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’ Fatima Shaik, The Margins’ Naeem Mohaemen, CNN.com’s Moni Basu, Hyphen Magazine‘s S. Nadia Hussain, the New York Daily News‘ Erica Pearson, and the New York Times‘ Sam Roberts.

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December, 2013
The Journal of American History

Review: Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America
by Nico Slate

The story of South Asian migration to the United States is normally told in two parts. First, a few thousand Indians, mostly Punjabi Sikhs, arrive on the West Coast in the first decades of the twentieth century. They tend farms, mill lum- ber, and build railroads. After World War I, new immigration laws cut off migration from India. Not until 1965, when immigration reform opens the door to professionals, does a new generation of South Asians arrive in the United States. Doc- tors and engineers become the public face of an educated, affluent Indian-American community, now heralded as a model minority. Continue reading…

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September 12, 2013
The Migrationist

Review: Bengali Harlem by Vivek Bald
by Calynn Dowler

Vivek Bald’s Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America is a highly detailed and beautifully written account of the lives of South Asian immigrants who arrived in the United States between the 1890s and 1940s. In piecing together the stories of this early immigrant group, Bald draws on census records, marriage licenses, ships’ logs, personal memoirs, newspaper clippings, and interviews with the migrants’ spouses and descendents. Continue reading…

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May 31, 2013
SAMAR Magazine

Uncovering Multiracial South Asian America: A Review of Vivek Bald’s Bengali Harlem
by Seema Sohi

Vivek Bald’s book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America challenges a long-standing assumption in South Asian American historiography: namely, that very few South Asian laborers entered the country between the passage of the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone Act and the “reopening” of the nation’s borders with the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. While the little-known histories of South Asian working-class migrants who continued to enter the country in the shadow of America’s restricitve immigration laws have essentially been lost to South Aisan American history, Bald’s work shows that there has been an unbroken stream of South Asian migration to the United States that continued throughout the exclusion era. Continue reading…

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June 9, 2013
Live Mint

Bengali men, American jazz
by Shamik Bag

The middle-aged men among the villagers in Babnan, a rural hamlet in West Bengal’s Hooghly district, still tittle-tattle about the time when there was a “mem” in their midst. She spoke Spanish, wore gowns and would scream “cover, cover” whenever flies hovered over the food. In a Muslim-majority village, the memsahib, locally called Mrs Politon, had appeared unannounced one day in 1931—wife of the US-returned Niyamul Haque Mondal, a Muslim who had followed his father to the distant land as a chikan peddler. Continue reading…

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May 31, 2013
New York Times – India Ink Blog

A Conversation With: Author and Filmmaker Vivek Bald
by Jennifer Chowdhury

The filmmaker and author Vivek 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… In an e-mail interview with India Ink, Mr. Bald discussed his research and his plans for a documentary related to his book. Continue reading…

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April 28, 2013
Wall Street Journal – India Real Time

The Bengali Villagers Who Migrated to America
by Atish Patel

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a wave of mostly illiterate Muslim men from Bengali villages arrived in the U.S., settling in neighborhoods like Tremé in New Orleans and Harlem in New York. Many formed multi-ethnic families after marrying African American, Puerto Rican and Creole women. Their story has remained largely untold until now.. Continue reading…

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April 27, 2013
Taj Mahal Foxtrot Blog

The Indian Who Discovered Ella
by Naresh Fernandes

“Boss, this girl has something,” drummer Chick Webb’s male singer told him. “You must hear her.” Webb couldn’t see the need for that. Though he cut one of the strangest sights in jazz – a drummer bent over by spinal tuberculosis, with partially paralysed legs – Webb was one of the earliest legends of swing. Continue reading…

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April 12, 2013
Firstpost

My Granddad, the Bengali Peddler: An African-American Writer Finds Her Roots
by Sandip Roy

In 1896, almost a century before Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala caused a stir by daring to show a romance between a black man and an Indian woman in the American South, a Muslim Bengali peddler from Hooghly married a black Catholic woman from New Orleans and settled down in that city. Continue reading…

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March 2, 2013
In These Times

Black and Bengali
by Fatima Shaik

The federal census taker comes every 10 years and, for most people in the United States, this has little consequence. But not where I lived, in New Orleans, just outside the historic district of Tremé. Continue reading…

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February 20, 2013
The Margins – Asian American Writers’ Workshop

The Skin I’m In
by Naeem Mohaiemen

I have recently been thinking about the blurred race politics of early Twentieth Century activist Taraknath Das. Das was an anti-colonial Bengali organizer in British India, eventually fleeing arrest by British authorities by immigrating to America. Continue reading…

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February 15, 2013
CNN.com’s InAmerica

Bengali Harlem: Author documents a lost history of immigration in America
by Moni Basu

(CNN) – In the next few weeks, Fatima Shaik, an African-American, Christian woman, will travel “home” from New York to Kolkata, India.

It will be a journey steeped in a history that has remained unknown until the publication last month of a revelatory book by Vivek Bald. And it will be a journey of contemplation as Shaik, 60, meets for the first time ancestors with whom she has little in common. Continue reading…

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January 30, 2013
Hyphen Magazine Blog

Lost and Found: The Legacy of the Bangladeshi Sons of New York
by S. Nadia Hussain

Ibrahim Chowdry is the reason I am an American. He was my grandmother’s first cousin, and he sponsored my family to come to the United States from Bangladesh. He was also the first documented Bangladeshi man to settle in New York City, arriving in the 1920s. This was more than half a century before South Asians immigrated to the US en masse in the 1980s. Continue reading…

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January 17, 2013
New York Daily News

MIT Scholar uncovers forgotten history of South Asian immigrants’ New York City arrival
by Erica Pearson

Virtually all Asian immigration to the U.S. was banned when Aladdin Ullah’s father — who left East Bengal to work on a British steamer — jumped ship in the 1920s and settled in New York.

Like hundreds of other Muslim sailors at the time, he found a home in Harlem — marrying a Puerto Rican woman and opening one of the city’s first Indian restaurants. He stayed there until his death in 1983. Continue reading…

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December 29, 2012
New York Times

Where Ethnicity Was Fluid
by Sam Roberts

IN “Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America” (Harvard University Press, $35), Vivek Bald, who teaches writing and digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has produced an engaging account of a largely untold wave of immigration: Muslims from British India who arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Continue reading…

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