This election year, there have been a lot of conversations in Asian American circles that begin and end with representation. They seem, as Dr. Jessica Namakkal pointed out, a diversion from the massive destruction being wrought on a global scale right now. Her AADS brown bag talk on October 4th, “Red, White, Blue, and Brown?: South Asian America Beyond Electoral Politics,” provided some touchstones for thinking about the ‘politics of diaspora’ within configurations of historical and contemporary state violence.
Dr. Namakkal pieced together histories of labor, racial formation, and, importantly, anticolonialism to start getting the contours of an early history of South Asian migration to the Americas. The first wave was mostly Sikh migrants, mostly from Punjab, in the early 1900s. Many early migrants were agricultural workers seeking job opportunities after the British development of monoculture in Punjab had stripped people of the ability to do small-scale farming. Much of the early migration was concentrated in Vancouver because Canada was also part of the British empire, but the continuous journey law effectively barred South Asian migration to Canada. People began moving to the West Coast of the U.S. instead, where anti-Asian (especially anti-Chinese) sentiment had already begun consolidating. Around 7,000 laborers moved to the West Coast between 1907 and 1910, and around 90% were Sikh or Muslim. Still, though, in the media, South Asian migrants were exclusively referred to as “Hindus” or “Hindoos,” inspiring news articles and op-eds directed at the “Hindu hordes.”
On Labor Day in 1907, against a backdrop of growing anger over white labor displaced by South Asian migrants, 500 working white men in Bellingham, Washington began pulling South Asian men out of their houses and beating them in the streets. They rounded up 200 men and imprisoned them in the city hall, and ten days later, every single South Asian person had left the town. Subsequent commentary in papers like the Seattle Morning Times underscored the employment of tropes being used to target Sikh men. For decades, scholars focused on West Coast racial formations like those in Bellingham, but Vivek Bald’s Bengali Harlem followed the Bengali Muslims who traveled as peddlers to the U.S. South. Many married Black and Puerto Rican women and integrated into local communities, Under Jim Crow segregationist laws, they would sell wares to well-off white consumers, but go back home to segregated quarters.
Dr. Namakkal argued that across all of these formations, there was a strong and explicit anticolonial sentiment that bound people together. The Ghadar Party, for instance, was an international political movement founded in San Francisco organized towards the violent overthrow of British rule in India. It was composed mostly of educated students at UC Berkeley, supporting revolution by shipping arms and subversive literature back home. The question now becomes, Dr. Namakkal said, what happened to anticolonialism in India and in the Indian diaspora?
The Hart-Cellar Act, which was passed in 1965, significantly shifted the demographics of people coming to the U.S. from Asia. Early migrants from South Asia were largely working class, with a small group of elites, but after 1965, the U.S. saw an influx of highly skilled Indian migrants. In India, after the British withdrawal in 1947, there was a postcolonial emphasis on developing elite Indian tech institutes (Indian institutes of technology), which pushed a lot of young people into the technology sector. Today, Indians represent the second largest group of immigrants to the U.S. 80% of immigrant adults have at least a bachelor's degree and median household incomes are double those of the national average, statistics which reflect the people the government has been preparing to go abroad.
In tandem with decolonial nationalist movements in the early 20th century, Hindutva emerged in 1923 as a political ideology advocating for Hindu supremacy and seeking to transform India (a secular state) into an ethno-religious state known as the Hindu Rashtra (Hindu nation). It claims historical legitimacy by promoting narratives of India as an ancient Hindu land colonized by Muslim invaders and invokes any sort of criticism of Hinduism as a threat to the Hindu nation. Because of its permeating influence contemporarily, there is increasingly a mass movement towards accepting that to have Indian politics is to promote something of an anti-Islamic agenda. Rising tides of Islamophobia after 9/11 allowed for the promotion of Hindutva, and South Asian American identities became further divided along religious lines as Muslims were increasingly actively surveilled by the FBI.
Dr. Namakkal ended her talk by delving into the history of relations between Palestine and India. India was one of the first colonies of the modern world to achieve independence, and immediately thereafter stood with the colonized peoples of the world. In 1946 and 1947, Nehru and Gandhi both stood staunchly against the creation of the Israeli state, noting parallels between Indian and Palestinian partition. In 1977, India became the first non-Arab state to recognize the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and in 1988 it became one of the first countries to recognize the Palestinian state. Today, though, pro-Palestinian protests are criminalized in India, and India remains one of the biggest suppliers of arms to Israel. This pivot underscores the point that Dr. Namakkal began with: racial or national consciousness centered solely on representation and frameworks of identity politics are wholly insufficient. Instead, Dr. Namakkal’s talk left her audience with questions grounded in overlapping histories of class struggle, colonialism, and resistance. To what extent is it possible today to tether racialized violence in the U.S. to global anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles? What paths forward does a politics of diaspora offer us, and, just as importantly, what possibilities might they preclude? How do we think beyond thin, commodified solidarities toward new visions of community? Dr. Namakkal didn’t offer easy solutions – if they exist – but the conversations themselves are already pushing towards more hopeful futures.
ASIAN AMERICAN & DIASPORA STUDIES PROGRAM
