’s reflections, representation was not indicative of some objective truth, but were “embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer.”45 The lack of self-representation was both a symptom and an outcome of disjointed discourses that reinforced racial essentialism by vocalizing and articulating it. For Orientalists and American racists, then, their representations of South Asians could most truthfully reflect their own reality, beliefs, desires, and politics; their construction and expression of the “Orient,” of spirituality, whiteness, etc. was the materialization of their ontology, of that which they believed to be real. tHe early soutH asian experienCe in tHe uniteD states The representations of South Asians did not exist solely in an abstract sense or in the social spaces of whites; they played a direct factor in the experiences of South Asian migrants themselves. Since the first large-scale waves of migration occurred in the late 19th century, the first generation of South Asians in the U.S. confronted upon their arrival a century’s worth of conjectural images and ideas of who they were supposed to be. Since these multifarious ideas defined South Asians as either morally fibrous or deficient, part of the in-group or out-group, their lack of clarity ultimately allowed South Asians to grapple with these ideas and meander through them to adapt and survive. While many were under strict, laborious conditions and/or had no leverage to negotiate their identity, others were able to argue the legal legitimacy of their Caucasian race, and many others invested in the image of the Oriental mystic as a means for economic vitality. As Vivek Bald aptly described, “Collectively, they used Americans’ confusion over their ‘race’ to their advantage, developing a fluid and contextual approach to their identity. 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.”46 Having been forced into a liminal space within the black/white binary of race, the choices to align with anti-blackness or resist among communities of color fell upon the consciences of many South Asians. The various reactions and responses to the imposition of their identities revealed the contextual localisms that influenced their decisions of how to represent themselves; equally important, they exposed the fallacy and subjectivity of the entrapment of ideas they were confronted.

South Asian lives and experiences in the United States (or anywhere, for that matter) could not be contained or explained by misrepresentations that enforced a static character; rather, they were influenced by the inimitable combination of political, social and cultural forces that created their contemporary reality.

Some of the earliest records of South Asians in the United States date back to the late 45 Edward Said, Orientalism, 272.

46 Bald, Bengali Harlem, 221.

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19th century, when prominent religious leaders were personally invited or Indian seamen abandoned their ships and escaped into cities. The first large-scale waves of immigration, however, began during the first decade of the 20th century, and the narrative of Indian Sikhs in California and the West coast is the most commonly told narrative. In these economically strict and racially oppressive environments, negotiation of identity was hardly a convenient approach to survival. They came not directly from Asia but from Canada, where Vancouver had been a destination for thousands of South Asian migrants due to its British connection and economic opportunity. White Canadians responded to perceived economic competition with severe backlash to the influx of Indians in Canada, culminating in nativist protests and forced deportations.47 Anti-Indian sentiment and the strict immigration restrictions that followed prompted many to make the relatively short trip to the United States. Until 1918, when the Asiatic Barred Zone came into effect and restricted all immigrants from Asia, about 6,400 Indians, mostly Sikhs, made their way to the United States to work on California farms and industries.48 Seasonal economic opportunities, coupled with the starkly uneven gender ratio, influenced many to travel to many workplaces per year in small groups that acted as surrogate families. Economically disadvantaged with little formal education, they faced similar legal and social ostracism that was experienced in Canada. As stated earlier, Samuel Gompers formed the Asiatic Exclusion League to keep workforces and labor unions in the West unperturbed

by Asians. In September 1907, a white riot in Bellingham, Washington mirrored the events in Canada and forced 700 Indians to deport themselves north of the border. Similar riots occurred in Everett, Washington and Live Oak, California.49 Regional anti-Indian sentiment was also sharply felt in California’s 1920 Alien Land Laws, a law that was originally passed in 1913 to bar Japanese people from land ownership but later extended to specifically include Indian nationals. Racial antagonism was rooted in the economics of the region; waves of immigration spelled labor competition for working-class whites in the area who thus saw no benefit to their presence. Rarely in this context was the Caucasian link evoked, and when it was, it held little weight against the threat of “incomes that would be prohibitive to the white man.�50 Forced into the margins of an environment that afforded them little cultural capital, the best means of livelihood did not lie in appealing to those who held power but consisted of cultivating their own community among the oppressed. Under these conditions, many Indians doctored accounting books to their benefit, married Mexican women, who were placed under comparable sociopolitical conditions, and toiled to eventually rise to tenant farming and land ownership. Many evaded the effect of the Alien Land Law by registering their farms under the names of their naturalized children.51 Perceived by such an inhospitable gaze, many Indians workers in the West, under the consequence of death or exile, found little to be desired in their racial identity and found what refuge they could in evading the capitalist system of racial 47 48 49 50 51

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Ronald Takaki, Indians in the West: South Asians in America (New York, NY: Chelsea House, 1995), 30.

Ibid., 35.

Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore (New York, NY: Back Bay, 1999), 297.

Ibid., 296.

Ibid., 304, 309.

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power.

In a wage-depressed environment where South Asians were undesired and ostracized, the means to argue against or resist hegemony was evidently difficult. However, for other South Asians who were more financially stable and located in different parts of the country, the path to success lay in professing their whiteness, particularly their Caucasian heritage while attempting to gain citizenship. Although contesting racial groups and subverting dominant definitions of whiteness, these cases did not fundamentally challenge white supremacy but were instead an attempt to solidify a place for South Asians within white hegemony. In the early 20th century, citizenship laws still heeded to the 1790 Naturalization Law, which dictated that only “free white persons” were eligible for citizenship. In 1923, Sikh Indian-American Bhagat Singh Thind filed for citizenship on the grounds that he shared the same Caucasian roots as whites; the Supreme Court, however, while acknowledging that he was Caucasian, declared Thind did not count as white, citing “unmistakable and profound differences between [whites and Hindus].”52 “It is a matter of familiar observation and knowledge,” Associate Justice Sutherland decreed, “that the physical group characteristics of the Hindus render them readily distinguishable from the various groups of persons in this country commonly recognized as white.”53 Although the argument for whiteness was viable and taken seriously, due to its acknowledged historicism, the Supreme Court defended the boundaries of whiteness by jumping through such legal hurdles. Thind’s sentiments were not uncommon among South Asians, many of whom used similar strategies to appeal for the benefits of citizenship. Chandra Ram. President of the San Franciscan pro-Indian-revolution organization Gadar Party, wrote in a 1916 pamphlet that “ethnologically, all the upper classes of India are Aryan and therefore eligible to American citizenship… they are white people in the same sense as are the Greeks, Italians, and Spaniards.”54 In a 1911 article in The Modern Review, Saranghadar Das explained that if Sikhs “would give up their turbans, cut their long hair and shave off their beard, no one could distinguish them from the Southern Americans or Southern Europeans, because of their clear-cut Aryan features.”55 Claims for citizenship and appeals to whiteness were strategies of survival and acceptance used by many, defensive measures that were possible by the lack of rigidity of the “race” of South Asians. This sense of Oriental nebulousness allowed many others to form strategies in quite different ways as well, namely investing in and marketing images of Oriental spirituality to susceptible crowds. This interaction exposed both the general population’s investment in these images as well as the degree to which South Asians used this tactic themselves. Many quizzically observed such trends. Writing in Illinois in 1911, Sudhindra Bose felt that the “rage for oriental carpets has invaded even the heart of the farmer’s wife in the remote farms,” while 52 Ibid.

53 U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. v. BHAGAT SINGH THIND, 261 U.S. 204 (1923), Findlaw.com, http://caselaw. lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&court=US&vol=261&page=204 54 Ram Chandra, “Exclusion of Hindus from America Due to British Influence,” Hindustani Gadar (San Francisco: Hindustani Gadar, 1911), South Asian American Digital Archive, last Modified December 29, 2013, https://www. saadigitalarchive.org/item/20100916-121.

55 Saranghadar Das, “Why Must We Emigrate to the United States?” The Modern Review, July 1911, https://www. saadigitalarchive.org/item/20101216-154.

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Har Dayal wrote in the same year that “I had hardly entered the premises of the Metaphysical Club at Boston, when a lady asked me if I could practice mental healing.”56, 57 The pervasiveness of these themes in some parts of the country was evident enough that many South Asians deftly capitalized on the economic potential behind them. From the early 20th century onward, scattered around the Eastern coast and the Deep South, dozens of businesses and salespeople selling imported Indian goods and materials. Many owners and dealers were former seamen for British manufacturers; after their ships were docked in American ports in the Northeast, many fled to city shadows never to return. Their experiences, largely overshadowed by the history of South Asians in the American West, were compiled and structured into a single narrative for the first time in 2013 by Vivek Bald in Bengali Harlem: The Lost Histories of South Asian America. Arguing that “these men have been ‘lost’ to history in large part because popular understandings, expectations, and myths about immigration to the United States render them invisible or illegible,” many of those who set up shop were able to live their lives mostly unperturbed from the acute, violent animosity that others faced, such as the California farmers.58 Their ability to play into racial stereotypes for economic gain, along with their limited numbers, allowed them to avoid being viewed as threats, a social outcome directly influenced by the popular representation of Oriental charm and spiritual bliss.

In the New Orleans International Cotton Exhibition in 1884-5, the Asian section of the world’s fair garnered much attention, particularly the imported products sold there. Shortly after, an “Oriental” store opened up in the center of the city.59 However popular these products were to the general population, their brown-skinned vendors were often unable to spring into social acceptance and were forced to either live or sell in segregated colored sections.

This ghettoization, however, allowed South Asians to intermingle with other people of color and weave themselves into the community. “These small businesses,” wrote Bald, “played dual roles. They were commercial ventures, but they were also dynamic community spaces where Indian workers gathered daily to socialize and exchange news and information.”60 Connecting struggles and sharing each other’s experiences and narratives, one AfricanAmerican newspaper from Baltimore reported and expressed support for Indian seamen docked in Baltimore who revolted against their cruel superiors. Ameer’s, a popular Indian restaurant in Harlem, became a regular meeting spot among progressive Muslims, where many members of Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity ventured to discuss religion and politics.61 The recognition of Black and Brown political unity was often reciprocal as well; perhaps the most famous example of this is W.E.B. DuBois’s Dark Princess, a novel that depicts a union between an Indian princess and an American black man.

56 Sudhindra Bose, “Travelling through the country in America,” The Modern Review, 1911, https://www.saadigitalarchive.org/item/20110616-213.

57 Har Dayal, “India in America,” The Modern Review, 1911, https://www.saadigitalarchive.org/search/har%20 dayal%20india%20america.

58 Bald, Bengali Harlem, 46.

59 Ibid., 24.

60 Ibid., 127.

61 Ibid., 135, 175.

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The multitude of experiences reveal the fluidity in South Asian racial construction and the factors that influenced identity formation, demonstrating that contending representations and beliefs not only clashed but were in dialogue with each other. The experiences of Amir Haider Khan, an Indian seaman who found refuge in the United States, help uncover the flexibility and simultaneity of factors in South Asian racial identity. In one incident in the medical ward of his ship, he was assigned to the segregated black section but immediately requested to be switched to the white section. After deserting the ship and finding work in New York, the continual discriminatory experiences he faced left him confused. “I did not expect such prejudice around the port of New York,” Khan reflected, “Indeed, I was proud of New York and its cosmopolitan life of which I always spoke very highly.”62 The prejudice he faced, as well as the rejection of his claims to whiteness, allowed him to locate himself more clearly in the racial hierarchy – and he even began to identify with African-Americans after his experiences in Detroit. While there, he rode the waves of community organizing and agency in 1925 during the trial of Ossian Sweet, a doctor who had been convicted after defending himself with arms against white home raiders. In his personal memoirs, he wrote with passion and purpose about what he witnessed.

Negroes in the U.S.A., who were fully aware of the whites’ treatment of their race rose to the occasion throughout the country… Negro groups did not leave any stone unturned to rally the race in defence of the accused…speaker after speaker poured out his heart to the audience in the most moving speeches. When the appeal was made for contributions for Dr. Sweet’s defence fund, everyone contributed whatever [they] could. … That day I saw how in face of a common danger, the Negro community stood united in defence of [a] man of their race.63 From the original anti-black sentiments he harbored and his investment in whiteness, his experiences in the United States informed him of the dynamics of race and hierarchy in the peculiar country in which he resided, and he ultimately aligned himself with AfricanAmericans in political struggle and unity. Although Khan faced repression and discrimination from whites throughout his travels, he, as many others did, may very well have had the option to not agitate the status quo. Instead, by political choice, he joined a community of the oppressed and involved himself in community action against racist practices. Neither black nor white, Khan’s experiences and choices could have swayed him in a direction of prowhiteness but through a heightened political consciousness swayed to pro-blackness.

From coast to coast, South Asian Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries faced innumerable challenges and experiences. Against the backdrop of amalgamated, contradictory representations, conceived a century prior without their consent, their histories reveal the historical process of racial construction and its dependence on concurrent political and social factors. Unable to neatly locate themselves on either side of the racial binary, the particular perceptions imposed on them and the ways in which they responded deeply impacted their livelihoods. As a result, for instance, an Indian in California could have been labelled as a non62 Ibid., 153.

63 Amir Haider Khan, Chains to Lose: Life and Struggles of a Revolutionary, ed. Hasan Gardezi (New Delhi: Patriot Publishers, 1989), 417, quoted in Bald, Bengali Harlem, 157-8.

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