Take a look at this portrait of Dalip Singh Saund, standing in the balcony of the Cannon Rotunda. “There is no room in the United States of America for second class citizenship – D.S. Saund,” the caption reads. A broad boned, heavy jawed figure, hair slicked back with that rich 1950s pomade which smelt of things like confidence, prosperity, land-of-the-free, he would have blended into any group of Congressmen stalking through the White House. But look closer and you spot the difference.
The Congressman from India was born in Chhajjalwaddi, a small village in Punjab, in 1899, to unlettered but affluent parents. In his memoirs, Saund records experiences that would have been familiar to many of the early Indian diaspora. The taste of food cooked by his mother, the homespun wisdom of the village, mangoes.
It was mangoes that first brought him to the US. After getting a BA degree in mathematics from the University of Punjab, he left home in 1920, promising to return in two or three years. The plan was to learn the art of canning fruit. Insteady, Saund got a PhD in mathematics for the University of California, Berkeley, and married an American woman. It would be 37 years before he saw India again.
Portrait of Dalip Singh Saund as a young man.
Un-American 'Hindus'
But a ruling by the US Supreme Court barred Asian Indians from citizenship in America. According to the court, the Hindu (the American establishment in the early 20th century tended to club all communities from South Asia under "Hindu") “is of such character and extent that the great body of our people instinctively recognize it and reject the thought of assimilation”. Denied the rights of citizenship, Saund was not eligible to teach at a university. From Sikh services held in Stockton, he learnt that many Indians had taken up cotton farming in Southern California’s Imperial Valley, so he headed there to find a job as a field foreman. Later, he started ranches of lettuce and hay, was almost ruined by the Great Depression but refused to declare bankruptcy.
In his spare hours, Saund read American literature and familiarised himself with the way California's government worked. Saund would go on to organise the India Association of America and become its first president. “Our purpose,” he says, “was to press for a Congressional bill restoring our right of citizenship.” A friend told him he was out of his mind to try getting citizenship for “2,000 poor Hindus” in wartime America.
The crazy plan took a few years, but the bill was passed in 1946. In 1949, Saund became an American citizen nearly three decades after he had first set foot in the country. The following year, he was elected to a judgeship but was unable to take up the post since he had not been a US citizen for a whole year. It was in 1952 that he finally became a judge of the Justice Court. From there, it was a relatively smooth transition to politics. In 1956, he ran for Congress as a Democrat candidate from 29th district Riverside and Imperial Counties. Saund won, making him the first Indian Congressman in America.
Saund with John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
Home of democracy
America must have held a keen, particular fascination for educated young men growing up in pre-Independence India, especially an India possessed with the dream of nationhood and freedom from the British. The Americans, after all, were the world’s first post-colonials.
In his campaign pamphlet, “What America Means to Me”, and in televised interviews, Saund describes how the idea of America first took hold of him. It was 1917, and the US had just joined the First World War. Indian troops were fighting for the British for their own reasons – self-rule in return for military participation was one of them. A young Saund pored over the papers, which were full of President Woodrow Wilson’s war time speeches: “I was deeply touched by the beauty of his slogans – ‘To Make The World Safe For Democracy’, ‘War To End War’, ‘Self-Determination For All Peoples’.” Wilson was soon joined by Abraham Lincoln in Saund’s imagination. Tracts on slavery would have resonated at a time when the nationalist narrative of cultural and economic subjugation had become popular among the struggling Indian masses.
The pamphlet 'What America Means To Me'. There's a handwritten note on the cover signed by Dalip Singh Saund Jr saying, 'Sorry I missed you – I hope you will consider voting for my father.'
A few years later, as his boat touched New York Harbour after being stranded for two days, Saund saw the mists rise from the Statue of Liberty. “Hundreds of my fellow passengers – immigrants from all parts of the world – stood with bared heads and with cheeks wet with tears,” he describes in the campaign pamphlet. “To them America was the land of opportunity. To me it was all that and more - it was the Home of Democracy.” Even accounting for the campaign rhetoric, the lines are moving. The American dream for many of Saund’s generation was perhaps the Indian dream, a generation’s yearning for independence.
Mother India
Even as he fought for citizenship in another country, Saund continued to identify with the aspirations of the freedom movement. In 1930, he wrote My Mother India, a tract that repudiated American historian Katherine Mayo’s polemical book, Mother India (1927), in which she listed the reasons why Indians did not deserve independence from British rule. Saund’s reply draws heavily from Tagore, Mueller and other Orientalists of the late 19th century. It is filled with the same civilisational pride as writings from that period, the same nostalgia for a distant past. It defends women’s place in Indian culture and rationalises the caste system, though admitting that there’s room for improvement.
Decades later, Saund would come full circle, making the journey back to India as an American Congressman speaking for his adopted country. He was one of the US’s Cold War ambassadors, sent to South Asia to combat the influence of communism.
By the time the Indian graduates started pouring into California’s Silicon Valley in the 1970s, Saund was an invalid and close to his death. What he made of this new wave of settlers is not known. But Saund had already fought and won the first battle for them – the right to be an American citizen.
A portrait of Dalip Singh Saund.
All images in the text courtesy of Eric Saund and the South Asian American Digital Archive.
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