Courtesy of Rachel Rosenbloom Vivek Bald.The filmmaker and author Vivek Bald’s book “Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America†created a buzz within the South Asian-American community when it was released in November. Mr. Bald documents the histories of seldom-acknowledged groups of early South Asian migrants to the United States, like Muslim silk and cotton traders from West Bengal in the 1880s and Indian sailors who deserted British steamships in the early 20th century. They settled in New Orleans, Harlem in New York and New Jersey and formed strong community bonds with African-American and Hispanic communities.
In an e-mail interview with India Ink, Mr. Bald discussed his research and his plans for a documentary related to his book.
What prompted your research for this book?
This project grew from the story of just one person: Habib Ullah, who was an ex-seaman from Noakhali in present-day Bangladesh and the father of the East Harlem actor, comedian and playwright Alaudin Ullah. Alaudin and I met back in the 1990s, when I was working independently on my documentary films and he was doing stand-up comedy. Alaudin started telling me his father’s story and I was completely amazed.
Habib had come to New York in the 1920s, lived for a while on the Lower East Side, then settled in East Harlem in the late 1930s. In Harlem, he married a Puerto Rican woman who was also a recent immigrant to New York, and they had two children (Alaudin’s older half siblings).  Habib worked as a dishwasher and line cook in restaurants all over the city, opened his own restaurant in Midtown for a short while in the 1940s, and lived almost all of his adult life, more than 40 years, in Spanish Harlem.
The reason this was such a remarkable story was the fact that for most of this time, the U.S. had put in place very severe anti-Asian immigration laws that kept almost all people from the subcontinent from even setting foot in the United States. South Asian-American history had a 40 to 50-year gap that stretched from the time these laws were put in place in 1917 until the moment South Asian immigration was opened back up again (mostly to professionals) in 1965. But Habib Ullah had entered the U.S. and lived out most of his life here during this period.
Alaudin’s father was in fact part of a much larger history of South Asian Muslim men, predominantly from East Bengal but also from Punjab and the Northwest Frontier, who labored under indenture-like conditions on British steamships and who began jumping ship in U.S. ports in significant numbers during World War I in order to access factory and restaurant jobs onshore.
Courtesy of Laily Chowdry A banquet held in New York City in 1952 by the Pakistan League of America, an organization that was dominated by ex-seamen from East Bengal, which was then part of Pakistan. How did the Bengali Muslims you uncovered view themselves and their interracial families?
This is a difficult question to answer, since most of the Bengali Muslim immigrants who I write about in the book are long deceased. What I had to make sense of were archival documents and in just a handful of cases, interviews with the children of these migrants, who are now in their 60s and 70s.
I was able to determine that the marriages, like any sampling of marriages you might take, were really varied in their dynamics. There were some that only lasted a couple of years and may have been just for convenience. There were others that seem to have begun as marriages of convenience but grew into deep and long-lasting relationships. There were others that began with husband and wife getting to know each other through daily interactions in their neighborhoods or apartment buildings, falling in love, getting married, etc. And there is evidence that some of the men maintained families both in the U.S. and in their home villages on the subcontinent.
But one thing that was clear was the role that U.S. women of color played in anchoring and maintaining both the peddler and maritime networks. As boarding housekeepers, as wives, as allies, as people with local networks in cities like New Orleans, New York and Detroit, Creole, African-American, and Puerto Rican women provided the knowledge and labor that gave South Asian peddler and maritime networks stability. It was because of them that so many South Asian men were able to cycle in and out of the United States in this era, to find work and to build lives.
Can you please explain the disconnect between the early South Asian immigrants and the communities that exist today?
One thing that was clear to me when I first moved to New York City in the late 1980s was the stark class division in the South Asian communities here. Part of the community had come to the U.S. in the wake of the 1965 Immigration Act. They were beneficiaries of that act’s preferences for certain categories of immigrants â€" engineers, doctors and other professionals â€" and by the late 1980s they were already quite settled and prosperous.
But there were also seemingly newer South Asian communities forming in the late ’80s and early ’90s â€" predominantly young men from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Punjab in India who were from less-privileged backgrounds and who were entering into the city’s service economy as cab drivers, restaurant workers, construction workers. It was the more prosperous sector of South Asians, the post-1965 professionals, who had the means to represent the community as a whole, so it was their image that came to dominate the image of South Asian-Americans.
The stories of more recent working-class immigrants were obscured by that image. So my first film, “Taxi-vala,†was an attempt to start to redress that in some small way â€" to broaden the picture of South Asian America in a way that included and accounted for the experiences of working-class immigrants.
Courtesy of Harvard University Press and Habib Ullah, Jr. The cover of the book, “Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America.â€â€œBengali Harlem†in a sense continues that project, but now historically. The book looks back all the way to the 1880s in order to challenge the idea that working-class South Asian Muslims are “recent immigrants†â€" that they have a long, continuous history in the United States; they have been part of the daily life of cities like New York, New Orleans and Detroit for over 100 years. This is what the archival research clearly shows. By comparison, the post-’65 professionals are the relative newcomers.
With the release of your book, what kind of an impact are you seeing within today’s South Asian-American community?
In just the short time that the book has been out, it has been embraced really widely. I’ve been hearing from academics, immigration activists, Bangladeshi-American high school and college students, older Bangladeshi-Americans who were often supported and sponsored by the earlier immigrants about whom I write and from the descendants of Bengali-African American and Bengali-Puerto Rican intermarriages in New Orleans, New York and Detroit.
What is most exciting, though, is just how many people are coming forward with their own family stories, including descendants of some of the earliest migrants. So, as an extension of the book, I have been building out an online oral history project that currently resides at bengaliharlem.com, where the children and descendants of South Asian peddlers and ex-seamen will be adding their own posts and interviews, and family photographs.
Courtesy of Habib Ullah, Jr. Habib Ullah, Sr., one of the earliest Bengali ex-seamen to settle in East Harlem.You are working on a documentary. How will it be different from the book?
The documentary will be more personal in its focus. At its core will be Alaudin Ullah and his search to find out more about his father. Alaudin grew up in Spanish Harlem in the 1970s at a time when the interracial community of Bengali Muslim men and Puerto Rican and African American women that had reached its height in the 1940s and ’50s was starting to dissipate and disappear.
At the same time, Alaudin’s search will be intertwined with my own search for answers about the lost history of which Habib Ullah was a part. In these sections of the film, I’ll draw on some of the research that went into the book, and move outward in widening circles to interview some of the children of other Bengali ex-seamen who settled in the Bronx, Staten Island, New Jersey and as far away as Detroit.
Visually, the film will explore the cityscape of Harlem and New York City in the 1930s-50s, and it will have a soundtrack by the jazz musician and composer Vijay Iyer. So the documentary will work on different levels â€" it will be a film about Alaudin’s family, about Harlem and New York City, and about a lost history of South Asian Muslims in America that extends across many other families and cities.
(This interview has been edited and condensed.)
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