The Black & Desi Solidarity Stories We Forgot: A Look at Anirvan Chatterjee’s Work
Years before Mahatma Gandhi’s principle of ‘ahimsa’ (nonviolence) influenced the American civil rights movement, Swami Vivekananda made several condemnatory observations about racial injustice in the US during his 1893 visit to the country. Some decades later, author and filmmaker KA Abbas voiced support for the African American fight for equality at a New York conference in 1938 and went on to explore racial injustice in some of his work as well.
From the early 20th century to 1947, there was a growing consensus in South Asia and African America that there were clear parallels between European colonization in India and a kind of internal colonization of African Americans. On both sides, activists and writers found strength in creating those ties. BR Ambedkar also highlighted this commonality in the early 20th century, which was then taken forward by contemporary movements such as the Dalit Panthers, whose name comes from the Black Panther Party that fought against racial injustice in the US from 1966 to 1982.
Anirvan Chatterjee
These (and other) instances of solidarity between the Black community and South Asians are rarely discussed despite their significant impact on the USA’s history. To bring these ties back to public attention, Berkeley resident Anirvan Chatterjee started a project titled The Secret History of South Asian and African American Solidarity in February 2015 to coincide with Black History Month. Chatterjee uses period photographs alongside quotes to show how African Americans continually advanced South Asian rights, such as the NAACP passing a resolution in favor of Indian independence, Langston Hughes’ poems about the oppression of South Asian freedom fighters, and Bayard Rustin, lead organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, forming the Free India Committee while in jail.
Bayard Rustin
“Conversely” said Chatterjee in an interview with NBC, “We’ve repeatedly stood up for African-American communities — the Pakistani and Indian professors who helped desegregate Jackson, Mississippi; Indian Prime Minister Nehru defending Paul Robeson when he was under attack in his own country; and the Gandhians who trained civil rights movement activists.”
Chatterjee has embarked on creative ways to share history before. Partnering with his wife, Barnali Ghosh, he launched an award-winning Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour that takes participants to original locations and uses storytelling, visuals, and street theater to bring Berkeley’s South Asian American history to life. The couple’s extensive historical research and active engagement inspired the Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour, which shares these histories with a broader community to inform, educate, and cultivate new activism.
Kala Bagai (Courtesy of Rani Bagai and the South Asian American Digital Archive)
Along with the tour, Ghosh and Chatterjee successfully campaigned for the renaming of a downtown Berkeley street to Kala Bagai way to honour Kala Bagai, a 1915 South Asian
immigrant who faced discrimination in Berkeley. They also work with Bay Area Solidarity Summer, Walk Bike Berkeley, the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action, and the Berkeley Reimagining Public Safety Task Force.
South Asians and African Americans have stood up for each other for over a century. Our histories are powerfully intertwined, even if our communities may not always realize it. Chatterjee’s decades-long work also explores how the civil rights movement laid the groundwork for the USA’s modern, vibrant South Asian migrant community. US laws restricted immigration from South Asia for a long time. While several thousand South Asians had made their way to the United States by the early 20th century, the Immigration Act of 1917 explicitly barred immigration from ‘barred zone’ (which included most of Asia). The 1946 Luce-Cellar Act eased the racist restrictions but only allowed a hundred Indian immigrants annually.
However, 1965 was a turning point. Passed in part as a response to African American activism against racist American laws, the 1965 Immigration Act ended the racist restrictive immigration quotas, enabling South Asians to become one of the fastest-growing populations in the United States, with over 5 million South Asians in the US today. Without the civil rights movement, South Asian America as we know it might not exist.
Chatterjee’s work highlights the remarkable shared history between the South Asian and Black communities and educates an entire generation about history we are never taught in our schools. In the same NBC interview, Chatterjee discussed inspiring more Asian-American activists, “From freedom fighters to feminists, labor to LGBTQ, for over a century, organizing has been central to our community’s tradition in the United States.”
Shalaka Laxman works as a Product Manager in London, focusing on developing sustainable financial products for large corporates. Before moving to London, she previously lived in New York and graduated with a B.S. in Commerce from the University of Virginia in 2014. Outside the day job, she writes a weekly newsletter with the latest developments in the sustainability space and runs By Shax, her own independent, conscious art and homeware brand. Shalaka grew up in Dubai before heading to the U.S. for university and enjoys reading, traveling, and all things cat-related, alongside time with family and friends.
