Did you know that the British Empire’s overthrow from India had deep roots in Southern California? Or that South Asia’s first congressman lived in Pasadena, representing the Imperial Valley? Or that the outdoor Indian jungle scenes in the 1942 Jungle Book were filmed on a lake in Ventura, or that a series of Indian restaurants in West Pico were burnt down during the 1992 Los Angeles riots? ?
That certainly wasn’t the case. I was born and raised in Los Angeles to Bangladeshi parents who immigrated to Los Angeles in the first wave of immigration after the 1965 Immigration Act. This law enabled an influx of South Asians who were allowed to immigrate to the United States. This is a change from previous immigration regulations, where only 100 immigrants per country were allowed into the country. My father came to Los Angeles in 1969 with a group of other young Bengali men from his village. They arrived not far from present-day Little Bangladesh to a house full of Bengali men who took turns sleeping between their service jobs and classes. Ten years later, after an arranged marriage, my mother came to Los Angeles, where my parents made their home for 50 years.
I love Los Angeles, and I love it in a way that only someone who was born and raised here can. It is a city of contradictions and a city of nomads. I loved the community I grew up in, the variety of imagination, and the Santa Ana breeze. I tried to leave many times, but was pulled back again and again. As a South Asian American living in Los Angeles, I grew up feeling like an outsider. I never saw my left-leaning politics driven by my lived experience in a brown female body reflected in the mainstream media around me. But it was just a pretense. There were a lot of people like me in Los Angeles, and our stories just got marginalized.
In fact, Los Angeles County is home to one of the largest South Asian populations in the country, with more than 150,000 people of Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Sri Lankan and Nepali descent. Nearly 500,000 South Asians live in Southern California’s surrounding counties, and the number is rapidly increasing. This area is home to Little India and Little Bangladesh, and Lancaster is also known as Sri Lanka Star due to its large Sri Lankan population.
As my activist work blossomed, I began digging into the radical history of the Asian American movement. I was inspired by learning about Bay Area activist Yuri Kochiyama and the efforts of Japanese youth in the 1970s to commemorate the Manzanar concentration camp so that history is not forgotten. As someone who has been closely involved in South Asian civic engagement across the country, I was interested in where the history of South Asian American activism lies. I wanted proof that I came from a community that was creating inspirational change here in California.
When I started digging into the archives, I turned to other South Asian Americans, such as the South Asian American Digital Archives, the folks at Berkeley’s South Asian Radical History Walking Tour, and Vivek Bold, who produced the documentary “Bengal Harem.” We researched and collaborated with archivists. I learned about the Ghadar Party. The Ghadar Party is a Berkeley-based radical movement that began in 1912 to overthrow the British government from India. I learned that in the 1950s, the first South Asian American congressman was elected to represent Southern California, and that the movement to give South Asians the right to vote began in the office building where Legal Live is now located. The first filmmakers of the multi-billion dollar Bollywood film industry found their education in the Los Angeles film industry. I learned that every time there is a racial riot in California, there are likely South Asian Americans marching in solidarity behind it.
This is what led me to create the Los Angeles South Asian American Radical History Map. It is hoped that the map will serve as a record of that very moment. In this pilot project, interested amateur historians will travel to Los Angeles and across time to the various moments that have created a legacy of South Asian American local history. As a pilot project, the map currently tracks 15 locations where significant moments occurred. We hope this map will evolve to more than 100 locations, documenting and audiovisualizing Southern California’s many radical moments. The final project will be an interactive map where you can hear descriptions of each location during your driving tour.
explore the map
The story currently includes:
Ghadar Party:
The Ghadar Party was a revolutionary movement founded in California by Punjabi workers and Bengali intellectuals to defeat British colonial forces in India. Founded in 1912, the party had branches throughout the West Coast, with San Francisco as its main base. Members communicated with each other through weekly newsletters mailed around the world. Here in Los Angeles, an attempt to overthrow Britain (the so-called Hindu-German conspiracy) failed in 1915 when the Ghadars loaded arms and propaganda materials on the SS Maverick at San Pedro Harbor and shipped them to India. Kala Bagai, a prominent local Ghadar Party member, moved to Los Angeles’ Koreatown in the 1940s, where she became known as Mother India for her ability to unite the community.
Citizen participation:
Two other prominent South Asian Americans also established themselves in Southern California. Shortly after landing in the United States, a Punjabi man named Bhagat Singh Shinde was drafted into the U.S. Army in World War II, and while serving in the U.S. Army, he was granted U.S. citizenship in 1918, but the Naturalization Office quickly stripped it away. “Hindu”. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Shinde argued that Indians were white and deserved citizenship, but the justices ruled that Indians were not “according to the common definition of white people.” did. It will take decades for this landmark case to be overturned. Dalip Singh Sound, a Punjabi mathematician, moved to the Imperial Valley after graduating from university to work on a cabbage farm. He became involved in local politics as a prominent Toastmaster and eventually founded the American Indian Association in 1942. The organization was instrumental in passing the Ruth Sellers Act, which granted citizenship to all South Asian Americans. His political involvement led to him becoming the first Asian American elected to Congress.
resistance:
The growth of the South Asian American population in Southern California was closely related to growing xenophobic sentiment throughout the region. During the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings sparked by the Rodney King assault verdict, hundreds of Korean businesses were targeted due to racial tensions. A cluster of Indian stores in the Pico Robertson area was also targeted, and four of them were burnt down. Los Angeles is also a place where South Asians have been unjustly targeted across the region for unprovoked hate crimes, from attacks on turbaned bus drivers to biased treatment by police officers. In each of these moments, we see a narrative of resistance emerge. Communities have organized to voice these issues and have started all sorts of organizations and initiatives over the years. Artesia’s Little India has been a hub for many organizing efforts, from solidarity protests to voter registration drives to fights for exploited workers. In 2011, South Asian Network was involved in helping 22 employees at a local South Asian restaurant receive $95,000 in unpaid wages.
These are just a few of the South Asian American stories woven into the soul of Los Angeles, and there are many more yet to be discovered on this map. These 15 moments are just the beginning of a much richer, interactive map you’ll have access to during your driving tour of Southern California. Its history runs far deeper and deeper than I ever knew.
After 9/11, when I began my career encouraging South Asian Americans to vote and build political power in America as South Asians and Muslims, I realized that our contributions were important to American society. I realized that our community could only engage in civic engagement if we could convince them that it was important to them. Foundations and structures beyond the American Dream. Coming together to protect ourselves from the post-9/11 backlash will only take us far. Learning and sharing South Asian American history has helped people feel grounded and that their citizenship here is built on a legacy of civic engagement. Thanks to Dalip Singh Sound’s campaign that helped South Asians gain the right to vote, we now have a South Asian American vice president. Being able to share stories of the 1907 Bellingham Race Riots and the burning of South Asian businesses during the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising made it easier to organize communities around Black Lives Matter in 2020. I did. By educating people about the Ghadar Party’s efforts to decolonize India in 1912, the British Empire is empowering this generation of South Asian Americans to fight for social justice now.
Knowing that I have a history as a South Asian American and Muslim woman in the city where I was born feels grounding. May this map also help you ground yourself in the radical South Asian American narrative.
