‘… Thine alabaster cities gleam
undimmed by human tears…
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free! … (Did Ayn Rand know about this?)
Till nobler men keep once again
Thy whiter jubilee!
Happy birthday, sweet land of liberty. I love my country tremendously, but the intertwined backstories of the good ol’ U.S. of A. and desi Americans are replete with historical irony. The übermutinous Declaration of Independence was signed 229 years ago on this day:
Prudence… will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes… But when a long train of abuses… reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government… The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries… the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States…
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither…Asian Indian students who were supporters of independence from the British Empire were expelled from the country by order of President Theodore Roosevelt… [Link]
When [Gen. Dyer, who executed the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre] was felicitated — not censured — in the British House of Lords, even Mahatma Gandhi, that apostle of tolerance, was moved to suggest that “co-operation in any shape or form with this satanic government is sinful”. [Link]
A geographical criterion was used to exclude Asian Indians, because their racial or ethnic status was unclear… The 1917 immigration act denied entry to people from a ‘barred zone’ that included South Asia… [Link]… sustained political attacks against Asian Indians… culminated in the imposition of the 1917 Barred Zone Act. Asian Indians joined other Asian country nationals… who were excluded from immigrating to the United States… [Link]
The final injustice to Asian Indians was exacted by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), which considered to which race Asian Indians belonged… The Court decided that although Asian Indians were Caucasian, they were not “white” and therefore could not be U.S. citizens. Harassment of the Asian Indian population continued, forcing many to return to India. By 1940 half of the Asian Indian population had left the country, leaving only 2,405. [Link]
… in its 1923 decision against Thind, the Court invoked the criterion of assimilability to separate the desirable immigrants from the undesirable ones: Asian Indians were distinguished from the swarthy European immigrants, who were deemed ‘readily amalgamated’… with the immigrants ‘already here’… [Link]
Beginning in 1901, California prohibited white people from marrying non-whites… The Cable Act … specified “that any woman citizen who marries an alien ineligible to citizenship shall cease to be a citizen of the U.S.” [Link]
… and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
… protectionist and racist groups, epitomized by the Asian Exclusion League, campaigned against the “Hindu invasion” or “turban tide” that was perceived as an economic threat to native farmers. Laws were passed in California to strip land ownership from Asian Indians… [Link]… a denaturalization process in California has stripped many Indians of land they legally owned… Many Indians, married to Mexican women, transfer their land to their children. [Link]
He has kept among us… Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures… Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us…
Thousands of American troops are stationed in India during World War II. There is resentment against American troops in India because of America’s… policy which supports British colonial rule. [Link]
He has… endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions…
… nativist rioters burnt out the Asian Indian settlements in Bellingham and Everett, Washington in 1907. [Link]On the night of September 4, 1907, a mob of between 400 and 500 white men attacked Bellingham’s Hindu colonies. Many of the Hindus were beaten… the Bellingham riot was mirrored by similar assaults in California during the months that followed in Marysville, Stege, Live Oak, and other communities where the immigrants had settled. [Link]
One of the most violent actions against the new Punjabi immigrants occurred in 1914… the Punjabis… received the brunt of the attacks… [Link]
Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people…
… Indians… were also incensed by the General’s notorious “crawling order.” In the street where a female missionary had been left for dead, Dyer decreed that between 6am and 8pm Indians could only proceed on their bellies and elbows and were to be beaten if they raised a buttock… [Link]
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren… We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred… They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity…
The Gadar [Revolution] Party blamed British influence for America’s negative attitude toward Indian immigration… [Link]These feelings of outrage were transferred to hatred against the British, for they felt they if they controlled their own country, this sort of abuse would not have happened… They had to strike at the British because they were responsible for the way Indians were being treated in America. [Link]
The catalyst in their political awakening was the ill-fated voyage of the S.S. Komagata Maru, a Japanese vessel that was bringing would-be Indian migrants to the Americas…. the Komagata Maru was turned back repeatedly: by the Canadians first, then by the Americans; the ship returned to Calcutta. Some people died on the way; on docking at Calcutta, the passengers were shot at by British troops… [Link]
We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
Gadar… describes what the movement hoped to achieve: the overthrow of British rule and the establishment of India’s independence. [The Gadar Party] was founded in the early decades of this century by expatriate Punjabis… its bases of operations were in San Francisco and the San Joaquin Valley…… the Gadar leaders found kinship, especially in Irish revolutionary brotherhood… it was the Irish who defended and supported the Gadarites in California during the difficult days of the San Francisco conspiracy trial in 1917-18… [Link]
The immigrant Irish laborers… were waging their own struggle against the British at the time of Gadar movement, and the members of the Irish community in California became Gadar’s close allies. The Gadar party, in turn, printed tracts in favor of Irish independence. [Link]
We… do… solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved…
Indian activists and their American supporters are dismayed to discover that President Woodrow Wilson’s call for colonies to have self-determination did not include countries such as India. [Link]
And for the support of this Declaration… we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
Sarabha and his fellow Gadar Party members were loyalist Indians who struggled for their motherland in far-off America; in the end, many of them paid the ultimate price: they were executed by the British Raj for ‘sedition’…
In 1913, Kartar Singh Sarabha was sent to study at the University of California, Berkeley… and soon joined the Gadar Party. In 1915, Sarabha and a number of others returned to India… to organise soldiers to mutiny against the British during the First World War… betrayals by others in their ranks led to their capture by the British…
Kartar Singh Sarabha and Vishnu Ganesh Pingle, another Berkeley student, were among the seven hanged at the Lahore Central Jail on November 16, 1915… it inspired Bhagat Singh, who became the most famous symbol of fiery Indian resistance to colonialism. [Link]
The U.S. allied with the Brits against Indian independence even as millions of Indians fought for the Allies in Europe:
With 2.5 million Indian soldiers on the side of the Allies, Indian troops helped the Allies secure ground in Africa and the Middle East, and subsequently played a role on the assault on the Axis in the European and Pacific theatres. By almost any measure - the number of casualties, the number of active soldiers, the number of medals awarded - India’s role in the Second World War was tremendous. [Link]
But then the Gadar Party and Subhash Chandra Bose played footsie with the Germans under the ‘enemy of my enemy’ theory, to evict the British (photos, more photos).
Amid all the fickle and questionable alliances of history, let’s remember what our parallel stories had in common, in terms of civil rights:
As Mahatma Gandhi assumes the leadership of the freedom struggle in India, American groups like Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) start speaking out against British rule in India… the concept of nonviolent resistance was not simply imported into America from India in the 1920s. America has had a ‘distinctive tradition of nonviolence’ dating back to colonial times, and played a significant role in the early nonviolent resistance, Quakers point out… Gandhi was influenced by American thinkers and activists… Gandhi also read Henry David Thoreau’s classic On Civil Disobedience. It left a ‘deep impression’ on him…1923: … black Americans look up to Gandhi in significant numbers. The Chicago Defender, one of the largest and most influential black newspapers in the United States, calls Gandhi the ‘greatest man in the world today…’ [The Defender] asks, in a 1932 editorial, ‘Will a Gandhi Arise?’ and notes that ‘what we need in America is a Gandhi who will fight for the cause of the oppressed in this country…’ [Link]
And democratic institutions:
Gadar support financed the funding of India’s first English-language nationalist newspaper, The Hindustan Times… The title of a later Gadar newspaper, The United States of India… suggests an American model of democracy… [Link]With more than 655 million registered voters in 2004, India has often been called “the world’s largest democracy”. [Link]
We know what happened next: of all the British settlements, the U.S. became the tail that wagged the dog, the colony that roared. Dalip Singh Saund and, much later, Bobby Jindal were elected to Congress. The civil rights movement and the 1965 immigration law opened the door to the modern era of desi Americans.
And so on this Fourth of July, I offer my poor almanack for a union of the colonies:
To this too I pledge allegiance.
Update: The Tories hiss
Wow, the comments are interesting. I thought I penned a historical essay. Turns out I actually wrote a litmus test for ethnic identity.
I told you a story about the original Indian-Americans. These farmers were invited over to build the railroads. Then they were violated in every way: beaten up, stripped of their citizenship, prevented by law from marrying whom they wanted, robbed of the farmland they had bought with their hard-earned money. Against all odds, these poorly-educated farmers persevered in their adopted land. They found a journalist to write about their plight. They found a friendly congressman to win back their citizenship and land. They got FDR to call for an end to ‘statutory discrimination against the Indians.’ They got the immigration quotas lifted. Some raised money and fought for independence for their country of origin.
There’s no better day to tell their story than the Fourth of July because their story is America: fleeing British persecution, coming over for political freedom and economic opportunity, slogging it out until they had assimilated, married here, had children here, become citizens, owned businesses, built homes, made this land their own. It is a story not widely known. There’s no better day to tell their story precisely because to tell it on the Fourth of July honors their Americanness, because to tell it on the 15th of August would mock them as forever foreign.
Theirs is a damn compelling story. I’m talkin’ novels, movies, a miniseries. And in the face of that story, how did some readers react? With outrage. Outrage that I’m telling this story on the day of America’s official tailgate party. A strange belief that despite 299 words about the totems of American independence (the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, ‘America the Beautiful,’ the Betsy Ross flag, a colonial unity symbol used by Benjamin Franklin and Paul Revere, the Empire State Building in red, white and blue, Fourth of July fireworks) and 1,529 words (88% of the post) about the history of the first Indian-Americans, that this post is about America-bashing.
At first this puzzled me. Did they actually read the post? Why didn’t they grasp the essential drama of the story? Why wouldn’t they empathize with all that their predecessors had been through? Did they somehow think you could tell the Indian-American story without mentioning America?
Finally I understood. Many of the angry readers identify far more strongly as American than Indian. Some even say so outright in the comments: ‘But what does that have to do with us?’ They have little emotional connection to their forebears. To them, they’re not their predecessors at all — and their shabby treatment, just an inconvenient wrinkle of history that’s too gauche to press on Independence Day.
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth! Ooooh, the delicious irony. Facts are inconvenient, history’s a bitch. The angry reader is in the U.S. only because of our predecessors’ struggle. The angry reader’s parents could afford to come over only because of their forebears’ fight for independence. The angry reader now so deeply identifies as American that he reflexively scans a post honoring the first Indian-Americans as ‘America-bashing.’
You know what that means, don’t you? It means the pioneers won. It means our antecedents did exactly what they set out to do: reshape this land’s laws and attitudes so Indian-Americans could grow up and feel exactly like those whose parents immigrated here earlier. And what’s the angry reader’s response to their hard-fought victory?
To deny our predecessors’ sacrifice. To disrespect the very people who got him into the U.S. in the first place. On the frickin’ Fourth of July.
It’s the very definition of ingratitude.
