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• 1 media/huck.jpg 2018-05-07T10:39:12-07:00 Moulvi Noorul Huq Akunjee: "a Hindu and not a White person..." 2 plain 2018-08-15T18:33:34-07:00 Moulvi Noorul Huq Akunjee [Noorul Huck] was born in 1878 in Calcutta (Kolkata), Bengal, India. During the late 1890s, Huck worked as a superintendent in Calcutta's General Post Office, but by the time he emigrated to the U.S. in 1909 he had become a trader. He was coming in at the tail end of a relatively small, largely forgotten wave of Bengali immigration to the U.S. that took place during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.[i]
  
  Emigration often entails employment decidedly outside of an émigré's comfort zone. For Huck, becoming an American would in part mean reinventing himself as a dealer in Oriental goods, which had become increasingly desirable commodities throughout the western world since the 1890s. In the U.S. he became part of a small but thriving network of Bengali traders in chikan (embroidery), muslin, silks, textiles and fabrics which came from the then still exotic east.  After moving between Asbury Park, Atlantic City, New Orleans and Galveston, Huck would eventually settle in Houston, Texas—all the while working as a chikondar, selling his goods on boardwalks and open air markets, like many of his Bengali compatriots. 
  
  Before going any further into Huck's life in his newly adopted country, it's important to locate what was primarily driving Bengali immigration to the U.S. at the time: consumer demand for an exotic product. 
  
  Orientalism was a pervasive phenomena during the early 20th century, affecting many forms of art [including fashion] and architecture across the western world, and lies at the heart of what fueled demand for Huck's merchandise.  But demand came with a price and stopped far short of embracing an ounce of the humanity that created the original forms. A shallow but dominating drive for ersatz authenticity and a way for westerners to mask themselves—in a refined and tolerable way—in the clothing of the exotic other while remaining fully dominant over the people/culture that produced it. 
  
  Many of the sui generis forms employed or mimicked in Orientalist art have quietly gone on to UNESCO's "Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity" lists, including some of the techniques used in the materials Huck was trading.  But during Huck's time the overbearingly patronizing aspect of Orientalism blotted out any seemingly benign intentions. What was taking place during this era might today be called "cultural appropriation" though at the time it was perhaps simply a way to sublimate racism. Westerners wanted the products but could scarcely tolerate, let alone welcome, the people that produced them.  The same can be said of the labor that Sikh and other South Asian émigrés were contributing to agricultural, mining and railroad industries during the early 20th century in the United States.  

  "A strange, exotic thing in the western landscape" 

  The infamous Dictionary of Races or Peoples, first published by the Immigration Commission in 1911 and subsequently used as a standard diagnostic tool by immigration inspectors at Ellis Island and Angel Island, defines Bengalis as "...like ourselves [i.e. Whites], Aryan." Fourteen years after Huck's arrival, this specious racial characterization would prove to carry deep irony for Huck and thousands of other immigrants from South Asia, many of whom had become naturalized U.S. citizens.
  
  After almost a decade in the U.S., Huck became a naturalized U.S. Citizen in 1917 and traveled back to India the following year "to see [his] feeble mother and settle up business affairs of her and my estate." Just eight months before his naturalization, the ­Immigration Act of 1917 was passed by the Senate (overriding vetoes from Presidents Taft and Wilson) and became law. 
  
  The Act had a number of provisions, including:
  • that all immigrants over the age of 16 be subject to a literacy test, barring from entry any "mature" illiterates;
  • that anyone falling into an ever expanding list of undesirable classes (anarchists, epileptics, feeble-minded persons, idiots, illiterates, imbeciles, persons being mentally or physically defective, persons with constitutional psychopathic inferiority [i.e. homosexuality], etc.) would be banned from entry;
  • to increase the head tax to $8 per person, deterring "paupers" trying to enter the U.S.;
  • and an outright exclusion of South Asians by creating what would be come to be know as the Asiatic Barred Zone.
  Here's where the irony begins. Only the final point could have affected Huck, would he have immigrated after 1917. However, something altogether unexpected (to Huck) but inevitable was just around the corner and it intersects with one of the main tenets of Orientalism.
  
  Even before his arrival to the U.S. in 1909, Huck was by all accounts a "desirable" immigrant on paper if not in person.  According the ship's manifest which documented his arrival, Huck was literate, skilled, educated, spoke English, had money ($55 = over $1400 in 2017 dollars), was healthy and would be joining a relative upon arrival.  He ticked the boxes on the manifest far better than the average European immigrant and his years in America would only prove he was a loyal citizen in the making.
  
  It was Huck's ethnicity that was becoming increasingly problematic after 1917, at least in the legal sense.  Intolerance and open hostility from the federal government, immigration restriction advocates and the public were kicking into high gear.  By the time the 1917 act came around, South Asian immigration to the U.S. had already been labeled as the "Tide of Turbans" in an essay by Californian poet and playwright Herman George Scheffauer; the term gained traction and spilled out into sensationalistic newspaper articles, particularly in west coast dailies. 
  
  After decades of incremental regulatory steps, the enforcement of the provisions listed above signaled a significant legislative turn toward race-based, federally administered immigration restriction and nativism. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act served in part as a successful model for the 1917 Act, which would eventually prevent South Asians from legally immigrating, obtaining or keeping their naturalization intact. Subsequent federal immigration acts passed in 1921 and 1924 would do much the same for southern and eastern Europeans, though the quota/national origins acts didn't exclude all European immigrants outright, prevent or strip them of naturalization.  By 1924 that's exactly what was happening to South Asians like Huck.
  
  The provision creating the Asiatic Barred Zone was, in fact, a thinly disguised prohibition against would-be immigrants from the Indian Subcontinent in particular, explicitly excluding from entry certain "classes of aliens" based on geographic origin, including:

  "persons who are natives of islands not possessed by the United States adjacent to the Continent of Asia [i.e. Philippines], situated south of the 20th parallel latitude north, west of the 160th meridian of longitude east from Greenwich, and north of the 10th parallel of latitude south, or who are natives of any country, province, or dependency situated on the Continent of Asia west of the 110th meridian of longitude east from Greenwich and south of the 50th parallel of latitude north."
  (39 Stat. 874) Feb. 5, 1917 Sec. 3

  A different kind of Whiteness

  As with Chinese and Japanese immigrants before and southern Europeans to come, the so-called "Tide of Turbans or "Hindu Peril" would manifest itself in many ways, including in the form of deplorable characterizations in the popular press.  Though the total number of South Asian immigrants was a fraction compared to other ethnic groups, from the 1890s on, South Asians would make front-page appearances in U.S. newspapers as both menacing, untrustworthy and disease-carrying others, much as the Chinese had decades earlier.
  By the time Huck applied for a passport to travel back to India in 1918, World War I was only months away from it's conclusion.  For years the conflict had massively affected transoceanic voyages, but there was another problem afoot, one that was drawing even more negative attention towards the Indian community. An elaborate, well-funded "German-Hindu conspiracy"—which involved plots to foment revolts on the Pacific Coast—had recently been thwarted by the U.S. government. The plot was widely and sensationally reported in the national press and led to the arrest of a number of Enemy Aliens originally from India, particularly those living in and around the San Francisco area. It would conveniently add to a long-simmering and not infrequently violent hostility "natives" were exhibiting towards "orientals."
  
  Perhaps due to the tense and increasingly antagonistic situation, Huck appears to have had some difficulty in having a passport issued to him for travel back to India in 1918. 
  
  His first passport application was refused "as it has not been shown to the satisfaction of the Department that it is imperatively necessary for you to leave the United States..." In a subsequent attempt, Huck would provide three affidavits attesting to his character and loyalty to the U.S. and that his intention to journey back to India was as stated. One of the supporting affidavits came from a Naturalization Examiner named M. H. Anthoni, who had know Huck for over four years. Anthoni stated: 

  "[Huck's] character is of the best, his reputation is excellent and i have found him to be a sober and industrious man, well formed to the principles of our government and attached to the same."

  The other letters submitted came from a local attorney and a foreman at a Houston post office, both of whom had known Huck for years and were written in a similar, praiseworthy manner.  Huck's own statement is confident, direct and simply extraordinary.
  
  Never mind that. Was Huck White? According to his World War I Draft Registration made on 18 September 1918—after a false start from the registrar—he apparently was:
  
  But this and his "Aryan" status enshrined in the Dictionary of Races or Peoples mentioned above weren't going to matter very much.
  
  Shortly after submitting his WWI draft registration, Huck left the U.S. for India via San Francisco. WWI officially ended on 11 November 1918 and travel records show that by early 1919, Huck had made it to Manila and was to set sail for India on 20 January.  This is the last time he makes an appearance in consular or immigration/emigration documents or any of the other places Huck was included on before, e.g. city directories, census documents, etc. Huck apparently stayed in Calcutta for an indeterminate period of time and perhaps never even returned to the U.S. He would, however, be named in U.S. Federal court documents several years later.

  Denaturalizing Huck

  Just prior to the next thread in the paper trail that Huck appears in, a 1923 U.S. Supreme Court ruling would completely upturn the status of Asian Indians who had settled in the U.S. The final decision handed down in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind explicitly concludes that the blood of even "high caste Hindu stock" from the Punjab (like Thind), let alone from other parts, is irreversibly tainted to such an extent that they could never be considered "free white persons" as the Fathers of 1790 could have conceived:

  "It may be, therefore, that the given group cannot be properly assigned to any of the enumerated grand racial divisions. The type may have been so changed by intermixture of blood as to justify an intermediate classification. Something very like this has actually taken place in India. Thus, in Hindustan and Berar there was such an intermixture of the “Aryan” invader with the dark-skinned Dravidian [...] The children of English, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, and other European parentage quickly merge into the mass of our population and lose the distinctive hallmarks of their European origin. On the other hand, it cannot be doubted that the children born in this country of Hindu parents would retain indefinitely the clear evidence of their ancestry. It is very far from our thought to suggest the slightest question of racial superiority or inferiority. What we suggest is merely racial difference, and it is of such character and extent that the great body of our people instinctively recognize it and reject the thought of assimilation."[ii] 

  With the decision, Bhagat Singh Thind had the appeal which granted him citizenship in 1923 overturned and was subsequently denaturalized. [iii] Though the precise number of total denaturalization cases is not know, the Supreme Court's decision here would quickly go on to adversely affect the citizenship status of many naturalized South Asians, including Huck's.[iv]
  
  In 1924, the Southern District Court of Houston Texas retroactively deemed Huck to be ineligible for citizenship.  Though lawfully obtained in 1917, Huck's U.S. naturalization was "canceled and held for naught" because he was [still] "...a Hindu and not a White person within the meaning of Section 2169 of the Revised Statutes of the United States of America..."  When Huck left India for the U.S. in 1909, he was neither an Indian or British citizen but rather a British subject. His U.S. citizenship, which he held for some seven years, was the first and perhaps only time he experienced being a legal member of a sovereign state. 
  
  Vivek Bald writes:

  "Not only had Indians been cast as undesirable, but they had been made permanent outsiders. For the next twenty years, it remained this way: Indians were prevented from immigrating to the United States, from owning land, from voting, and from naturalizing—from becoming an accepted part of the nation."[v] 

  What became of Huck? A number of scenarios are plausible.
  
  If Huck was still in the U.S. after his denaturalization, he might have lived out the rest of his life in the shadows of U.S. economy and society or may have even been deported back to India. In either case, this would explain his absence in the paper trail from subsequently issued government documents. Vivek Bald has shown, remarkably, that a number of Bengali men married into African American and Latino families around this time, particularly in the American South..melding into communities of color, both urban and rural.  Perhaps Huck found "cover" in this manner as well. 
  
  Many South Asians like Huck were denaturalized after 1924 while others whose status as declarants or resident aliens put them at greater risk.  All would have experienced extreme insecurity and a tenuous future so long as they stayed, though leaving wasn't going to be easy either.[vi]  To make maters even worse for South Asians that married U.S. citizens, denaturalization would potentially put their spouses' citizenship status in jeopardy, due to a clause in the Cable Act of 1922 which stipulated that women who married foreign nationals ineligible for naturalization (i.e. Asians) would forfeit their own U.S. citizenship.[vii]
  
  Signed into law on 2 July 1946, the Luce–Celler Act (H. R. 3517; Public Law 483) allowed an annual token quota of 100 Indians and 100 Filipinos to emigrate to the United States; it also provided the right for existing declarants to naturalize and become U.S. citizens. However, it wouldn't be until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 came into force that all South Asians like Huck would have a fair opportunity to emigrate and become American Citizens.
  
  As of 2018, there are nearly 3.5 million Indian Americans in the United States, a population that has doubled in size since 2000. 
   

  ---

  Notes

  [i] Recent research is revealing some extraordinary Bengali-American (i.e. Bangladeshi) legacies still very much alive today.  See: Bald, Vivek (2015) "Bengali Harlem and the lost histories of South Asian America" and Munshi, Sherally (2017) "Immigration, Imperialism, and the Legacies of Indian Exclusion," Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities: Vol. 28 : Iss. 1 , Article 2.
  
  [ii] United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923)
  
  [iii] Thind was a WWI veteran and after the Alien Veteran Naturalization (aka Nye-Lea Act) was passed by Congress in 1935, which allowed "any alien veteran of the World War heretofore ineligible to citizenship because not a free white person or of African nativity or of African descent may be naturalized under this Act...", he again petitioned for naturalization and was ultimately successful later that year. 49 Stat. 397, 74th Congress, Sess. I, Chap. 290, Pub.L. 74-162.
  
  [iv] While a precise number of denaturalizations is not ascertainable, based on the number of South Asian departures in subsequent years, the the figure probably runs in the hundreds: "In conjunction with the 1917 Immigration Act, this episode of denaturalizations led to the collapse of the South Asian community in the United States: It is estimated that close to 3,000 South Asians left the United States between 1920 and 1940." In Zhao, X., & In Park, E. J. W. (2015). Asian Americans: An encyclopedia of social, cultural, economic, and political history. 557, (Kritika Agarwal).
  
  [v] Bald, V. (2015). Bengali Harlem and the lost histories of South Asian America. 2.
  
  [vi] A 17 March 1928 newspaper article from the San Francisco Examiner gives some fascinating, and heartbreaking, insight into the plight of denaturalized South Asians who remained in the U.S. In it, a Peshawar-born immigrant named Lala Vaishno Das Bagai, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1915 with his wife and three children and became a U.S.citizen in 1921, recounts his years of crisis after denaturalization. Despite experiencing personal and financial success after emigration, he committed suicide in 1928 "in protest against the refusal of the United States government to recognize the American citizenship which he claimed." The disillusionment of being stateless and disenfranchised was profound. Just before taking his life, Das Bagai sent the Examiner a "letter to the world", apparently in the hopes that they would publish it—to which they did the very same day.  It is both eloquent and profoundly devastating: "WHO IS RESPONSIBLE? But they now come to me and say, I am no longer an American citizen. They will not permit me to buy my home and lo, they even shall not issue me a passport to go back to India. Now what am I? What have I made of myself and my children? We cannot exercise our rights, we cannot leave this country. Humility and insults, who is responsible for all this? Myself and American government. I do not choose to live the life of an interned person: yes, I am in a free country and can move about where and when I wish inside the country. Is life worth living in a gilded cage? Obstacles this way, blockades that way, and the bridges burnt behind. Yes, you can call me a coward in one respect, that I did not try to break the mountain with my naked head and fists."
  
  [vii] See the "Married Women's independent Citizenship Act of September 22, 1922": § 5. "That no woman whose husband is not eligible to citizenship shall be naturalized during the continuance of the marital status...” 42 Stat. 1021b, Pub.L. 67-346.