Indian presence in New England: People and Ideas
by Bandana Purkayastha
At every gathering, such as the celebration of the Durga Puja, we have begun to recognize how many of us are here in the US. People who arrived in the late 60s or early 70s, can recall the times when they could not indulge in Bengali events because there were so few Indians, and even fewer Bengalis. Our perceptions are based on fact. Till 1965, migration from the Indian subcontinent was strictly controlled through a series of laws, including the omnibus Asian migration ban in 1917. We “arrived” in the US relatively recently as a consequence of changes following the Civil Rights Movement. The pioneering Sikh men, who arrived in small numbers and settled on the West Coast, paved our passage to this country. People like Bhagat Singh Thind who filed a lawsuit to claim citizenship for Indians, and Dalip Singh Saund, the first Indian member of the House of Representatives were among the earliest immigrants to challenge the prevalent notions about India and Indians. However, Swami Vivekananda probably launched this challenge, in a public way, decades earlier.
While several scholars have written about the Indian migration experiences in the US, less is known about our presence in New England and the North East. This is a very brief introduction to that history.
Early Encounters.
In the centuries leading up to the 1890s, Asian Indian migrants were considered to be an alien presence in New England (and the US), despite the flourishing trade with India. The early American traders were eager to profit from India’s vast resources of precious gems, silks, linens and spices, often using Calcutta as their base. But colonial and evangelical missionary rhetoric emphasized the problematic character of Indians, even as Yankees benefited from the India trade.
The earliest Indians were not considered to be “assimilable;” they could only become part of the black population in any town. One of the earliest testimonies was written in 1790, by Rev. William Bentley of Salem, Massachusetts. According to his diary, he saw “a native of the Indies from Madras…he is of dark complexion…being much darker than any native Indians of America. I had no opportunity to judge his ability but his countenance was not expressive. He came to Salem with Capt. J. Gibaut, and has been in Europe” (quoted in S. Chandrasekhar 12). And in 1851, the Fourth of July parade in Salem, organized by the East India Marine Society, included six Asian Indians, who later settled in Salem, married “negro” women and became part of the black population of the town (Jensen 26).
As Susan Bean points out, while individual Indians were still novel enough that their alien presence was noted in dairies, Yankee clipper ships were making voyages to India, trading in salt, rice, cloth and opium. The wealth generated from this trade was the source of fortune for the first American millionaire, E.H. Derby of Salem. As the trade with India grew, the East India Marine Society was created in 1799 for the elite of Salem’s India traders, whose members paraded through the streets before their annual meeting, in a procession that showcased Indian artifacts and curiosities. By the 19th century, members of this society established the Peabody Museum, featuring items that had appeared exotic to the traders—for instance, a pair of hooks with which natives apparently swung their brethren to help them recover their caste, and life-like models of Indians that created an enigmatic eastern ambience in Salem.
Besides the growing Peabody Museum, the East India trade financed other New England landmarks. For instance, Elihu Yale, a retired East India merchant whose grandmother was a Yankee from New Haven, Connecticut, was approached by Cotton Mather to donate money for a college in New Haven. According to Dexter, Yale, who had amassed a sizeable fortune through trade with India, donated nine bales of goods that were auctioned off by William Tailor of Boston to raise £562, leading to the establishment of the institute in New Haven that was renamed Yale College in 1718.
While the India trade contributed to Yankee wealth, a formidable series of laws, contributed to the absence of Indians in this region (and in the US). Barringer et al state that the US Census shows that there were only 84 Indians in the US in 1850. By 1900, another 595 Indians arrived; by 1924, there were 8,663 Indians in the US. New England was home to even a very insignificant proportion of this population. Even Yale University, originally founded with money from the India trade, had few Indian students. Purkayastha records that a search of the colleges in Connecticut showed that most of the Indians students were Christian missionaries. In fact, the first Indian to graduate from Yale in 1906 was a Christian minister.
Imagining India and Indians.
Even though there were very few Indians in the United States, the lives and beliefs of Indians were the subject of many public discussions, sustained and structured by political and missionary interests. During the nineteenth century, the establishment of British colonial power in India was justified by a discourse emphasizing a “civilizational mission” of the British in India that highlighted the flaws of Indians and Indian society. For instance, since Bengal became the headquarters of the colonial power, the colonialists frequently used language such as “the effeminate Bengali” to describe Indians, and emphasized the need to civilize the Indian population and to root out their savageries and exotic customs (Rolfson). The US supported the British stance. The political discourse was paralleled by the discourse of evangelical missionaries who created stories about Indian heathens as a way to raise money to save their souls.
There were some exceptions to this general atmosphere of non-acceptance. In general, the intellectuals of the Northeast were not active participants in such overt racialized discourse. Jane Jensen states that New England intellectuals developed a deep interest in Indian religions in the early 19th century, at about the time the New England-India trade developed. She describes how Boston society became interested in Indian literature and in Indian religions, especially Hinduism, Buddhism and the Brahmo Samaj movement. Intellectuals at universities such as Harvard began to cultivate an active scholarship and also initiated a nascent Indian art collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The theosophical writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, as well as Walt Whitman’s poems (such as “Passage to India” and “Leaves of Grass”), are reflective of this trend. These earlier writings of the Transcendentalists, on the “life of the spirit” (developed on the basis of an earlier encounters with Hinduism), prepared the ground for Vivekananda and his message.
An Indian on India.
Given the absence of Indians in this region (and the very small numbers in the US), there were very few people to challenge the negative propaganda about “heathen” Indians. Since Vivekananda traveled to different parts of the country, before and after the World Parliament of Religions, lecturing about India and Hinduism, he attracted a great deal of negative responses. His veracity was questioned repeatedly, and his facts repudiated. Thus the first public debates about India and Indians in the US, which actually involved an Indian, centered on Vivekananda.
Vivekananda spoke to many audiences in New England. According to Mary Louise Burke, during his stay at Metcalf, Massachusetts, Vivekananda spoke to Mrs. Sanborn’s guests at Breezy Meadows and also to the Ladies Club in Salem, where his discourses were received positively. He also addressed hostile Ramabai circles. He lectured several times in Boston, at the Procopiea Club, at the Harvard Philosophy Club. He spoke at Annisquam, Holliston, Lawrence, Lynn, Medford, Melrose, Northampton, Plymouth, Salem, Sherborne and Swampscott, and at Hartford, Connecticut.
A set of socially prominent, progressive-minded families were receptive to Vivekananda’s ideas. This group included Sara and Ole Bull, John and Mary Wright, the Hales, the Legetts, Sanborns, and Josephine MacLeod. They organized his visits and talks and tried to thwart some of the most vicious attacks made on him by other people in the region. Some members of this group, like Christina Greenstidel (Sister Christine) and Sara Ellen Waldo, became his disciples. This group was attracted to the message about an universal religion. As he repeated in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1896, he said, “[w]e must learn to love those who think exactly opposite to us. We have humanity for the background, but each must have his own individuality and thought. Push the sects forward and forward till each man and woman are sects unto themselves” (Burke 3:479).
Vivekananda also spoke to members of Harvard’s philosophy department; his reception was mixed. When Vivekananda addressed them, in March 1895, the influential metaphysicians of the time, William James, a pluralist and pragmatist, and Josiah Royce, an idealist, while respectful of Vivekananda, summed up his view of Eastern religions by stating, “the Hindoo and the Buddhist…are simply afraid of more experience, afraid of life” (James 39). While Vivekananda’s lectures on Vedanta did not fundamentally alter the outlook of the established philosophers, he clearly impressed some students; American idealist, William Hocking, later wrote that he rethought his philosophical foundations after listening to Vivekananda at Harvard.
But, like his experience elsewhere in the US, Vivekananda attracted the ire of people who had their own ideas of what India and Indians. When he was invited to speak before Ramabai circles—groups that had been set up after Pandita Ramabai’s visit soliciting money to help poor widows in India--these networks were highly critical of “hindoo” women’s status, pointing to the abject condition of child widows and Indian women. Vivekananda countered the broad attack on Indian womanhood by addressing the gendered and racist content of the messages by using the trope that Indian women were worshipped as mothers. He pointed out that, unlike any other religion, Hinduism was replete with female goddesses and strong female imagery, and that mothers were highly regarded across India. As he reflected upon the charges raised by the Ramabai circles, he wrote to Sarala Devi, by then a leading nationalist leader in Calcutta, “If talented and bold women like yourself, versed in Vedanta, go to England and preach…speak [to] America, if an Indian woman in Indian dress preach[es] there…there will rise a great wave which will inundate the whole Western world…you have power, wealth, intellect and education, will you forego this opportunity?” (quoted in Basu 158).
While Sarala Devi did not come to the US to preach, Vivekananda found another fiery, erudite leader to carry out the task of generating and spreading other ideas about Indians and India. Apart from her work on Hinduism, Sister Nibedita inspired a range of people, Nandalal Bose among them, to study Indian traditions, break away from European hegemony, and to chart paths towards multiple Indian modernities.
Reflections on Early Encounters
Reflecting on these early encounters, during the time of Durga puja, makes it hard not to draw a parallel between the image of a goddess armed with the most powerful weapons who takes on a hitherto unmet challenge and the battles of a lone individual who attracted the unjust approbation of the ignorant. The lesson of these early encounters is that such battles are often battles of ideas. As William Radice has pointed out in his seminal book on Vivekananda and the Modernisation of Hinduism, we have contemporary battles to take on, not the least of which are the unfinished battles against the misrepresentations of Vivekananda’s purpose and message. Vivekananda’s call for a great wave of erudite, powerful female leaders is not yet met. And, our battles against intolerance, and the barriers that make it difficult for us to live our lives by acknowledging our humane ties through socially just actions, need to be won.
1An expanded version of the socio-religious history of Indians in New England in the early 20th and 21st centuries is available in a chapter by Bandana Purkayastha and Anjana Narayan entitled Bridges and Chasms: Orientalism and the Making of Indians in New England, published in “Asian Americans in New England,” forthcoming from the University of New England Press.
[i] I am confining most of this discussion to Hindus, even though Sikhs, Muslims, and Christian Indians played a significant role in creating room for all of us in the US.
Sources for this article: Herbert Barringer et al, Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States. 1995; Shamita Basu, Religious Revivalism as Nationalist Discourse : Swami Vivekananda and New Hinduism in Nineteenth Century Bengal. 2002; Susan Bean, “Yankee Traders and Indian merchants, 1785-1865.” Festival of India in the United States 1985-1986. in Festival of India, 1982.; Marie Louise Burke, Swami Vivekananda in the West: New Discoveries. 6 vols. Kolkata: Advaita Ashram. 1983; S. Chandrasekhar, (ed.) From India to America: A Brief History of Immigration; Problems of Discrimination; Admission and Assimilation, 1982; Franklin Dexter, Biographical Sketches of Yale College with Annals of the College History. October 1701-May 1745, vol. 1, 1745; William James, Pragmatism, 1907; Joan Jensen, Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America,1988; Bandana Purkayastha “Asian Indians in Connecticut.” Research Paper Series. Vol. 2. 1999; Catherine Rolfson, Resistance, Complicity and Transcendence: A Postcolonial Study of Vivekananda’s Mission in the West. Unpublished MA thesis. Queens University, Canada, 2005; William Radice, (ed.). Swami Vivekananda and the Modernisation of Hinduism. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.