Selling the East in the American South

Bengali Muslim Peddlers in New Orleans and Beyond, 1880–1920

Vivek Bald

Over the past two decades, while South Asian American Studies has begun to coalesce as a field, the broad historical narrative of South Asian immigration to the United States has changed little. Most of the work in the field has focused on the decades of migration and settlement that unfolded after passage of the 1965 Hart-Cellar Immigration Act. This work was initially centered on the immediate beneficiaries of the 1965 Act—the doctors, engineers, and other professionals who arrived by the thousands over the course of the 1970s and '80s. Since the mid-1990s, scholars have turned their attention to newer migrations from the subcontinent and to a "South Asian America" that is conceived much more broadly along differing lines of class, gender, religion, sexual orientation/identification, generation, and regional and national origin. Pre-1965 histories are only now becoming the focus of renewed interest and inquiry. For years, scholarship on this period has centered primarily on Punjabi migration, settlement, and activism on the North American West Coast in the two decades between 1904 and 1924. Work on the period follows the lives of Punjabi farm and mill workers in British Columbia, the Pacific Northwest, and California; focuses on the expatriate nationalist politics of the San Francisco–based Ghadar Party; and charts both the violence and the lobbying efforts of anti-Asian citizen groups, labor leaders, and politicians on the West Coast that led up to the federal government's barring of Indian immigration and naturalization. Scholars focusing on this period have produced crucial work, and newer research on the Ghadar Party and West Coast migration now promises to expand what we know and how we think about these histories.

However, another early history of South Asian migration to the United States, far from Pacific shores, has remained hidden, its traces scattered across a series of disparate archives for over a century. In the 1880s, Bengali Muslim peddlers began arriving in New York—passing through immigration at Castle Gardens on the Southern tip of Manhattan and then Ellis Island after its facilities opened in 1892. These men did not stay in New York, nor did they follow the patterns of migration that became common after 1965, to the cities of the North and Midwest. Instead, they headed for New Jersey's beach boardwalk towns—Asbury Park, Atlantic City, Long Branch—and then turned southward to New Orleans, Charleston, and a series of other cities below the Mason-Dixon line. They came in small numbers at first, but many of the earliest arrivals married and settled within local communities of African descent, establishing a network that was firmly rooted in the U.S. South. Bengali peddlers not only moved throughout the region to a constellation of Southern cities, they traveled outward from New Orleans across the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico to Cuba, Belize, Honduras, and Panama. Their network expanded and flourished over the years that anti-Asian xenophobia grew to a fever pitch on the West Coast and Jim Crow was imposed in the South, and it continued to operate, albeit in different and diminished ways, even after Indian exclusion was formalized through the Asiatic Barred Zone provision of the 1917 Immigration Act.

Recovering the history of this peddler network enlarges the existing picture of early South Asian migration both geographically and conceptually. It challenges our understanding of when immigration from India to the United States began: which groups were migrating to the United States; where they were headed upon arrival in the United States; if, when, and where they were settling; and for what purposes. The choices that Bengali peddlers made and the paths they traveled prompt us to consider the importance of the Southern States in South Asian American historiography. Moreover, the lives they fashioned give us a glimpse of the interstices within which some South Asian migrants continued to work during the exclusion period. In the pages that follow, I explore the history and context of this forgotten migration. First, I consider the context in which Bengali peddlers were able to operate: a fashion for "Oriental" goods and entertainments that swept the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which fancies and fantasies of "India" took a central role. Then, I examine a series of archival sources—ships' logs, marriage and birth records, Census enumerations, and local news items—to piece together the record of this peddler network, from its origins in West Bengal to the U.S. South and beyond. The documents reveal a history that is important for the same reason it has thus far remained invisible—because these migrants followed a different and unexpected path, one that diverged sharply from later, normative patterns of South Asian immigration to the United States. Most chose not to settle permanently, and those who did stay integrated into working-class African American communities.

Fancies of India

How was it that at a time of heightened anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States—and at a time when Asian immigrants were being singled out by xenophobic politicians and citizens—a group of Muslim migrants from India was able to establish a peddler network that extended through New York, New Jersey, and New Orleans and across the U.S. South? The answer to this question lies in what the men were selling. At the most literal level, they were selling a range of compact and readily transportable "Oriental goods": embroidered cotton, silk kerchiefs and...