Dalip Singh Saund Collection - Part 1

This month I had the honor and excitement of perusing one of the key archival collections of my dissertation - the Dalip Singh Saund Collection. As readers may know from my previous biographical sketch, D.S. Saund was the fist Asian American U.S. Congressman, serving from 1957-62. His archival collection is privately held by D.S. Saund’s grandson, Eric Saund, so it wasn’t as easy to access as the ones I’ve viewed at libraries in the past. In fact, initially I didn’t even know that it existed! After not finding any of Saund’s documents in the Library of Congress archives, a librarian put me on to the Dalip Singh Saund website, created by Eric Saund to commemorate and provide sources about his grandfather’s story. While the primary sources hosted there helped me think through my biographical sketch, I wrote Eric an email asking about any other documents. I was quite pleased when Eric told me he had a collection of other things in his basement and invited me to come see them.

The collection itself has been well curated by the family. Kept in 5 large WWII-era crates and a collection of plastic bins, various sorts of documents are ordered together in folders or plastic bags. I could easily find materials about D.S. Saund’s business, his years as judge, his correspondence, etc. Because Eric hadn’t yet divided out “Family” from “Archival” items, the collection also helped me to get a more wholistic understanding of Saund as a person. For instance, one bag of papers related just to his wife’s activities while in D.C. Some hundred Christmas cards might not be much desired by library collectors, but they helped me to find a friendship connection between the Saund family and Bhagat Singh Thind’s family. (He was the plaintiff in the Supreme Court’s famous United States vs. Bhagat Singh Third naturalization case.) The two were close enough to be on one another’s top-30 Christmas card lists! Or consider that Eric shared with me the contents of an old suitcase belonging to his father, revealing a bit about Saund’s “son who went to Korea.” 

Still, definitely one of the most helpful aspects of visiting a privately-held collection was my ability to converse with Saund’s family member as I pursued my research. During lunch breaks and at the end of the day, Eric would tell me stories about his grandfather and the family. About his dad and aunts helping out on the campaign trail. About what happened during Saund’s 12 years of life after suffering a stroke while in office. 

Furthermore, I could check some of the analysis I was forming in realtime. For instance, I was amazed at not finding more connections from Saund to local South Asians. He seemed to sell fertilizer to mostly white American farmers. He was one of the few Indians in his beloved Toastmaster’s club. And his campaign staff seemed to be mostly white Americans, beyond his immediate family. I had assumed that working in agriculture in a district with a larger minority population of agriculture-working Punjabis would mean that Saund socialized with many other South Asians, but his collection points, rather, to being well integrated into his local white American community. This made me reconsider my initial skepticism of comments by Saund, where he stated that he hadn’t experienced racism from white Americans. Earlier, I had assumed this was said just to curry favor with a white public. Perhaps he actually hadn’t experienced any?!

Eric Saund helped me put this into better context. He explained that his grandfather seemed to hold on to the good he experienced from people and allow negative experiences to fade from his memory. This gave him an eternal optimism and enthusiasm for pushing forward, despite coming to a country that excluded him from citizenship and careers that fit his level of education and training. I now think that this worked in tandem with having such a large number of good relations with white Americans. Likely, perceiving his experiences of racism as the work of an individual allowed him to see each white American he came upon as a potential friend and ally, which in turn gave him a larger base to overcome the racist bent of many social systems and public opinion at the time. His marriage to a European immigrant undoubtedly aided his perceptions on that as well. What good fortune for Saund to have been pushing at the door of change for South Asian immigration, naturalization, and societal participation at a time when the larger political and economic landscape was beginning to open for such changes as well. His attitude, his era, and his social network all contributed to his successful bid as America’s first Asian American U.S. Congressman.

I'll be eternally thankful for Eric Saund's generosity in letting me view his grandfather's collection. And I'm excited to see what insights I develop as I study my scans of the materials in greater detail.