George Gmelch

Abstract: I received this unique volume, the first major study ofSouth Asian migration to the V .S. and Canada, on the very day the best known Indian American, Zubin Mehta, announced his resignation as music director of the New York Philharmonic. Somehow it seemed an ironic conjunction. Much of Joan jensen's comprehensive analysis addresses the struggles of Asian Indians to find their place among Americans who, if they thought of them at all, saw the Indians in caricatured images (turbaned swamis, barefoot fakirs, and other Kiplingesque types), or as foreign competitors as mysterious as the other Asians, "the Orientals" and just as driven. To see them as prominentmembers of"our" society was, until a mere decade ago, almost unimaginable. From 1870 to the beginning of World War I, thousands of people from the Indian subcontinent came to North America as economic migrants and political refugees. Vancouver was the main port ofentry. While there were Hindus and Moslems in their ranks, most of the migrants were Sikhs from the Punjab who, like the Chinese who preceeded them by several decades, found employment on rail gangs, saw mills, and gold mines. Later many ofthem were to move down the Coast to work and eventually to excel in the growing argobusinesses of California. Like the Chinese and others from East Asia, the Indian workers were exploited by their bosses and, because they were frequently willing to work for low wages, resented by "EuroAmerican" laborers who saw them as unfair competitors. Mounting animosity in the V.S. as well as in Canada led to moves to stem the flow. In this country, Indians were increasingly included under the rubric of undesirable aliens. In the early decade of the century, the jingoistic Japanese and Korean Exclusion League changed its name to the Asiatic Exclusion League. Its program served as a platformforthosewhowould-andeventually did cut off migration from India (it was not until July 1946 that Congress passed a bill granting naturalization rights and allowing a very limited number of Indians to enter the country). Workers were not the only people who came from the sub-continent prior to the passage of the restrictive legislation. There were merchants, especially Parsis, and there were students, many of them "radicals" who favored independence for their country and who, in many cases, returned home to participate in the rebellions that began in 1914. Among much else that is essential reading for students of Indian migration, Jensen details the trials and tribulations of those who came and stayed in North America (and those who came and went home again) before the first World War. She describes the lives of those who grew up in the V.S. and Canada between the wars and during World War II. Her social history ends with a bittersweet commentaryon the fact that Indian independence, while clearly ensuring a new respect ofIndians in foreign countries, including the V.S. and Canada, had a devastating effect on many of the areas from which the majority of Indian Americans had come. The struggle and especially the civil war on the sub-continent led not only to partition into two and, later, three countries, but to the shattering of the Punjab area that straddles what became India and Pakistan.