A Sylheti man involved in the anti-British movement runs from the police and takes a job on a ship bound for the United States. The year was 1920. He jumps off the ship on New York's harbour and swims to the shore of an alien, unwelcoming land. This young man's name was Ibrahim Chowdhury.
South Asian immigration boomed in the United States after the passage of Harry Truman's immigration reform in 1965. But long before that, there were smaller waves of immigrants who hailed from India under the British Empire, in the 1920s and ‘30s.
New Yorkers called them ship jumpers. They were mostly illiterate and worked as cooks, dishwashers, merchants, subway labourers. In New York they gradually formed a small community in Spanish Harlem. They occupied apartments and tenement housing on streets in the 100s.
South Asian immigration was illegal then – the 1917 Immigration Act barred all idiots, imbeciles, criminals and people from the “Asiatic Barred Zone.” The Bangalis did all they could do to become American in a nation of segregation and prejudice. Most of them married into black and Puerto Rican families.
Unlike other immigrants of the time, they did not settle in their own enclaves. Rather, they began life anew in established neighbourhoods of colour: Harlem, West Baltimore and Treme in New Orleans.
Ibrahim's story and that of many other South Asians who constitute this forgotten first wave of migrations to America have been documented in a book titled, “Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America,” by the MIT Associate Professor Vivek Bald.
“One of the most important things I took from the research is the fact that in the years of Asian exclusion, African-American and Puerto Rican communities actually gave the Bengali men the possibilities and the shelter to rebuild their lives,” said Bald.
“Those communities lived up to the promise of the nation when the nation failed to do so … because they were equally marginalised and equally deprived of full membership.”
The political zeal remained in Ibrahim's blood. He became a key figure among New York's South Asians. He convinced the British Consul General in New York to establish the British Merchant Sailors Club for Indian Seamen.
His son Noor said in the book that Ibrahim helped the ship jumpers with immigration problems, led religious functions and interacted on his community’s behalf with British, Indian and Pakistani consular officials. Chowdhury even went from one New York-area hospital to the next, meeting with staff and asking them to call him whenever anyone was admitted with the surnames Meah, Ullah, Uddin or Ali.
In 1945, he lobbied the Congress to change the naturalisation laws of the '40s, connected with African-American Muslim groups in Harlem as well as Jewish and Christian leaders.
“I talk for those of our men who, in factory and field, in all sections of American industry, work side by side with their fellow American workers to strengthen the industrial framework of this country,” he wrote in a letter to the Congress.
At age 32, he married Catherine, a 17-year-old woman who was born in Cuba to Puerto Rican parents, and had two children, Laily and Noor.
Both Laily and Noor recalled a father who was busy; that he became the guy to call in the Bengali community. He was always rushing out of the house.
It seemed that despite becoming an American to the bone, Ibrahim's Bangalee palette remained. One day when Noor Chowdhury had gone to the Bronx Zoo and come back with a 15-inch catfish he’d caught in the lake. His father was about to leave the house, but when he saw that fish, he took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and got a knife out.
From Boston he ended up in New York, married a Puerto Rican woman, Victoria Echevarria, and moved to East Harlem.
The temptation of a fish curry could triumph over any order of business for a Bangali.
Ibrahim later launched a short lived venture with his friend Habib Ullah from Noakhali, the Bengal Garden, just off Broadway in Manhattan’s theatre district. The place served South Asian cuisine and Salsa music.
Habib had rural Noakhali at the young age of 14, travelled to Kolkata and found a job on an outgoing ship. Bald’s book documents Habib’s arrival in Boston, where he either jumped ship or fell ill. His son, Habib Ullah Junior, always thought his father had gotten lost.
Victoria died in 1952, leaving Habib to raise the children alone. He worked as a cook at a restaurant. He left the house at the crack of dawn for the subway ride. He came home tired, took a nap and then cooked dinner. Rice and curry.
Occasionally he would take his son to the Indian Seamen’s Club in the Lower East Side and after 1947, to the Pakistan League of America, an organisation Ibrahim and Habib co-founded.
Habib Junior called his father’s friends “Chacha.” Some of them changed their Bengali names to Charlie and Harry and in the case of Ibrahim – Abraham.
He asked his father once to teach him Bengali. The answer was no. “He wanted me to be an American boy,” Habib Junior said. He remembered his father asking a literate friend to pen letters in Bengali to his mother and brother back in Noakhali.
“He would bring them home and I would address them and send them out,” he said.
In the late 1960s, Habib, then ailing from asthma, returned to Noakhali to remarry. He returned with Moheema, a Bangali woman who was much younger than her husband. They had a son named Aladdin Ullah.
'Dishwasher dreams'
California native Vivek Bald grew up with a strong sense of connection to India. He heard stories from his Indian immigrant mother that made a mark when he began making movies about the diaspora.
In his exploration of the diaspora, he met Habib's second son, actor and stand-up comic Aladdin Ullah, 44. Bald was fascinated with his story. He’d never imagined such a history.
“This was a population who came to the United States at a time when this country had erected quite draconian race-based immigration laws,” Bald said. “They came during that time but were able to build networks in order to access jobs all over the United States.”
“The story,” said Bald, “was so completely different than what I had heard about South Asian immigration in the United States.”
Bald began researching their history. It took him nine years to comb through marriage and death records, court documents, newspaper stories and archival treasures.
“I think the revelations I had along the way had to do with how resourceful both of these groups of men were in dealing with a home country that was under the rule of the British and on the other hand, another country that was closing its doors to them and passing increasingly more restrictive and racist immigration laws,” Bald said.
Alauddin Ullah, whose one-man act “Dishwasher Dreams” explores his father’s experiences, imagined how difficult life must have been for the Bangalis.
“These were illiterate men who came to America with hopes of a better life,” he said. “They learned the American hustle, not the American Dream.”
Unlike his elder brother, Alauddin did not have much connection with his community.
“I rejected my culture. I was a hip-hop kid, a kid from Harlem. I listen to rap. I didn’t have any connection to Bangalis.”
But it was an acting role that led Ullah to reconsider his father’s identity.
Habib Junior grew up speaking English and Spanish. The Bangla side of him diminished but never went away.
“I’m a Banglarican,” he says of his identity. “We assimilated into the neighbourhood. I’m immersed in both cultures.”
He wishes he had accompanied his father on that long trek back to Noakhali. He is 70 now and does not think he will ever step foot on his father’s homeland.
“I have a whole family I have never met, and will never meet,” he said. “Now my father has passed away. His brother is gone. The lines of communication are gone.”
Curry on the stove
John Ali Junior remembers that Bangali food was the one constant from the homeland.
His father, Mustafa “John” Ali, like Ibrahim, also came to play an important role for Bengali men in the industrial towns where he worked, including Chester, Pennsylvania, home to a Ford car factory and the Sun Shipbuilding plant along the Delaware River.
Mustafa learned English from listening to the radio and helped “anchor the broader network of escaped seamen in a series of key locations,” Bald wrote.
Ali Junior, 83, remembers his father always having a pot of curry and rice on the stove’s back burner, just in case any of the Bangalis stopped by.
Ali Junior moved to Atlanta almost three decades ago, where he settled in the mostly black south-west neighbourhood of Cascade. He married a black woman, as had his father, and never saw himself as anything else. In his tenure in the Army, he’d always been coloured.
In his youth, he read a lot of Indian history, about independence. He recalled his father listening to news about India on the radio and translating it for his fellow Bangalis who did not know English.
“I thought I would see Bangladesh one day,” he said. But he never did.
His father returned to his hometown of Sylhet in the 1960s after his wife's death. Shortly after, he died on his way back from Hajj in Saudi Arabia.
The legacy of Ibrahim, Habib, Mustafa and the other Bangali men who triumphed against so many odds in a hostile land lives on in modern day Americans like Alauddin.
S Nadia Hussain, a great grand niece of Ibrahim, is an activist and a blogger. She is currently a member of the board of trustees of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey.
She says Ibrahim's work was the inspiration for her own. On her personal blog she writes, “It inspired me to know that I had family doing community and social justice work in this country decades before I was even born.”
