You might think that such a discovery is a boon, learning new details that other sources did not include. But what happens when the new source contradicts an old source? You could go with the source with more intimate knowledge of the topic. Or you could analyze which source provides the more specific explanations/details. In the end, you probably just need more and better sources to hone in on the exact details.
In my case, I'm trying to write a biographical sketch of Dalip Singh Saund, pulling all the details I know about him into a narrative. My sources include a recent documentary, which included photos as well as a video of Saund in an interview from the 1950s. I have drawn on Saund's autobiography, "Congressman From India" and his congressional campaign pamphlet, "What America Means to Me." Also, I was given a biographical essay, researched and written by an elder of the Sikh community in Washington, D.C. who had been on good terms with Saund's brother and extended family. Unfortunately, these documents sometimes contradict one another on details, such as what Saund hoped to do in India with his education or on family relationships back in India. Neither is it easy enough to just take the explanation given by Saund over other explanations, because in these areas, Saund's explanation remains sketchy or able to be interpreted differently.
One day, I hope to get more definitive knowledge on those details. Right now, I have to just make my best guess and "show my work" in the footnotes. Enjoy this first section of the immigration & settlement story of the first Asian American in the U.S. Congress. (In another post, I'll continue with how he married and built a family, helped win U.S. citizenship for Indians, served as Judge in southern California, and eventually ran for and served as a U.S. Representative.)
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In 1920, a 21-year-old Sikh man arrived in Berkeley, California, having traveled by boat from Bombay, to London, to New York City and then by train to the West Coast. Only three years previously the United States Congress had prohibited Indians (and others from the Asiatic Barred Zone) from immigrating or naturalizing, but Dalip Singh Saund arrived with one of the few legal statuses available for Asians. He came as a student. His mission: to learn horticulture and fruit canning in order to return home and modernize the production of his family’s large-scale fruit gardens with a mango cannery.(1) Yet Dalip Singh Saund’s education in the United States would shape his life’s direction in more ways than he imagined. In fact, he would remain in the United States, completing graduate school and moving on to a farming career, political activism, and eventually service in both state and federal government positions.
Saund’s graduate school years bore many similarities to those of other international students pursuing degrees in the United States. On one hand, he enjoyed participating in the freedoms and community available to those at American colleges. Whether learning in the classroom or playing field hockey on the green, Saund engaged with his American classmates as an equal and came to appreciate the freedoms (such as the freedom of speech) that they expected. Graduate school also provided Saund opportunities to build community with other Asian Indians in the area. For instance, Saund “lived in a group house maintained by the Sikh gurdwara in nearby Stockton.”(2) He also joined the Hindustan Association of America and became its president for a time. In fact, as an emerging leader of the Indian American community, he even received requests to speak to community groups about India and its independence movement. In this way, he grew in familiarity with and appreciation of the United States even as he also grew in his identification with his homeland.
Despite his identification with India’s political developments, graduate school also was the time when Saund began orienting himself towards staying in the United States. Upon the death of his uncle(3), the familial expectations behind Saund’s agricultural studies passed away. Saund had the freedom to pursue other career paths. As he reminisced, “I decided to go into my favorite and beloved subject of mathematics.”(4) In 1924, Saund received his PhD in Mathematics from the University of California in Berkely. Having come to love the United States, Saund sought an occupation there commensurate with his education.
Unfortunately for Saund, the 1920s were not a time when intelligence and higher education opened the same occupational doors for an Indian as it did for his white classmates. Although he could remain in the United States as a resident alien, Saund was not allowed to naturalize as a citizen. The United States government classified all Asians as “aliens ineligible for citizenship.”(5) Furthermore, in 1923 the U.S. Supreme Court had decisively denied citizenship to all immigrants from British India, rescinding Bhagat Singh Thind’s American citizenship on the grounds that he was not racially white “in accordance with the understanding of the common man.”(6) Without American citizenship, Saund could not secure even a teaching position.(7) Instead, in 1926 he migrated to southern California to join fellow Punjabi Sikhs who worked as farmers there. Rather than running a mango canning factory in the Indian province of Jammu, Saund became a foreman on his friend’s cotton farm in the Imperial Valley, putting his agricultural training to a different use than originally intended.(8)
The liberal ideals articulated by American icons such as Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson had initially inspired Saund to study abroad in the United States.(9) Yet Saund lived in the tension of seeing those ideals denied on many sides. In his homeland, British colonizers governed the Indian subcontinent and proved unwilling to extend independence to India, jailing independence activists and disregarding the proposals and demands of the Indian National Congress. In his new land of residence, state and federal laws limited how Saund could live in the United States because of his non-white racial status. Not only did federal laws exclude him from naturalization as an Asian, California’s Alien Land Acts also kept him from leasing or purchasing land in his own name.(10) On top of this political and economic exclusion, when Saund married a white American woman, she lost her American citizenship as a result of the Cable Act, a federal law that mandated loss of American citizenship for any woman who married an Asian. Sound’s graduate school experiences did not accurately reflect the his access to rights and freedoms in the rest of U.S. society.
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(1) In his July 12, 1959, interview on WCKT-TV (E. Samantha Cheng, Dalip Singh Saund: His Life, His Legacy documentary), Saund explained “I came here to study fruit canning with the desire to go back to India and start a canning factory to can mangoes.” Shamsher Singh Babra's biographical essay, "Personal Recollections and Reflections: Essay # I, Judge Dalip Singh Saund (1899-1973)," explained further that his uncle, Mia Singh, sent him to the U.S. to learn fruit cultivation technology so that he could return and manage/modernize the family gardens.
(2) E. Samantha Cheng, Dalip Singh Saund: His Life, His Legacy, documentary. https://www.heritageseries.us/dalip-singh-saund/
(3) Saund’s 1956 campaign pamphlet “What America Means to Me” describes the death of a brother. Shamsher Singh’s biography denotes “uncle,” explaining that Saund's term for this person is the name Sikhs use for their father's younger brother ("chacha").
(4) Dalip Singh Saund, Congressman from India (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1960)
(5) Following a series of federal laws and Supreme Court decisions, beginning with the Naturalization Law of 1870, which excluded from naturalization of all but “whites” and “Africans.”
(7) Shamsher Singh Babra, "Personal Recollections and Reflections: Essay # I, Judge Dalip Singh Saund (1899-1973)."
(8) Babra's essay describes him as a "rancher" in these years.
(9) Dalip Singh Saund, Congressman from India (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1960)
(10) California’s white farmers originally developed/pushed for these laws to avoid competition from Japanese immigrants.
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