Kala Bagai | |
|---|---|
 1915 arrival in San Francisco, as reported by newspapers | |
| Born | April 15, 1893 |
| Died | October 4, 1983 (aged 90) |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Known for | Immigrant activism |
| Spouses |
|
Kala Bagai (later Kala Bagai Chandra; 1893-1983) [1] [2] was a South Asian American immigrant and community activist. [3] The Smithsonian described her as "a life-long advocate for immigrants and a mother figure among South Asian communities in California." [4]
Kala was born into a Sikh family in Amritsar in British India on April 15, 1893, [5] [6] [7] the daughter of Narain Singh and Kani Dhingra. [8]
She married Vaishno Das Bagai, and moved to Peshawar to live with him. They had three sons, Brij, Madan, and Ram. [5]
Vaishno Das Bagai was involved with the anti-colonial Ghadar Party. [4] After the death of his parents, he hoped to move to the United States with his family to join other Ghadar activists, leaving what he described as an enslaved country. [5]
When Kala Bagai was 22, she, Vaishno and their sons moved to the United States, arriving in San Francisco in September 1915. [2] [9]
Upon arrival, the Bagais spent a few days in detention at Angel Island. They were questioned about why they immigrated, but officials became less suspicious after seeing that the Bagais had brought all their savings with them. [5] [7] [10]
Kala Bagai was one of very few South Asian women in the United States, and her family was among the few able to immigrate together to the United States. [1] [11] [12]
In San Francisco, according to granddaughter Rani Bagai, "She delighted in seeing a city newly rebuilt from earthquake ruins, touring the marvels of the Panama-Pacific Exposition, and walking on a sandy beach, things she’d never experienced in India." [13] [14]
Kala Bagai's arrival in San Francisco was noted in newspapers like the San Francisco Call-Post and the Washington Post, which remarked on her nose ring. [5] [14] [15] [16] [17]
Vaishno Das Bagai had learned English in school in India, but Kala had yet to learn the language. [7] She learned English after arrival, with the support of a German family who helped look after her children, giving her time to study. [4] She also found ways to support the Indian independence movement. [18]
Writes Rani Bagai, "And from then on, they were kind of pioneers, because there really were very few Indians there around to help them, or to help them…acclimate…[Vaishno Das Bagai] dressed in a Western style with suits. My grandmother still wore a sari, though. She was very traditional, and she didn't eat meat, so that was kind of hard for her to adjust to, because, you know, so meat-centric, their diet then…But she managed…eating fruits and vegetables, and got by, and so they embarked on this adventure in San Francisco." [7]
In her 1982 oral history interview, Kala Bagai described how she and her husband attempted to move from San Francisco to Berkeley, California, where racist neighbors prevented them from entering their newly purchased home. [5] [10] [19]
Writes historian Erika Lee, "The family achieved a dream when they bought their first home in the city of Berkeley. But when they pulled up to their new neighborhood on moving day, they found that the neighbors had locked up the house to prevent them from moving in. 'All of our luggage and everything was loaded on the trucks,' recounted Kala Bagai. 'I told Mr. Bagai I don’t want to live in this neighborhood. I don’t want to live in this house, because they might hurt my children, and I don’t want it. He agreed. We paid for the house and they locked the doors? No!'" [20]
They made their lives in San Francisco, where over the years, Vaishno ran several stores. [7] One was an import store called "Bagai's Bazaar," [5] [9] [21] which sold things like curios and handmade goods from India, embroideries from China, and other goods from Asia. [7] Another was a general store that sold items like candy, trinkets, soap, and supplies; the Bagais lived in an apartment right above. [7]
Vaishno Das Bagai became a naturalized United States citizen in 1921, [13] but his citizenship was revoked in the wake of the 1923 Bhagat Singh Thind decision. [4] [22] This forced the family to sell their property, including their store, and left them stateless people unable to get a U.S. passport. [7]
According to Rani Bagai, "that meant that now he could not travel to India unless it was back under an Indian passport under the crown, the British Crown…But there were a lot worse implications…he now could not own a business. So I believe it had to be transferred to a friend or someone who was not Indian. So there were a lot of problems then with that. It was bad enough trying to run it on his own, and the discrimination and the bias, but now having to run it through a second party and, you know, the trust you put into someone to manage the money and give you the money that's owed to you…there were…issues there where he was swindled or lost money and he felt, I think, quite a bit of despair and frustration towards the end. No matter what he did…he can't go home to India. They would pursue him, they would probably arrest him if he came back there because of the work he did with the Ghadar party in San Francisco. He couldn't make a go of things the way he dreamed of in San Francisco, for his family and, you know, the idea of a business and all that were kind of vanishing. So it was a very…depressing, frustrating time for him." [7]
Vaishno Das Bagai committed suicide in 1928. [10] [23] [24] In his suicide note, he wrote "I do not choose to live the life of an interned person: yes, I am in a free country and can move about where and when I wish inside the country. Is life worth living in a gilded cage? Obstacles this way, blockades that way, and the bridges burnt behind." [25] [26]
Kala Bagai, now a widow, raised her three children without the benefit of United States citizenship. [9] She was proud to be able to eventually send all three of her sons to college, to Stanford, UC Berkeley, and USC. [7]
She finally received her United States citizenship in 1950, after the passage of the Luce-Celler Act of 1946. [5] [27]
Kala Bagai remarried in 1934, to Mahesh Chandra, another Ghadar activist and an old family friend. [2] [10] [28]
They moved to Southern California in the late 1940s,[ citation needed ] where she built a new life for herself. [29] [30] Granddaughter Rani Bagai described her new life: "She flouted her cultural norms by marrying again, to another Indian activist and a graduate of UC Berkeley, Mahesh Chandra. She reinvented herself, attending night school, wearing Western dresses, and even learning tennis. She had many close American friends and never went on a social visit without a gift box of See’s candy." [13]
By the 1950s, Kala Bagai had become an activist and community-builder in the early Indian and Pakistani immigrant community. She organized with other South Asian immigrant and American women, planned arts events, raised funds for post-Partition refugees, welcomed newcomers to her home, and built connections. [30] [31]
According to Rani Bagai: [13]
"it seemed to be my grandmother’s personal mission to create a welcoming community to other immigrants arriving in this land, where she herself was once a stranger, and to show the kind of generosity of spirit to them that had been denied to her and her family. Working with both American and South Asian immigrant women like herself, she went on in the 1950s and 1960s to become an active community builder in Southern California, hosting Indian American cultural events, receptions, and benefits at community halls, theaters, and homes. She built bridges wherever she could between her adopted American culture and the great diversity of Indian culture."
South Asian immigrant community members would sometimes refer to her as "Jhaiji" or "Mother India." [6] [31]
Kala Bagai died in Los Angeles on October 4, 1983, at age 90. [6] [8] [31] [32]
Kala Bagai's photos, letters, and oral history audio are archived by the South Asian American Digital Archive. [4] [33] Her story has become a subject of increasing interest to Asian American and other historians after her death. [4] [20] [34] [35] [36]
The city of Berkeley, California named a downtown street after Kala Bagai in 2021, as part of the reconfiguration of Shattuck Avenue. [37] [38] The two block stretch known formerly as "Shattuck Avenue East" was renamed "Kala Bagai Way" after a year of community activism in support, in recognition of both her activism and her racist exclusion from the city a century earlier. [24] [39] [40] [41] It was the first street in the city named after an Asian American. [42] [43] [44]
The Ghadar Movement was an early 20th century, international political movement founded by expatriate Indians to overthrow British rule in India. The early movement was created by revolutionaries who lived and worked on the West Coast of the United States and Canada, but the movement later spread to India and Indian diasporic communities around the world. The official founding has been dated to a meeting on 15 July 1913 in Astoria, Oregon, and the group would splinter into two factions the first time in 1914, with the Sikh-majority faction known as the “Azad Punjab Ghadar” and the Hindu-majority faction known as the “Hindustan Ghadar.” The Hindustan Ghadar Party’s headquarters and Hindustan Ghadar newspaper was based in San Francisco, California, whereas the Azad Punjab Ghadar Party’s headquarters and anti-colonial publications headquarters was in nearby Stockton, California.
Mohamed Barakatullah Bhopali, known with his honorific as Maulana Barkatullah, was an Indian revolutionary from Bhopal. Barkatullah was born on 7 July 1854 at Itawra mohalla, Bhopal in what is today Madhya Pradesh, India. He fought from outside India, with fiery speeches and revolutionary writings in leading newspapers, for the independence of India. He did not live to see India independent. He died at San Francisco in 1927 and buried at Sacramento City Cemetery California. In 1988, Bhopal University was renamed Barkatullah University in his honour. He was also Prime Minister of first Provisional Government of India established at Afghanistan in 1915.
Downtown Berkeley is the central business district of the city of Berkeley, California, United States, around the intersection of Shattuck Avenue and Center Street, and extending north to Hearst Avenue, south to Dwight Way, west to Martin Luther King Jr. Way, and east to Oxford Street. Downtown is the mass transit hub of Berkeley, with several AC Transit and UC Berkeley bus lines converging on the city's busiest BART station, as well as the location of Berkeley's civic center, high school, and Berkeley City College.
Friends of South Asia (FOSA) is a California, United States based social and political activist organization. Founded jointly in 2001 by Americans of Pakistani and Indian origins, the group describes its mission as "achieve a peaceful, prosperous, and hate-free South Asia...work[ing] through people-to-people contacts, dialog, and other non-violent, non-exclusionary means." FOSA activism has touched upon issues inside South Asia, as well as outside South Asia such as those relating to Israel and United States policy in Cuba and Venezuela among others.
Taraknath Das was an Indian revolutionary and internationalist scholar. He was a pioneering immigrant in the west coast of North America and discussed his plans with Tolstoy, while organising the Asian Indian immigrants in favour of the Indian independence movement. He was a professor of political science at Columbia University and a visiting faculty in several other universities.
Kartar Singh Sarabha was an Indian revolutionary. He was 15-years old when he became a member of Ghadar Party; he then became a leading luminary member and started fighting for the independence movement. He was one of the most active members of the movement. In November 1915 at Central Jail, Lahore, he was executed for his role in the movement when he was 19 years old.
The Hindu–German Conspiracy Trial commenced in the District Court in San Francisco on November 12, 1917, following the uncovering of the Hindu–German Conspiracy for initiating a revolt in India. It was part of a wave of such incidents which took place in the United States after America's entrance into World War I. The trials came after pressure from the United Kingdom to suppress the Indian independence movement abroad.
The Hindu–German Conspiracy(Note on the name) was a series of attempts between 1914 and 1917 by Indian nationalist groups to create a Pan-Indian rebellion against the British Empire during World War I. This rebellion was formulated between the Indian revolutionary underground and exiled or self-exiled nationalists in the United States. It also involved the Ghadar Party, and in Germany the Indian independence committee in the decade preceding the Great War. The conspiracy began at the start of the war, with extensive support from the German Foreign Office, the German consulate in San Francisco, and some support from Ottoman Turkey and the Irish republican movement. The most prominent plan attempted to foment unrest and trigger a Pan-Indian mutiny in the British Indian Army from Punjab to Singapore. It was to be executed in February 1915, and overthrow British rule in the Indian subcontinent. The February mutiny was ultimately thwarted when British intelligence infiltrated the Ghadarite movement and arrested key figures. Mutinies in smaller units and garrisons within India were also crushed.
The Annie Larsen affair was a gun-running plot in the United States during World War I. The plot, involving India's Ghadar Party, the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the German Foreign office, was a part of the larger so-called "Hindu–German Conspiracy", and it was the prime offence cited in the 1917 Hindu–German Conspiracy Trial, described at the time as the longest and most expensive trial in American legal history.
Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna was a Sikh revolutionary, the founding president of the Ghadar Party, and a leading member of the party involved in the Ghadar Conspiracy of 1915. Tried at the Lahore Conspiracy trial, Sohan Singh served sixteen years of a life sentence for his part in the conspiracy before he was released in 1930. He later worked closely with the Indian labour movement, devoting considerable time to the Kisan Sabha.
The Hindustan Ghadar was a weekly publication that was the party organ of the Ghadar Party. It was published under the auspices of the Yugantar Ashram in San Francisco. Its purpose was to further the militant nationalist faction of the Indian independence movement, especially amongst Indian sepoys of the British Indian Army.
Ram Chandra Bharadwaj, also known as Pandit Ram Chandra was the president of the Ghadar Party between 1914 and 1917. As a member of the Ghadar Party, Ram Chandra was also one of the founding editors of the Hindustan Ghadar and a key leader of the party in its role in the Indo-German Conspiracy. He assumed the role of the president of the party following Lala Har Dayal's departure for Switzerland in 1914 and, along with Bhagwan Singh and Maulvi Mohammed Barkatullah, was key in rallying the support of the South Asian community in the Pacific Coast in the wake of the Komagata Maru incident for the planned February mutiny. Ram Chandra was assassinated on 24 April 1918 on the last day of the Hindu–German Conspiracy Trial by Ram Singh, a fellow defendant who believed that Ram Chandra was a British agent.
The first Christmas Day plot was a conspiracy made by the Indian revolutionary movement in 1909: during the year-ending holidays, the Governor of Bengal organised at his residence a ball in the presence of the Viceroy, the Commander-in-Chief and all the high-ranking officers and officials of the Capital (Calcutta). The 10th Jat Regiment was in charge of the security. Indoctrinated by Jatindranath Mukherjee, its soldiers decided to blow up the ballroom and take advantage of destroying the colonial Government. In keeping with his predecessor Otto von Klemm, a friend of Lokmanya Tilak, on 6 February 1910, M. Arsenyev, the Russian Consul-General, wrote to St Petersburg that it had been intended to "arouse in the country a general perturbation of minds and, thereby, afford the revolutionaries an opportunity to take the power in their hands." According to R. C. Majumdar, "The police had suspected nothing and it is hard to say what the outcome would have been had the soldiers not been betrayed by one of their comrades who informed the authorities about the impending coup".
Bhai Bhagwan Singh Gyanee was an Indian Nationalist and a leading luminary of the Ghadar Party. Elected the party president in 1914, he was extensively involved in the Ghadar Conspiracy of 1915 during World War I and in the aftermath of its failure fled to Japan. He is also known for his nationalist poems that were published in the Hindustan Ghadar and later in the compilation Ghadar di Gunj. Convicted of violating U.S. neutrality laws, at the Hindu–German Conspiracy Trial, Singh was sentenced to 18 months in prison. Requests by the British government to deport him to India, where he likely would've faced execution, were rejected.
Punjabi Americans, are Americans whose ancestry originates wholly or partly from the Punjab region of India and Pakistan. There are over 300,000 Punjabi Americans, many of whom were Sikhs from British Punjab who first settled in California's Central Valley to do agricultural work.
Angana P. Chatterji is an Indian anthropologist, activist, and feminist historian, whose research is closely related to her advocacy work and focuses mainly on India. She co-founded the International People's Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir and was a co-convener from April 2008 to December 2012.
Gobind Behari Lal was an Indian-American journalist and independence activist. A relative and close associate of Lala Har Dayal, he joined the Ghadar Party and participated in the Indian independence movement. He arrived the United States on a scholarship to study at the University of California, Berkeley. Later, he worked as a science editor for the Hearst Newspapers. In 1937, he became the first Indian to win the Pulitzer Prize.
Kartar Kaur Dhillon was a Punjabi Sikh American political activist and writer from California. Dhillon grew up in the Ghadar Party, working to end British colonialism in India. As an activist, she supported unions, the Black Panther Party, farm workers, political prisoners, and the Korean reunification movement.
Girindra Mukerji was an Indian anti-British activist, organizer, and agriculturist. His article "The Hindu in America" has been widely cited as a document describing early Indian immigration to the United States.
The San Francisco Bay Area has the second-largest Indian-American population in the United States after the New York metropolitan area. The Bay Area Asian Indian population is primarily concentrated in the Santa Clara Valley, with San Jose having the highest population of Asian Indians in raw numbers as 2010, while Cupertino, Dublin, Fremont, Pleasanton and San Ramon have the largest concentrations. The South Bay-based 17th congressional district, represented by Indian-American Ro Khanna has the largest Asian Indian population of any congressional district in the United States. In 2010, Indian-Americans were the fastest growing minority population in the Bay Area. The Indian population in the city of San Francisco itself is still small compared to other Asian groups, but grew by 109% during the 2010s.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link).jpg){kind=link}
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)