Notes toward a prehistory
Caught between binaries, barred by anti-Asian exclusion laws, did some West Indians of Indian origin claim Blackness in early 20th-century America? Gaiutra Bahadur finds cases in the
archives that beg the question.
Gaiutra Bahadur’s book Coolie Woman was shortlisted in 2014 for the Orwell Prize in Great Britain. An assistant professor at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, she writes for The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Nation, and Dissent, among other publications. The recipient of literary residencies at The Bellagio Center in Italy and the MacDowell Colony in Vermont, she is a two-time winner of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Award for Prose and a winner of the Barbara Deming Memorial Award for American feminist writers. She has also been a fellow in residence at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the
New York Public Library and the Eccles Center for American Studies at the British Library. Born in Canje, Berbice, she earned her B.A. in English Literature,
with honors, at Yale University and her M.S. in Journalism at Columbia University. This article first appeared in Tides, the online magazine of the South
Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), where Bahadur currently holds a fellowship supported by the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create an online archive of Guyanese immigrants in the United States.
British Guiana’s first elected leader, the son of plantation workers who had arrived in that colony as infants on the same ship from India in 1901, almost became an immigrant in the United States.
In 1936, Cheddi Jagan arrived here on a visa to study at Howard University. In his memoir The West on Trial, he wrote: “The first thing I became very conscious of was the question of colour. Somehow, in the U.S., a nonwhite is always reminded of the colour of his skin. This was for me an entirely new experience.” He recounted that his classmates, with an exoticizing flourish, nicknamed him Rajah because he was the only student of Indian origin at the historically Black college. In his seven years in Washington, D.C., New York and Chicago, he repeatedly found himself an outlander in the borders between Black and white, an appalled witness to segregation. He also found that the color of his skin, less dark than other Indian-looking students forced in the South to sit in the rear of streetcars and buses, gave him the ability to choose which side of the American binary to ally himself with.
Told that, as an “East Indian,” he could go to cinemas in white sections of Washington, D.C., he chose the “Jim Crow cinemas.” In theatres with partitions down the middle, he chose to sit in the Black section. On a streetcar in Virginia with a Howard classmate who was