In 1910, reports from Collier’s and The Survey printed photographs of these men, dressed in suits and turbans, a throng standing along the San Francisco waterfront, crowded on transpacific liners. A few years earlier, The Pacific Monthly published a series of photographs of the early migrants posing by the lumber mills and train depots of British Columbia, or in a huddle at the customs detention shed. The “Hindu” (or “Hindoo,” or occasionally “Hindo”) was the most favored term to describe these men -- no doubt a convenient way to draw a distinction from Native Americans -- never mind that the majority of these migrants were actually Sikh. But while the pictures might have appealed to a reader’s curiosity for the exotic, the language of these articles couched America’s “Hindu” in no uncertain terms. The Hindus were a problem -- an invasion and threat, an undifferentiated mass posed to steal American jobs. “[A] few years ago a turban would have attracted a crowd,” the Collier’s reported, “they have [now] become an element to be reckoned with in the labor situation of California.”
One article from this first decade stands out. In 1909, the Los Angeles-based Out West published an essay by Saint Nihal Singh, a journalist whose name seems to pop up everywhere in our archive. Singh was a frequent contributor to the Calcutta-based Modern Review (writing on American industry, Indian Students in America, as well as the African American struggle for equality). His life is still something of a mystery; one source claims St. Nihal Singh’s real name was in fact Lai Singh, but he called himself “Saint” in order to impress the American public.
“Of all immigrants who drift to North America,” he wrote, “none surpasses the Hindu in picturesqueness."In his article “The Picturesque Immigrant from India’s Coral Strand,” Singh promised to describe exactly “who” this new immigrant was, and “why he comes to America.” But side-stepping the question of labor, Singh’s article began with a focus on the the new immigrants’ swag. “Of all immigrants who drift to North America,” he wrote, “none surpasses the Hindu in picturesqueness. [...] Yards upon yards of cotton, calico or silk are swatched about the head of one, forming a turban [...] as variable as the styles of American women’s pompadours.” And it wasn’t just the turban that marked the Hindu, Singh noted; others wore a “scarlet Turkish Fez,” “an ordinary cap or hat,” while others went “bare-headed.”
Over the course of the thirteen-page spread, Singh described these “specimens of the Hindoo genus homo” (a term that seems almost satirical), distinguishing laborers from merchants, wealthy travelers from missionaries through clothes, hair, skin color, and build. In a telling passage, Singh draws from the racial typologies of the day: “All the Hindoos who come to America have hair varying in hue from brownish-black to purplish or an intense raven-black. [....] A number of the Hindoo immigrants have kinky hair like a negro’s wool.” And later, he writes, “The hide of the Hindoo varies from the dull, pale, sallow-brown of a Mexican to the extreme black of an African.”
It’s hard to make sense of Singh’s intent, more than a century after the essay was published. Singh’s emphasis on sartorial difference breaks down the image of the undifferentiated “tide of turbans,” which white labor groups and the Asiatic Exclusion League were actively spreading.
His essay also questioned the claims to Aryan “whiteness” used by several South Asian migrants to distinguish themselves from the “Asiatic” in petitions for American citizenship. Singh writes, “the sun-browned, sometime kinsmen of the American Anglo-Saxons were refused their papers because they were too much darkened by the sun and simoon of the tropics to pass for ‘white,’ and they were not negroes.” A loaded term he uses: “to pass.”
On one hand, the images in the article placed the “Hindoo” into a curio-cabinet of exotic types. On the other hand, the text clearly describes the violence meted against South Asian migrants up and down the Pacific coast. And that might be our main take-away -- Singh captured the interesting collision of exotic and anti-Asiatic that made up the discourse surrounding the South Asian in the first decade of 20th century America.
(Thanks to Paul Englesberg for contributing the St. Nihal Singh article to the collection)
Manan Desai is an Assistant Professor of English at Syracuse University and on the Board of Directors of the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA)
