Indian-Americans and Black History

As Black History Month (BHM) draws to a close, it is worth reflecting on the sub-optimal ties between the Indian diaspora and Black populations across the world, particularly in the US. Some years ago, a US Census report noted that Indian Americans displayed the highest rates of endogamy -- the custom of marrying within one's own community, clan, or tribe -- with very low levels of out marriage overall. It also observed that racial endogamy is significantly stronger among recent immigrants. By some accounts, interracial marriage between Indians and Blacks is as low as 0.2 percent -- two out of every thousand. Bluntly put, unions -- marriage or cohabitation -- between Indians and Blacks are rare and few.?

So there is a refreshing resonance in the fact that an Indian-American-Black woman is now the U.S vice-president, and she fittingly celebrated the BHM in the White House this week by noting that it was established "to teach the history that too often has not been taught: the history of Black excellence and leadership in America and also the history of resistance and resilience in America."? Too little is taught in America about Black History, and even less is known about the close ties between Indians and Blacks going back a century, notwithstanding the current low levels of engagement.?

Vice-president Harris' own story is well known. She -- and her sister Maya Harris -- are of the daughters from the union of Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian student- turned- immigrant, and Donald Harris, a Black graduate student from Jamaica, who met at Berkeley. Harris eventually came to Washington DC's Howard University, a historically Black college, for her undergraduate studies, belying the Indian propensity to head to elite white-dominated universities. A key influence in her decision to go to Howard – rather than Harvard or Stanford or Yale -- was the late Ajit Singh (whom she called "Ajit Uncle"), an economist and a contemporary of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at Cambridge, and also a close friend of her father Donald Harris.?

Ajit Singh came to Howard University to study economics around the same time Shyamala Harris came to Berkeley in the late 1950s, at a time few Indians went to HBCUs. But Howard had a storied history with India. Mahatma Gandhi's emissaries, notably Charlie Andrews and Madeleine Slade (Mirabai) had delivered talks at Howard, inspiring many academic activists. Among them were Howard Washington Thurman, a black author, philosopher, theologian, educator, and civil rights leader, who served as dean of the university’s chapel from 1932 to 1944. In fact, even before Thurman was bowled over by the Mahatma, Gandhi had established contact with a renowned Black agricultural scientist, George Washington Carver at Tuskegee University (also an HBCU), whose research was dedicated to supporting impoverished Black farmers who struggled to grow food on land that, for generations, had been used for growing cotton plants.?

Thurman eventually traveled to India with a four-person delegation in 1935, meeting with Mahatma Gandhi in Bardoli village in Gujarat. By then, Gandhi had already been in communication with George Washington Carver, Booker T Washington, a prominent black educator, and W.E.D.DuBois, the sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist. In fact, the Mahatma contributed an article titled “Message to the American Negro” that was published in The Crisis, the official publication of the the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) that Dubois had co-founded. Towards the end of their meeting, Howard Thurman’s wife, Sue Bailey Thurman, urged Gandhi to visit America (he never did) telling him, “We have many a problem that cries for solution, and we need you badly.” Gandhi replied, “I must make good the message here, before I bring it to you….It may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of non-violence will be delivered to the world.”

When they returned to the U.S., Benjamin Mays, a Baptist minister who was a member of the delegation that met Gandhi, wrote: “The Negro people have much to learn from the Indians. The Indians have learned what we have not learned. They have learned how to sacrifice for a principle. They have learned how to sacrifice position, prestige, economic security and even life itself for what they consider a righteous and respectable cause.” While wondering if nonviolent resistance could truly free India, he wrote in another article? “The fact that Gandhi and his non-violent campaign have given the Indian masses a new conception of courage, no man can honestly deny. To discipline people to face death, to die, to go to jail for the cause without fear and without resorting to violence is an achievement of the first magnitude. And when an oppressed race ceases to be afraid, it is free.”?

Such words and messages infused early civil rights activists, including Dr. Martin Luther King, with ideals and ideas to advance their struggle. King was preparing to go to India himself just before Shyamala Gopalan and Ajit Singh, separately, headed to the U.S in 1958. It was amid the ferment of civil rights activism that Ajit Singh came to Howard, graduated from there with an MA in Economics in 1960 (his master’s thesis was on the Indian steel industry) and headed out west for his PhD at Berkeley. His roommate here was Jerry Brown, a Zen Buddhist who had worked as hospice worker with Mother Teresa at the Home of the Dying in Calcutta, and who would go on to become Oakland mayor, a multi-term California Governor, and a three-time presidential candidate.?

Donald Harris ran into Ajit Singh in the fall of 1961 at the coffee shop of the International House where they were both residents as graduate students. “I could not help but notice him. There he was this tall slim impressive looking figure engaged in animated discussion with a gaggle of other residents. As I drew closer, I recognized the subject of discussion was the ongoing war in Vietnam and the role of the United States in it. He was arguing against the war in a combative, forceful and incisive manner, while others in the group, either supported it, or were ambivalent. Naturally I joined in on his side. This was the beginning of an enduring friendship,” Donald Harris recalls in a tribute he wrote on Ajit Singh following his death in 2015.?

Such Indian-Black friendship, engagement, and collaboration go back a century and often remain buried in history. As far back as the 1920s, a young Indian student and political activist named H.G.(Hucheshwar Gurusidha) Mudgal, came from Hubli, India, to Harlem, NY, to study at the City College of New York and at Columbia University, where he gained an M.A. He would eventually become an activist at black nationalist and Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, and go on to become editor of the Daily Negro Times and Negro World. "During the 1930s, issues of the Negro World were often filled with articles about the Indian nationalist movement, including a steady stream of news reports, announcement for lectures, and the occasional editorial from Indian American writer Haridas T. Muzumdar. For Mudgal, it was clear that anticolonial and nationalist struggles in India, Egypt, China, and of course, Africa, would, 'have an effect on the destiny of the Negro, not only in Africa but even in the United States,'" notes an article in the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA).

Black History Month is a good time to remember and advance such support and togetherness.

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Chidanand Rajghatta is the Times of India’s US-based Foreign Editor, long-time Washington D.C. scribe and sutradhar. In earlier roles, Rajghatta has worked with India’s leading news brands, including The Indian Express, The Telegraph of Kolkata, India Today, and The Sunday Times of India. He received his Master's Degree in mass communication from Bangalore University, Bangalore. He is the author of The Horse That Flew: How India's Silicon Gurus Spread Their Wings, Illiberal India: Gauri Lankesh and the Age of Unreason and Kamala Harris: Phenomenal Woman.