Bengali Harlem
“In January 1918, in the dead of a severe New York winter, the SS Khiva docked on the Westside waterfront of Manhattan. The Khiva was a British steamship carrying goods from colonized India to the United States. The ship was manned by a crew of laborers from what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh. Maritime work was some of the most arduous labor of the early industrial age, and in the case of British trade and transport ships, it was labor performed by men from the colonies. South Asians comprised the largest group among colonial laborers on British steamships. That night in January, two young workers took leave from the Khiva to explore the docks of New York City. One, a Kashmiri named Amir Haider Khan, was just eighteen years old and already a four-year veteran of the maritime trade. He and his friend eventually wandered into a waterfront provisions store, whose Jewish proprietor put the idea into their heads of deserting their ship. Khan and his friend took shore leave again, “telling our shipmates we were going for a stroll,” but they did not return.” — Excerpt from Vivek Bald's Bengali Harlem
In the 1920s and 1930s, South Asian seamen known as lascars began “jumping ship” at New York ports. These newly arrived lascars found blue-collar jobs all across Manhattan: as peddlers, line cooks, or factory workers. Lascars lived in clandestine networks in neighborhoods stretching from the Tenderloin to the Lower East Side. Such men were likely to end up in a boardinghouse, typically inhabited by single men and African Americans, and run by women. Here, they got provisions, clothing, a safe haven, and community in a new, strange country.
One such lascar was Dada Amir Haider Khan. Khan boarded a ship at the age of 14 or 15 from Bombay on the S.S. City of Paris, a British steamship that sailed along British-controlled routes of the Atlantic. On his initial journeys, he met various crew members who were from different parts of the British empire. These encounters awakened his critical consciousness and helped him come to terms with his own experiences of colonial violence. He wrote of his early journeys in his memoir:
“Without any political background or formal school education, my national sentiment had begun to grow under diverse experiences and surroundings through which I had been passing. The first symptom of it I can trace back to the time of my contact with Joe. Subsequently it continued to grow and was stimulated by the post-war happenings in India which caused the greatest upheaval in modern Indian history. Finally, my contact with the old Sikh of the Ghadar Party and other nationalist Indians in America…inspired my enthusiasm for India’s freedom to such an extent that all these various influences had created a passionate burning patriotic feeling in me.”
Dada Amir Haider Khan anchored himself in history through experiences with other colonial subjects, like Joe, who was the son of an Irish revolutionary. His interactions with Ghadar Party members — who he met after jumping ship and settling in New York City — were also politically and intellectually significant for him. He wrote of how, during his time in the United States (when he was in his 20s), he spent all of his free time attending “political, social, or educational meetings” to learn the history of the United States, build a stronger understanding of Marxism and labor rights, and to better understand the unique contours of racism in America.
Khan wrote, “The national colonial problems, the interconnection and interdependence of the national movement for emancipation of the colonial people with the working class struggle in the advanced capitalist countries, the role of the Communist International and the Soviet Union in the world revolutionary movement for the ultimate emancipation of humanity as a whole. It stirred my imagination.”
Khan left the United States to study proletarian revolutionary strategy in Moscow. He ultimately returned to India in 1928, marking the end of the period in his life where he would frequently stay in America. Khan’s time in New York would remain a deeply influential period in his political development. It shaped his political activism around the world in the decades to come, though his anti-colonial views would forever be refracted through his unique experiences as a seaman.
“Khan was clearly moved by the fact that American activist Agnes Smedley could shift her political energies from pursuing the lofty goal of Indian independence to addressing the everyday difficulties and concerns of Indian ex-seamen in the United States—and that she could see… that both efforts were part of the same struggle.” — Vivek Bald
In a still-segregated New York City, South Asian men were often classified as “colored,” “Mexican,” or as Black. Thus, by the 1940s, Harlem had become an unlikely home to South Asian migrants. Many of them were Bengali Muslim seamen, whose presence led to the development of a politically engaged working-class community. Harlem became increasingly multicultural, as these migrants intermarried and built families with Black, Hispanic, and other minority groups that resided in the neighborhood. On streets like 110th, 116th, and Lexington Avenue, there were a few gruff, bearded, Brown faces positioned behind hot dog carts, sticking out amongst the crowd. These streets and the vendors who worked on them were important parts of everyday life for residents of Bengali Harlem. Those hot dog carts, in addition to being one of the many ways Bengalis found to make a living for themselves in 1930s Harlem, were also community institutions. In Bengali Harlem, author Vivek Bald writes about how the carts were places where South Asian Muslims could be sure to grab a halal meal and engage in some daily gossip.
By the 1940s, these streets were still a place for Bengali Harlemites to gather. But by now, they were also important inter-communal areas for newly-forming mixed-race families. Felita, the Puerto Rican sister-in-law of Bengali seaman Saad Ullah, speaks about how the South Asian-owned pushcarts became touchpoints for her, where she knew “that her brother-in-law Saad’s friends would keep a watchful eye on her.” Saad himself ended up marrying his Puerto Rican wife, Jackie, after repeat encounters on a train he boarded from 110th Street. In the late 1940s and beyond, places like Lexington Avenue between 102nd and 116th Street became a place for many Bengali-Puerto Rican families like Saad and Jackie’s to settle down.
[Street Map of Harlem in the 1930s from Vivek Bald's book/NYC Municipal Archive of where South Asians lived]
Restaurants were the most common business ventures for a South Asian immigrant in the twentieth century. By the middle of the twentieth century, Hell’s Kitchen and Times Square had a high concentration of Indian restaurants. For example, the famous Ceylon India Inn opened in 1915 on 49th Street, while the Taj Mahal Hindu Restaurant opened in 1918 on 42nd Street. Bengal Garden was also a central part of the community of Bengali Harlem and greater New York, where the Pakistan League of America regularly held their meetings. Peddlers and community members could pool money, and perhaps get advice from seasoned experts Victoria and Habib Ullah, owners of Bengal Garden, on how to open their own restaurants. Many of the new restaurants were located in the Theater District, if not right in Times Square. Further down the East Side, 6th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenue had become a “Little India” by the 1960s, as many restaurants and shops serving South Asian cuisine and goods had popped up there. Today, on 6th Street, there are two Indian restaurants. It is a far cry from what was once a haven for the community looking for a bit of home in New York City.
In July 1913, Bhimarao Ramji Ambedkar, a young man from a marginalized Dalit community in British India, arrived at Columbia University on a Baroda State scholarship. Born into the “untouchable” caste, Ambedkar had already defied overwhelming odds to receive a degree from Bombay University. As a graduate student at Columbia, he immersed himself in economics, sociology, history, and philosophy, surrounding himself with progressive thinkers who shaped his vision of social justice and equality for marginalized groups. His time in New York, particularly the exposure to African American struggles in Harlem, deeply influenced his political thinking and lifelong fight against caste oppression in India.
To learn more about Ambedkar's time in the US, explore Ravi's exhibit on "Ambedkar in America."
Upon his return to India, Ambedkar would become the father of the Indian Constitution and an intellectual rival to Mahatma Gandhi, whose footprint is also found in Harlem. The Harlem Ashram was founded by two white, Methodist missionaries as a dedication to Mahatma Gandhi. These missionaries were Ralph Templin and Jay Holmes Smith, the latter of whom is pictured here with Jawaharlal Nehru a year prior to the Ashram’s founding. Gandhiji, as he is known, was a deeply religious man who advocated for the dissolution of violence in society. Notably, Gandhiji’s activism overlooked caste abolition, despite caste being a violently oppressive system in Indian society that sentenced millions to economic immobility and social exclusion. On this topic, Ambedkar and Gandhi were diametrically opposed in their political philosophies. Ambedkar believed caste abolition was a necessary tenet for the propulsion of a post-colonial Indian subcontinent, as argued in his 1936 paper "Annihilation of Caste." As the aforementioned Immerwahr noted, Ambedkar “believed the greatest obstacle to the full flourishing of Untouchables was the Mahatma himself.” Gandhiji is quoted “The poor Harijans [Untouchables] have no mind, no intelligence, no sense of difference between God and not God.” This is in deep contradiction with not only Ambedkar’s academic theses, but Ambedkar’s Dalit identity itself.
Despite these two political figures’ clashing perspectives on caste, the Ashram in Harlem brought together both of their ideas in a practical sense. The Ashram was modeled on the tenets of ahimsa and satyagraha, ideas of nonviolence put forward by Gandhi that contributed heavily to Indian independence in 1947. Simultaneously, organizers within the Ashram prioritized economic mobility and poverty alleviation for Harlemites. These efforts included, but were not limited to, targeting workplace discrimination, addressing housing discrimination, confronting segregation in social spaces such as hotels and restaurants, finding housing and employers for Black and Puerto Ricans, investigating police brutality, and creating local credit unions. If the experiences of Untouchables and Black and Brown Americans are analogous, as asserted by Ambedkar, the labor of organizers within the Ashram tangibly broke down caste barriers in NYC. Before its closure in 1948, the Ashram was an important place of religious and social connection in Harlem, and formed an intersecting network with the institutions of Bengali Harlem.
[Other Ashram pics from folder]
This documentary traces the history outlined above, and was donated to us by students at Columbia University. You might also find the accompanying walking tour, found here, a helpful activity to do with students after viewing the documentary!
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