The ghosts of Harlem past

Vivek Bald's intricately researched and exquisitely rendered Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America exposes at least three truths regarding the story of Indians in America today. First, relatively affluent, post-1965 'techies' have hijacked the narrative of Indian immigration to America from their scrappier, working-class and itinerant forebears; second, the voices of Sikhs and Muslims who were critical in the fight for individual and collective rights in the US in the first half of the 20th century have been sidelined; and third, current 'model minority' narratives pander to the pretences of upper-caste Indians, as well as mainstream American assumptions regarding equal opportunity. In exposing these truths, Bengali Harlem tells a superb tale of 19th-century globalisation and the role that Harlem, New Orleans, London and Chittagong played in this process, reminding us that globalisation is older and deeper than we have come to think.

In exposing these truths, Bald's work provides a necessary corrective to persistent, one-dimensional tropes regarding the Indian American experience. Indians are widely represented in the American media as highly literate, hardworking, socially-awkward, 'authentic', Hindu and conservative. This representation is often true to how the community sees itself. In a piece of pop sociology attempting to explain the relative success of different ethnic groups in America today, including Indian Americans, Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld cited the importance of three traits: a cultural superiority complex, insecurity and impulse control. Among the diasporic Indian middle classes, the argument has been well-received. Of course, such analysis invariably comes with an insidious comparison to African Americans and Hispanics, who presumably do not have these winning traits. (Such arguments ignore the fact that if one controls for parental accomplishment and education levels, people of Mexican origin residing in the US are more successful than people of Chinese or Indian origin.) Narratives concerning what 'makes' a model minority generally avoid the question of class and race. Thankfully, these questions are central to Bald's account.