The Documentary: “In Search of Bengali Harlem”
Preview of In Search of Bengali Harlem, a documentary feature film currently in production, with start-up support from the Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media and…
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Pakistan League Banquet, NYC 1952
In October 1952, The Pakistan League of America, an organization whose membership consisted predominantly of former seamen from East Bengal, along with their African American and…
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The Bengali Lower East Side
In November 2013, I spoke to Amina Ali Cymbala, whose father Mohamed Ali, was one of a group of Bengali ex-seamen who settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and married…
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Searching for a Name
A guest post from Fatima Shaik, a New Orleans writer whose grandfather Shaik Mohamed Musa was one of the group of “Oriental goods” traders who came from Hooghly, West Bengal…
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I Measure Out Sadness in Coffee Spoons
A guest post from S. Nadia Hussain, about the recent loss of her great uncle, Masud Chowdhury, one of the early members of New York’s Bengali community, who came to the city…
The Book: Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America
Now Available – Place Your Order Today: Indiebound | Amazon | Facebook | Twitter In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim…
Aladdin Ullah’s “Dishwasher Dreams”
DONATE to the “Dishwasher Dreams” production fund at Fractured Atlas In his one-man show “Dishwasher Dreams,” actor and writer Aladdin Ullah draws on the story of…
New York
At the turn of the 20th century, news reports recorded a small, transient population of East Indian maritime workers living in the sailors’ boardinghouse district on…
New Orleans
Between the 1880s and 1910s, small groups of Indian Muslim peddlers made regular trips from Calcutta to the port of New York. The men were from…
Detroit
During World War I and for at least two decades afterward, hundreds of Indian Muslim maritime workers made their way to Detroit and Dearborn, Michigan after…
Baltimore
Some of the earliest news reports of Indian “lascar” seamen in the U.S. date back to the turn of the twentieth century in the port of…
The Book: Recent Articles and Reviews
A sampling of recent articles about the book Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, from Firstpost ‘s Sandip Roy, In These Times’…
About
This website is part of an ongoing project by filmmaker and scholar Vivek Bald using different media – web, print, and video – to document the…