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About This Contribution
A Note from The Localized History Project: This exhibit was generously donated to us by Jia Dixit, Sangam Bhati, and Sayuri Govender, students at Columbia University as a part of their South Asian Diasporas Class. The text below is unedited and unchanged and represents their viewpoints and analysis. The ideal way to interact with this exhibit is to follow their StoryMap: otherwise, a written out walking tour can be found on tabs 2-19.
For decades, Columbia University has functioned as a location of elite higher education amidst the "subaltern" university of the greater Harlem area surrounding it– bringing to light a fascinating history on the intellectual life inside and outside of its gates.
Columbia has a long history of advocacy, activism, and famous academics studying and teaching in its classrooms. Yet, this history is also the result of a vexed relationship with the Harlem neighborhood, as sometimes the University embraces it, and others closes itself off.
Many South Asian scholars cite the university as a place of significant intellectual development and opportunity, especially in advancing their own anti-caste and anti-colonial advocacy. The work of these South Asian academics in the U.S must also be discussed in conjunction with the historical context of the racial justice movements going on in and around the university at the time. Intellectual thought on the South Asian diaspora is a byproduct of larger movements by Black intellectuals, as well as significant changes to academia at Columbia. As we trace the lineages of the South Asian diaspora at the university, we ensure that it is placed within this context of the "inside and outside" teachings of Columbia.
The entrance of major South Asian scholars and politicians—specifcally B.R Ambedkar, a representative of the broader shifts in the population of South Asian students—makes clear how the University played a crucial role in fundamental works of South Asian thought. In the early 1900s Columbia also began to admit international students in large volumes for the first time. Students at the time had the ability to be influenced by the cultural renaissance and blooming civil rights movement–especially with the creation of the NAACP and the prominence of critical race scholars like W.E.B DuBois. This was a period of intense cultural upheaval and intellectual fermentation that also directly coincided with neighboring working-class South Asian communities within Harlem.
It is important to both acknowledge the immense history here and the power of the academic world in allowing for significant contributions to South Asian history, and how Columbia functioned as an actor that both embraced and shut off intellectual thought in the world outside its own gates.
The Walking Tour
Location 1: The Gates and Greater Harlem
For decades, the Columbia gates have been a contentious site representing the divide between the elite institution of the university and its encroachment into the historically Black neighborhood of Harlem. The opening and closing of the gates, as well as the creation of them, demonstrate the often hypocritical role of the University in who it allows on campus and who it does not.
Columbia became a closed campus, constructing gates on 119th street in 1913, in a racialized response to the changing neighborhood of Harlem. At this time, Harlem was invigorated by a major population change, in which race riots downtown led to the migration of Black New Yorkers to uptown. Furthermore, this period marked the beginnings of the Harlem Renaissance, a massive cultural era where Black art, music, writing, and thought flourished. Harlem became an almost open-air, subaltern university— a beating and vibrant hub that contrasted immensely to the closed elite academic world of Columbia. Many students were influenced by the ongoing cultural bang going on around them.
Furthermore, in 1909, the NAACP was founded in Harlem. This was a backbone of the cultural renaissance. Its commitment to racial justice through the law, as well as the fight for civil rights, paved the way for the racial reckonings that would soon occur. As critical thinking on race flowed throughout Harlem, Columbia students like B.R Ambedkar and HG Mudgal were able to bridge gaps between constructions of race and caste, and bring to life a method of thinking about power structures and systems of hierarchy in new, bold ways.
The erecting of the 119th gates in 1913 also juxtaposed greatly the new admittance of international students and other minority students–an action led by President Nicholas Murray Butler. Summer sessions were open to both men and women for only $25 dollars in 1900 to make liberal education more accessible, especially for black women, Native American, and Jewish students. With this, Columbia's student population increased exponentially from 1901 to 1913. This was also the same time that prominent South Asian politician and anti-caste activist B.R Ambedkar arrived as a student. Columbia was both opening, and closing, its gates–with a stark division centered on the upcoming gentrification and racial discrimination against Harlem residents.
Location 2: Low Library
An international student welcomed at this time was B.R. Ambedkar– a renowned Columbia University alumni, anti-caste activist and member of the Indian Constituent Assembly. While completing his master's at Columbia, Ambedkar wrote his dissertation, "Administration and Finance of East India Company." His time in New York led to his admiration of the New York Public Library system and inspired advocacy for similar accessibility to the written word in Mumbai. The written word was the strongest tool that Ambedkar possessed: not only was he able to reach an expansive audience, but he also reclaimed the power of education that was taken away from him as a Dalit by upper castes and Brahmins through segregative and discriminatory practices– such as having Dalits sit outside while class was taught inside. His focus on education aligned with his obsession with collecting books that began at Columbia, specifically at the Low Library, as well as continued his passion for writing.
Ambedkar left Columbia in 1916, beginning research on his doctoral thesis, "National Dividend of India– A Historic and Analytic Study," while maintaining contact with his mentor, Professor Edwin Seligman. He was also heavily influenced by Franz Boas, whose thesis criticizes race by citing the importance of using culture, history, and psychology to identify peoples and was featured in Ambedkar's anthropology classes. This is shown in Ambedkar's publication of Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis, and Development in 1916, where he criticizes the caste hierarchy as an assertion of control over women's sexuality through endogamy, or marriage within a specific caste. He would go onto the London School of Economics for a few years but return to Columbia in 1925 to submit a PhD thesis under Professor Seligman entitled "The Evolution of Provincial Finance in British India: A Study in the Provincial Decentralization of Imperial Finance in Economics."
In 1936, Ambedkar published Annihilation of Caste, which echoed the ideas of John Dewey, also influenced by Boas. Specifically, he focused on American democracy. He connects ideas of freedom, equality, justice and fraternity to the caste system, emphasizing that education in morality and critical thinking are a means of intellectual freedom that can destroy caste.
Following his time at Columbia, Ambedkar became the main architect of the Constitution of India and the first law and justice minister of the Republic of India. The influence of Columbia and Harlem civil rights activists is reflected in his politics– while he argued against the caste system and its treatment of Dalits, he also practiced Anglo-American liberalism, fighting against social discrimination against women and workers. In 1930 at the Round Table Conference, Ambedkar infamously argued for political representation and suffrage of Dalits through the creation of a separate electorate, which clashed with the ideas of fellow activist Mahatma Gandhi, who saw a separate electorate as creating further division within Hindu society. In 1949, Ambedkar developed the Indian Constitution, guaranteeing freedom of religion, abolition of untouchability, and the outlawing of all forms of discrimination. Later, in 1950, Ambedkar resigned from his position as the minister of law when the cabinet refused to pass the Women's Rights Bill. In 1952, Ambedkar received an honorary LLD doctorate degree in law. In 1956, Ambedkar converted to Buddhism and passed away the same year.
Location 3: Butler Library - South Asian Studies Room
Moving to another famous library at Columbia University, the 6th floor of Butler Library houses the South Asian Studies Reading Room, which features a non-circulating collection on South Asian history and humanities. With more than 1500 items, it houses collections of major reference works, including dictionaries and encyclopedias, primary sources, and publications by important authors, as well as key texts on South Asian history, literature, culture, and society. Some of these include firsthand travel accounts such as Travels in India, dated to 1676, and Ancient Accounts of India and China, dated to the 9th century, as well as a collection of proverbs and proverbial phrases, in the Persian and Hindoostanee languages, dated to 1824. On the same floor is the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, which is where the Indian Princely State Legal Documents collection, containing seals and "court fee" revenue stamps from 1860 to 1960, special collections of Sanskrit manuscripts on astronomy and mathematics, documentation of Ambedkar's affiliation with Columbia, and much more are located.
This is not the only location of South Asian material: the South Asian Studies Collection, which contains over 500,000 volumes, spans libraries across the various institutions of Columbia, such as the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, the Business & Economics Library, the Lehman Social Sciences, the Law Library, the Health Sciences Library, and the Burke Library, which specifically includes the South Asia Series of the Missionary Research Library Archives. Through the South Asian Cooperative Acquisitions Program and the Pakistan Cooperative Acquisitions Program, these materials are supplied to Columbia through Library of Congress field offices in New Delhi, India and Islamabad, Pakistan. The languages of the materials span Arabic, English, Hindi, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and at least 30 other languages, including tribal languages and dialects.
Location 4: The Cosmopolitan Club / Ambedkar's Housing
Ambedkar arrived at Columbia in 1913 to complete his Masters in economics. He eventually moved into the now Wallach Hall (previously Livingston Hall) and met his roommate, Naval Bhathena, who he would stay life-long friends with. He would later move to the Cosmopolitan Club, which was a housing group made up of Indian Students. This allowed for the sensation of community away from the subcontinent– perhaps Ambedkar's first interactions with the diaspora.
At Columbia, Ambedkar grew and developed his own political thought under the influence of other economists including his professor Edwin Seligman, John Dewey, James Stotwell, and James Robinson. Professor Seligman's thesis on "The Problems of India Rupee" most strongly shaped Ambedkar's own conception of and theorizations on India's economy. Furthermore, John Dewey, an influential economist, would go on to be quoted numerous times in Ambedkar's critical work The Annihilation of Caste. Ambedkar spent hours on end in the libraries, reading and expanding his own academic thought– especially, as mentioned, in the Low Library's stacks.
The academic world at Columbia was key to Ambedkar's role in both constructing the Indian Constitution, as well as his anti-caste advocacy. Here, Ambedkar was free to explore, unchained from his low caste status. He took classes beyond the world of economics, including history, French, German, philosophy, and anthropology. He was introduced to Franz Boas–whose denunciation of racial typologies would go on to influence his scholarly work Castes In India: Their Mechanisms, Genesis, and Development. In this seminal text, written in 1916 for a seminar taught by Alexander Goldenweiser, he argued that caste was, at its core, the overt control of women's sexuality. This bold work would go on to become his first scholarly publication.
His positionality within the greater Harlem area was also deeply influential in his anti-caste work and development of his sociopolitical thinking. Ambedkar was at Columbia at a time that coincided with the creation of the NAACP and the brewing popularity of the sociologist and activist W.E.B DuBois's work– who Ambedkar would later contact in 1946 an effort to connect the struggle of caste in India to the struggle of race in America. The Harlem Renaissance would begin just a few years after his arrival– a period of intense artistry and intellect that would be sure to reach Ambedkar's life uptown. It would be remiss not to acknowledge the role of Black thinkers, especially their theories of race and subjugation, in anti-caste work.
This expansive coursework and academic life at Columbia helped shape Ambedkar into the renowned economist he is known as today, as well as aided in his intense and extensive claims about caste and its deep-seated connection to Hinduism and the control of female sexuality. His time at Columbia exemplifies the connections between the South Asian diaspora and the specific position they occupy within a space. His combined knowledge of being a student in a democratic country as well as his background as an untouchable in the Indian caste system shaped his intellectual explorations into caste as well as writing of the Indian Constitution.
Location 5: Gender and Culture in Barnard Anthropology
Across Broadway at Barnard college, in the 1920s, numerous prominent female academics were making waves. Women such as Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Zora Neale Hurston became a part of ongoing conversations and discussions about the role of race and culture within anthropology. Specifically, these women were part of a select group of female anthropologists who studied under Franz Boas, an anthropologist who radically challenged anthropology's, as well as the general academic world's, conception of and acceptance of race science. Margaret Mead would continue her work in cultural anthropology, working to broaden ideas of sexuality and sexual conventions. Ruth Benedict became a renowned folklorist, who expanded ideas on cultural configuration. She would become the first female faculty member at Columbia.
Zora Neale Hurston battled not just a patriarchal system, but a racist one. Barnard was solely composed of white elites at the time, and Hurston struggled immensely to find her place among them, writing "How It Feels to be Colored Me" to reckon with her place at the school. To her, the students at Columbia were known as the "Gods of the Upper Air." She would become the first African-American woman to graduate from Barnard. Placed at the intersection of these systems of oppression, she worked to champion the idea of uplifting the Black voice through anthropology. She was also a central voice in the Harlem Renaissance, publishing numerous short stories and novels including Their Eyes Were Watching God. She bridged the strong gap that existed between Harlem and the university at the time. She represented the academic world inside and outside of the university. She connected deeply with writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, and became a part of Barnard after demonstrating her literary prowess just a few blocks away.
Hurston, while a celebrated writer, would die in poverty in 1960. Her work was obscured for decades, only brought to light by writer Alice Walker in 1973, when she journeyed to find Hurston's grave and make her work, which had strongly inspired Walker, finally known.
Hurston, Mead and Benedict each studied extensively under Franz Boas, who was a deep source of inspiration for B.R Ambedkar. It is crucial to note the changing ways race and culture were explored at Columbia under Boas, and how the work of these women started efforts to change the patriarchal and discriminatory structures of the university. With their work, they radically changed the academic world of the university, bridging gaps between the inside and outside places of learning. The classroom was not just Barnard, but the city around them. As these women attended Barnard at the same time as Ambedkar was at the university, one can imagine they may have encountered each other's work, especially as Ambedkar's work on India began to enter the cultural conceptions of India.
Location 6: Knox Hall
Considering the presence of these prominent non-white academics at Columbia in the early 19th century, it is important to acknowledge the history of non-Western and South Asian education at the university by this time and beyond. In 1784, Columbia University (previously named King's College) invited the first Professor of Oriental Languages. The same year, it reopened as Columbia College after having cut ties with its colonial past. As British colonialism expanded in India after the Revolutionary War, William Jones, an orientalist, found comparisons between European languages and Persian and Sanskrit, introducing the study of comparative philology. This field was the forefront of the humanities in Europe throughout the 1800s, but even with its established Oriental Languages program, Columbia struggled to integrate comparitive philology even by the mid 19th century.
However, in 1890, when Columbia transitioned from an undergraduate college to a university, Oriental Languages was a department within the new Faculty of Philosophy. A.V. Williams was introduced as the Indo-Iranian Languages chair the next year, and courses in philology and the history of Arabs, India, Persia, Egypt and West Africa were offered. The department split with Indo-Iranian scholars joining Comparative Linguistics and the Oriental Language being renamed as the Department of Semitic Languages. This was short-lived and both faculties reunited under the Department of Near and Middle East Languages.
In the 1960s, the department expanded to include history and international affairs scholars, reflecting a movement towards the study of modern histories and politics. The department moved into Kent Hall in 1965 under its new name– Middle East Languages and Cultures.
The department experienced rapid expansion between 2005 and 2007, including the introduction of new faculty and the inclusion of African Studies into its intellectual focus. By 2009, the department moved to Knox Hall to accommodate its expansion– the faculty and graduate program had doubled in size since the early 2000s. This move gave the department access to more resources for its faculty and students, such as offices, classrooms and graduate work spaces.
The MESAAS department has transformed and expanded exponentially since the introduction of Oriental Languages in 1784. However, today, its history of growth and inclusion is being stalled as a result of the Trump administration's federal funding cuts to the university in the spring of 2025. Alongside this, they demanded that MESAAS be placed into academic receivership. These demands put pressure on research and free speech throughout the university, but particularly target the MESAAS department, enforcing supervision and censorship on the study of these fields.
Location 7: Professor Mamdani and the South Asian Diaspora Today
Housed in Knox Hall, is Professor Mahmood Mamdani's office– an embodiment of the anti-colonial and multi-cultural education that has come to define MESAAS. Mahmood Mamdani, the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University, is a Ugandan anthropologist who teaches courses on major debates in the study of Africa, the Cold War and the Third World, the modern state and the colonial subject, the theory, history, and practice of human rights, and civil wars and the state in Africa.
Born in India to a Gujarati Muslim family and raised in a racially segregated Uganda at the time, Mamdani is a part of the South Asian diaspora resulting from a large shift of South Asians to British colonies in Africa. Mamdani graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Pittsburgh in 1967 as a part of the Kennedy Airlift scholarship program, which brought hundreds of East Africans to American and Canadian universities. During this time, he made the bus journey south to Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1965 to participate in the civil rights movement, where he was jailed and used his phone call to contact the Ugandan ambassador in Washington, D.C., for assistance. When the ambassador questioned his interference in the "internal affairs of a foreign country," Mamdani indicated that it was not an internal struggle but rather one of freedom .
Following his participation in the Montgomery protests, Mamdani was visited by the FBI at his dorm at the University of Pittsburgh. FBI agents asked if Mamdani knew Karl Marx, to which Mamdani responded that he had not met Marx. The agents indicated that Marx had been "long dead" and discussed Marx's ideas of taxing the rich and distributing these taxes to the poor. While this encounter was inconsequential to the FBI, it was an introduction of Marxist ideas to Mamdani.
Mamdani then attended the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, where he received his master's in political science in 1968 and in law and diplomacy in 1969. In 1972, while Mamdani was in his mid-twenties, Uganda's Asian population, consisting of 70,000 people, was expelled by Idi Amin. Many Asians, including Mamdani, had been registered as citizens at Ugandan independence only to have their nationality rescinded. Mamdani moved to Britain at this point, residing in a youth hostel near Kensington Place that was repurposed as a transit camp for refugees. He later obtained his first academic position as a professor at the University of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania and received a PhD in government from Harvard University with a thesis entitled "Politics and Class Formation in Uganda in 1974." He returned to Uganda after Amin's fall in 1979, working as an intern at an ecumenical Christian alliance, and joining a position at Makerere University in Uganda from 1980 to 1993. In 1984, Mamdani became stateless after his Ugandan citizenship was withdrawn by the government of Milton Obote due to his criticism of its policies, during which he returned to Dar-es-Salaam. In 1986, after the deposition of Obote, Mamdani went back to Uganda. He was a founding director of Uganda's first non-governmental research organization from 1987 to 1996 and served as a visiting professor at institutions in South Africa, New Delhi, and the United States, specifically at Princeton University. He later worked at the University of Cape Town from 1996 to 1999, resigning after disagreements with the mostly white faculty over the syllabus draft of his course "Problematising Africa." Mamdani originally joined Columbia University in 1999 as director of the Institute of African Studies until 2004, when he took on the position of a professor.
Mamdani has also published multiple books on Islam in America, colonialism in various African countries, caste in India, and more. His writing is a representation of the multiculturalism of the South Asian diaspora through relationships to the United States, African nations, and South Asian countries, as well as those that revolve around culture, religion, and more.
On October 6, 2022, Mamdani published his piece "The Asian Question" in the London Review of Books. He discusses his personal experience during the Asian expulsion from Uganda, which reframes the narrative of Ugandan Asians as not solely victims. The oversimplification of the identity of Asian Ugandans further complicates their relationship to Black Ugandans and contributes to the lack of inclusion of Asian Ugandans in a multicultural Uganda. He emphasizes how both British and Ugandan citizenship laws made Asians stateless by denying them rights, mobility, and economic and political presence, which all relate local injustices to greater issues of racism related to colonization, immigration, and citizenship. His powerful personal account also emphasizes a lost belonging related to statelessness and perpetual displacement of the Ugandan Asian diaspora, many of whom experience ambivalence rather than nostalgia in returning to pre-expulsion conditions.
In 1991, Mamdani and his wife, Mira Nair, a renowned Indian filmmaker based in the United States, welcomed their son, Zohran, in Kampala, Uganda. Mamdani and his family later moved to Morningside Heights in New York, close to Columbia University, where Zohran grew up. His son Zohran has become the mayor-elect of New York City as of November 4, 2025, becoming the city's first South Asian mayor, first Muslim mayor, and youngest mayor in over 100 years. Mamdani's socialist and Marxist views are reflected in his son's policies, which focus on free busing, rent stabilization, and affordability of groceries through New York City-run grocery stores.
Location 8: Riverside Church
Shifting our focus onto the civil rights and anti-colonial advocates outside of the university, Riverside Church becomes a prominent location. On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech to more than 3,000 people at Riverside Church, a historic cornerstone of Morningside Heights. He discussed parallels between the vulnerable Vietnamese community during the Vietnam War and the impoverished communities of America. Significantly, King cited the significance of nonviolence in protesting and bringing a peaceful end to the war. Earlier, on October 27, 1961, he also spoke at the McMillan Theater, presently known as the Miller Theater. Invited by the Columbia Owl, a School of General Studies publication, King emphasized the importance of voter registration and the need to eradicate segregation in federal programs through more government involvement in furthering civil rights for marginalized communities.
This practice of nonviolence reflects Mahatma Gandhi's idea of satyagraha, truth force, which consists of passive civil disobedience. During his 21 years in South Africa, Gandhi developed this philosophy to unite the Indian community in opposing the socio-economic repression and race laws located there. Gandhi returned to India in 1914 and, in 1919, continued his practice of satyagraha through a day of national fasting, suspension of work, and meetings after the British issued the Rowlatt Acts, which permitted incarceration without a trial for Indians suspected of sedition. Gandhi continued this measure through boycotts of British goods and institutions, which led to the arrests of many of his followers and even his own arrest in 1922. He also led a defiance of the British Salt Laws, which allowed the Raj to recover a tax from salt sales, through a 200-mile march to the sea and production of salt from seawater by Gandhi and his volunteers. Gandhi negotiated a truce with the British government's representative, ending satyagraha temporarily until the successive representative resumed political repression. He revived satyagraha through a fast to protest Ambedkar's policy of separate electorates, which led to the 1947 resolution of making discrimination against untouchables illegal. The very same year, Britain transferred power to a partitioned India, specifically the independent states of India and Pakistan.
Gandhi had many acquaintances in the progressive African American community, consisting of Bayard Rustin, Howard Thurman, Mordecai Johnson, and more. Gandhi viewed the practice of segregation in the United States as "a negation of civilization," emphasizing the freedom struggle of African Americans. We see his biggest impact, however, on the policies of King, who utilized nonviolent political action in the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott. In 1959, King preached during his Palm Sunday sermon about the significance of Gandhi's 1930 salt march and his fast to eliminate discrimination against untouchables in India, applying the Gandhian approach of nonviolent resistance as a solution to race in the United States.
Location 9: From Harlem With Love
Stepping further beyond the gates of the university, on a wall donated by the Columbia-owned building located at 126th Street and Old Broadway lies From Harlem with Love: A Mural Project for Yuri & Malcolm. Unveiled on October 23, 2016, it is the culmination of the work of hundreds of community volunteers to paint local activists Malcolm X and Yuri Kochiyama. The site was originally home to the Black-owned soul food restaurant and nightclub "Concerto West," where Yuri worked, and her residence at the Manhattanville public housing development from 1960 to 1999 is directly visible when standing in front of the mural.
Yuri was an advocate for the antiwar movement, reparations for Japanese-American internees, and the rights of people imprisoned by the U.S. government. She also worked diligently to teach English to immigrant students, volunteer at soup kitchens and homeless shelters across NYC, and mentor youth at more than 100 high schools and colleges across the United States and Canada.
This mural specifically commemorates her friendship with Malcolm X, who coincidentally shares the same birthday. Born to middle-class Japanese immigrants in Southern California in 1921, Yuri and her family were sent to a concentration camp in Arkansas during World War II. Malcolm X, born in Nebraska in 1925 to a mother from Grenada and a father from Georgia, was sent to a Massachusetts prison in 1946 for larceny after avoiding the draft, where he joined the Nation of Islam. Both figures experienced politicization during incarceration and eventually met in New York after Malcolm X began leading Harlem's Temple Number 7 in 1954 and Kochiyama joined her husband, Bill Kochiyama, in the city in 1960. During a campaign by the Congress of Racial Equality in October 1963, the two attended a protest of discriminatory hiring in construction work for the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn. After Yuri and her son were arrested for blocking truck traffic at the construction site, she met Malcolm X at a subsequent courthouse proceeding in Brooklyn. They communicated through letters and engaged in activism against the Vietnam War, connecting US intervention in a non-white country to racism at home and nuclear weapons, where Malcolm X discussed nuclear bombs and bombs of racism at a reception hosted at Yuri's apartment. Yuri worked as a member of Malcolm's Organization of Afro-American Unity, where she further developed her understanding of the Black struggle. Yuri attended Malcolm X's speech at the Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965, where he was assassinated, and she held his head as he lay dying. She cites Malcolm X as the biggest influence of her continued activism for political prisoners and internment reparations until her death.
The mural immortalizes the alliances between Asian American and African American activism located in West Harlem by honouring the powerful friendship between Malcolm X and Yuri Kochiyama. It places an emphasis on the need for minority communities to be willing to learn from each other and uplift one another. The construction of the mural also cites the importance of accessibility to community-driven public art programs for the youth, many of whom participated in the painting of the mural, in order to maintain the cross-generational and cross-cultural unity that exists in Harlem today.
Location 10: H.G. Mudgal
You can learn more about H.G. Mudgal from Youth Researcher Ravi's exhibit on "1910 Indian Intellectuals," here.
H.G. Mudgal is another prominent figure in the political history of Harlem's cross-cultural activism. Similar to Ambedkar, Krishnalal Shridharani and Marcus Garvey, Mudgal falls into a line of activists interested in the relationship between South Asian and African American struggles. Born in Hubli, a city in modern-day Karnataka, he came to New York City in 1920 and pursued his higher education. He attended Columbia University earning a M.A. and a Ph.D, while also studying literature and languages at the City College of New York and journalism at NYU. Struggling to find jobs after his time at NYU, it was recommended that he apply to work at African American newspapers since they hired without the prejudices that most newspapers at the time held.
He was hired by the Daily Negro Times and later became the editor of the Negro World newspaper. Both papers were associated with Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, of which he became a significant member. Mudgal embodied Garvey's ideas of racial unity, pride and promoted his ideas of economic empowerment. It is reported that he organized panels and gave speeches that aligned with Garvey's cause of racial and economic empowerment. His commitment to the Garveyite movement also manifested in columns he wrote. For example, he wrote a series called "How to Build Up Liberia" in which he outlined how the country's natural resources should be utilized. Similarly, his advocacy for economic empowerment was exhibited through his support and involvement in a movement that called for the boycott of white businesses that discriminated against African Americans. His career is defined by his support for black cultural pride and racial determination.
Additionally, a significant part of his ideology was also based on the idea that racial liberation in the US was deeply tied to anti-imperialist independent movements across the globe. Similar to Garvey, he identified himself as "neither capitalist, communist, liberal nor socialist but an \"intelligent free-lance.\"" He consistently compared Garvey to Gandhi, revering them both as strong leaders and enemies of the British empire.
Location 11: Marcus Garvey and UNIA
Marcus Garvey, mentor to H.G. Mudgal and leader of radical racial freedom movements in the US, was another activist who looked at the Indian freedom struggle as parallel to the African American one. He drew on the Indian struggle as evidence of the uprising of oppressed people, and was inspired by Gandhi's strong leadership.
Garvey was born in Jamaica in 1887 where he grew up witnessing the poverty and discrimination that black people faced worldwide. In 1914, he founded the United Negro Improvement Association in Jamaica, which then moved to New York City in 1916. Housed in New York City, UNIA started the Negro World newspaper. The newspaper, aligned with Garvey's ideology, covered issues such as racial unity, economic empowerment and transnational struggles. The Garveyite movement, therefore, was not restricted to the USA– UNIA had branches in Africa, the Carribean, Australia and Europe. A racial diplomat, Garvey highlighted the transnational liberation of "the Negro race." Along these lines, UNIA and the Negro World often focused on the comparison between the Indian and African American struggles. Garvey represented the unity of the Indian people as evidence of the possibility of Negro unity. While championing this transnational outlook, Garvey also made it clear that his movement was not transracial. He looked at the Indian and African American movements as parallel but separate– he emphasized racial boundaries but encouraged cooperation between the two races.
This racial cooperation was not purely ideological but also manifested in his collaboration with Indian activists such as H.G. Mudgal, Lala Lajpat Rai, Haridas Muzumdar and Mohandas K. Gandhi. Garvey and Gandhi were often compared as leaders of anti-colonial movements. A Gandhian graduate, Muzumdar's contributions to the Negro World drew ties between these two figures. He gave speeches through UNIA about the non-cooperation movement and Gandhi's ideas for the future of India. He also embodied Gandhi's principles, fasting for two days after hearing about a lynching in the South. UNIA therefore, was ideologically and practically aligned with the freedom struggle in India, bringing Gandhian and Garveyite thought together.
UNIA was seen as an organization that was spearheading a movement of transnational freedom struggle, one that gave oppressed people a new confidence. However, Garvey himself was far more controversial. His focuses on racial boundaries and extreme alignment of all black people were criticized for their proximity to fascist ideas. He claimed to be the representative of the Negro people, even signing his letter to Gandhi as the "Provisional President of Africa." His dismissal of the diversity and variety of the people he was leading led to criticism of his ideology as a whole. However, his critics recognize that much of UNIA's success can be attributed to his radical commitment to changing the world order.
Location 12: The Harlem Ashram
Gandhi's influence in New York City extends further with the establishment of the Harlem Ashram. The Harlem Ashram was founded in 1940 by two white men, Ralph Templin and Jay Holmes Smith, who were previously Methodist missionaries in India. However, during their time in India, they became fiercely inspired by Gandhi's work and the non-violence movement. The British government forced them to leave India due to their growing pro-independence work. Yet their work did not stop there.
Upon returning to NYC, Temlin and Smith founded the Harlem Ashram, hoping to build connections and coalitions with black leaders at the time. They sought to build up a multiracial and diverse community that worked together to connect the Gandhian movement to the work of anti-Jim Crow activists. Those who lived and visited the Ashram would learn how to use non violence to end discrimination on the basis of race within the United States. The central idea of satyagraha, or non-violence, was used to empower Black leaders and voices, especially as the ashram was frequented by Black Harlemites. Frequentists of the ashram even included major activist figures, such as Bayard Rustin– a civil rights leader who organized the March on Washington, and used ideas of nonviolence as the foundation of his activism. Krishnalal Sridhirani also at one point lived in the Ashram. After completing his PhD thesis on the sociology of satyagraha at Columbia School of Journalism in 1940 (the year the Ashram opened) he would continue his work in demystifying Gandhi's teachings and also organizing with the Non-violence Direct Action Committee. His 1939 book War Without Violence was a wildly popular and significant book to 1940s civil rights organizing, especially due to its analysis of and discussion of satyagraha. Bayard Rustin would even go on to describe how "Shridharani's book became our gospel, our bible."
The Ashram was a central place where the gap between the anti-colonial movement in India and the civil rights movement in the U.S. was bridged. This was a crucial building block in the later entrance of nonviolence as a key aspect of the civil rights movement, as many activists were introduced to and were inspired by satyagraha. While led by white missionaries instead of Indian anti-colonial activists themselves, the entrance of this idea into the mainstream in Harlem was significant. The Harlem Ashram would close in 1948 after conflicting views and organizational struggles that fractured the conception of the multicultural community. Yet its history is significant in understanding the larger story of South Asian organizing and advocacy, especially in its deep connection to civil rights and Black liberation movements.
Location 13: Krishnalal Shridharani
A prominent influence in the Harlem Ashram's history, Krishnalal Shridharani was an Indian activist who was heavily surveilled by British intelligence as a result of his advocacy for immediate Indian independence. He was born in 1911 in Gujarat and was introduced to anti-colonial thought early in his life. He studied in anti-colonial schools and became familiar with African American texts and ideas by the 1920s, including those of W.E.B. Du Bois. As a student, he participated in the Salt March of 1930 for which he went to jail. Shridharani traveled to New York on a scholarship with the help of Rabindranath Tagore. Here, he went to NYU where he earned a master's degree in economics and sociology, and then got a PhD from Columbia University.
He published several books and articles, even becoming a bestselling author for his autobiographical book, My India, My America. He was a ferocious advocate for the Indian independence movement and became a public speaker. He also challenged the exclusionary immigration and naturalization policies but never tried to attain American citizenship himself. When he entered America at the age of 22, he was traversing a complicated landscape, one in which the exclusion of Indians and the exoticization of their culture were equally rampant. In his book My India, My America, he recounts instances where he was treated as a spectacle by his graduate student peers because of his skin colour and dress. In order to resist these racist instances, he claimed the character of "radicalized dandy." He disrupted expectations by donning suits and jewellery, smoking cigars and engaging in banter– through his language and clothing he was able to subvert the assumptions about him and put forward his political message.
Although relatively unmentioned in the history of the Indian freedom movement, Shridharani had a prominent impact on anti-colonial thought, especially in the United States amongst black revolutionary thinkers. In India, he is mostly remembered in Gujarat for his poetry and plays rather than his political activism in the US. During his 12 years in America, between 1934 and 1946, many Indian and African American thinkers like him were interested in the intersection between the struggles of these two populations. Activist-intellectuals in the US saw these struggles as linked in their rejection of white supremacy and empowerment of "the colored world." In this context, an emerging generation of black intellectuals and radical thinkers became extremely influenced by Shridharani's work.
Shridharani's War Without Violence, although not as commercially successful as his My India, My America, became "[the] gospel, [the] bible" for civil rights activists in the 1940s, according to Bayard Rustin. The book offers an understanding of nonviolent resistance as a tool within greater movements. Shridharani primarily discusses satyagraha within the context of the Indian freedom struggle, but also discusses such methods in a broader context. The book's influence is substantiated by multiple accounts of activists drawing directly from it. For example, Bernice Fisher, a white member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, used War Without Violence to produce a list of guidelines for sit-ins against segregation. Similarly, in 1941 A. Philip Randolph mobilized a mass march on Washington which is said to have been significantly based on Shridharani's book. Pauli Murray, a Black, queer intellectual and activist, was arrested for refusing to move to the back of a bus– discussing the incident and her time in jail, she credits Shridharani as a major influence in her nonviolent resistance. Additionally, James Farmer, founder of CORE, was friends with Shridharani and, in 1943, invited him to be the featured guest speaker for CORE's first national conference. Besides these direct applications, these activists and many others studied and taught Shridharani's War Without Violence– for example, it became foundational in conversations at the Harlem Ashram.
Shridharani was involved in the ashram not only through his frequent visits in personal and academic capacities, but also through his book, War Without Violence. It was a frequent topic of discussion at the ashram and also served as the foundation for training around nonviolent direct action and resistance. In his book, he rejects the idea that direct action is unnecessary in America because it is a democracy. He claims that democracy and oppression are not mutually exclusive, and that democracies certainly should not be seen as remedies for oppression.
Location 14: The NAACP and W.E.B. DuBois
Considering remedies and the struggle against oppression, the foundation of the NYC chapter of the NAACP in 1911 must be acknowledged. This moment marked the beginning of a powerful effort to organize around and address racial discrimination and injustice, especially in cases of police brutality and ongoing segregation systems. The NAACP, directed by W.E.B DuBois, was centered on ending practices of segregation. This began with fighting for educational equality. DuBois's critical work on race and racism was central to racial and decolonial advocacy at the time, especially for B.R Ambedkar, who was deeply influenced by his fight to end systemic oppression and even reached out to him expressing how he was a "student of the Negro problem," and "[t]here is so much similarity between the position of the Untouchables in India and of the position of the Negroes in America that the study of the latter is not only natural but necessary."
Ambedkar's use of DuBois's work allowed for the lines between race and caste to be drawn, and started a joined approach towards seeking social justice on a global scale. While the NAACP's headquarters were in close proximity to Columbia, they functioned as a place of radical education and advocacy outside the elite university. Even so, some Columbia faculty bypassed this border and were a key part of the NAACP, such as Joel Elias Spingarn, a professor of comparative literature who was a prominent leader in the founding of the NAACP. He would eventually become its second president in 1930, and he would serve until his death in 1939.
Students also crossed between the NAACP and the university as they were inspired by the sociological work of DuBois. Yet distinctions between Harlem and Columbia were heavily drawn. Columbia was an actor who advanced notions of white elitism, and failed to facilitate strong relations between the neighboring work of Harlem organizers. This cultural moment of radical racial justice advocacy in the early 20th century represented the beginnings of the "subaltern university" of Harlem advocacy, in which perspectives, experiences, and conceptions of race were altering at a rapid pace.
Location 15: Taraknath Das
Taraknath Das was one of the major political leaders of anti-colonial, Indian nationalist sentiments in North America in the early 20th century, and husband to founding member of the NAACP, Mary Keatinge Das. Later in his life, he was a professor of political science at Columbia University where he taught until his retirement in 1956. In his time here, he introduced the Mary Keatinge Das Lecture in 1948 in honour of his wife after her death. These lectures brought leaders, writers and intellectuals to the university, and today his endowment funds a prize for exceptional undergraduate senior theses.
Before starting his career as an academic, Das spent time in India, Europe, Japan, but more significantly, USA and Canada, spreading his influence globally. He was born near Calcutta in 1884 and grew up around revolutionary communities such as Anushilan. Within these circles, he was advised to travel to Japan to be trained and educated so that the movement for Indian independence could be furthered. He went to Japan in 1905 to fulfill these ends, however, by 1906 he was pushed out of Japan by the British government. He left for Seattle where he worked on the railway system, then quickly moved to San Francisco. In 1907, he was admitted to UC Berkeley where he studied chemistry and worked in the labs. He also passed the civil service exam in 1907, and was positioned in Vancouver as an interpreter in the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization Service of the USA.
Coinciding with his arrival in Vancouver in 1907, South Asians were not allowed to vote in municipal elections or be involved in public service. Also, in 1908 the Canadian government made an amendment, the Continuous Journey legislation, to the Immigration Act, whereby anyone who reached Canada from somewhere other than their native country could be denied entry. In the context of this exclusion and in the aftermath of the Bellingham riots of 1907, many South Asians banded together in Vancouver leading Das to start his newspaper, Free Hindusthan. The newspaper's first issue in 1908 was published in the press room of the Socialist Party of Canada. The British Criminal Intelligence caught wind of the paper, banning it and threatening Das's position in the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization Service. Das moved the paper to Seattle and then to New York in 1909, where he met Geroge Freeman, an Irish nationalist who offered Das resources to publish Free Hindusthan.
Free Hindusthan provided stories about political activity in India to immigrants in Canada, but also became a resource for Indian revolutionaries globally. The paper was radical in its rejection of the British empire, with the 1908 edition calling out British policy as the reason for famine in India. Besides reporting on atrocities in India, the paper also featured pieces about South Asians' position as immigrants, discussing their exclusion and surveillance by the British empire, and their treatment in Canada, South Africa, Australia, etc.
In 1908, Das went to a military training academy where he continued to be surveilled as a threat to the British empire. He returned to Seattle in 1909, having been suspended from the academy, then earning a BA in political science and in 1911 an MA as well. In 1911 he also applied for citizenship again, but was denied.
In 1913, he became one of the founders of the Ghadar party, originally called the Pacific Coast Hindustan Association. In San Francisco, Das applied for citizenship again and finally received it in 1914. He travelled to Canada after gaining citizenship in order to help the migrants on the Komagata Maru who were stranded as a result of the Continuous Journey legislation. He then travelled between the American northwest and Europe until 1917 when he was tried in the Hindu-German conspiracy trial. The trial targeted an alleged conspiracy surrounding uprisings between 1914 and 1917 attributed to the Ghadr Party, the Berlin India Committee and other Indian revolutionaries. Das was found guilty and was moved to Leavenworth prison in 1918. Here, he remained engaged in political activism, having meetings with other revolutionaries and finishing his book, India in World Politics. After this book was published in 1923, Das's citizenship was threatened and the US government attempted to deport him but he evaded capture. He fled to Europe in 1924 with his wife, Mary Keatinge. After the war ended he went back to the USA where he taught at Columbia University until 1956 and died in 1958.
His story is set at a time when Indians were excluded, surveilled and mistreated by the British Empire. British intelligence pushed for the restriction of South Asian immigrants worldwide, creating a network of documentation and surveillance that targeted South Asians. Das's continual dedication to the Indian freedom struggle gave direction to immigrants and revolutionaries globally, forming his own network of revolutionary anti-colonial thinkers.
Location 16: Ambedkar Bust
These revolutionaries and anti-colonial activists from around the world all had an impactful, but often forgotten presence on and around Columbia's campus. A representation of the legacy of these many cross-cultural anti-colonial thinkers is a bronze bust of B.R. Ambedkar, located at the far east corner of the Lehman Social Science Library on the third floor of the School of International and Public Affairs. Sculpted by Vinay Brahmesh Wagh of Bombay, the bust was presented to the Southern Asian Institute of Columbia University on October 24, 1991, by the Federation of Ambedkarite and Buddhist Organizations, UK. The bust is adorned by bright garlands, offerings of the many admirers Ambedkar acquired during and after his life.
Ambedkar's time at Columbia shaped his legacy and his ideas: he bridged the American ideas of democracy to criticize the caste system. Surrounded by the thinkers of Harlem as well as his companions at Columbia, he sought to uplift the voices of those who were repressed in India, especially Dalits and women. His views were revolutionary and timeless, a legacy that changed the world while he was alive and even after his time, as he shaped the very constitution that represents the largest democracy in the world. His legacy as well as those of figures like Taraknath Das, Marcus Garvey, H.G. Mudgal, Zora Neale Hurston, and Krishnalal Shridharani, represent the history of activism and revolutionary thought that Columbia's students embody.
Location 17: Closing of the Gates
On October 12, 2023, the open gates of Columbia closed. This was a result of protests on campus against the war in Gaza and Columbia's compliance with the Trump administration over changes to the Middle Eastern studies department and the arrest of Mahmoud Khalid, a Columbia grad and legal U.S. resident. These protests were further fueled by the revocation of the student visa of Ranjani Srinivasan, a pro-Palestinian Indian PhD candidate at Columbia. Her enrollment at Columbia, where she was labeled by the Department of Homeland Security as "an advocate of violence and Hamas," had been withdrawn. The very gates that issued a welcome to international students now targeted the same students, threatening their education and ability to practice free speech when criticizing the institution. The closing of the gates directly rejects and dishonours the legacies of the many anti-colonial thinkers whose thought was fostered within and around these gates. Today, student voices are suppressed, even though they echo the anti-colonial advocacy and radical thought that these historic alumni encouraged.
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