The ground that felt like home: The Kalha family

I

In 1967 my grandmother lived in North Dakota. The week before, Washington DC; Nebraska, three months later. After three months in Michigan and six-and-a-half months in all, she touched down in Bombay and, elated, literally touched the ground. The ground that felt like home. A farmer, she has a unique connection with land -- today, she maintains a beautiful garden in Chandigarh, Punjab.

Her father was a King’s Commissioned Indian Officer (KCIO) trained at Sandhurst, the Royal Military Academy. His name was Col. Rajinder Singh Kalha, and he had dreamed of retiring to a farm. After his time as Surveyor General of India, he bought a plot of land and moved his family to the country. He and his five daughters leveled out the dunes and began planting crops. Years later, when my grandmother was 26, she was given the opportunity to spend half a year in the US as part of the International Farm Youth Exchange. The second oldest sister, my grandmother was the first member of my family to travel to the Americas, the "new world," and a new world it was. Cultivation in the US was profoundly different.

Americans tilled massive farms and harvested only one crop. Everything was mechanized. Roaring tractors and sprawling, thousand-acre farms. Overproduction was so problematic that farmers were paid to leave parts of their fields fallow.

Her stay in the US spanned from May to November of 1967. There was a week of orientation in Washington DC where she was assigned a local family and instructed on how to eat at a table, sit on a chair, and use cutlery. The irony; her father graduated from Sandhurst; her uncle and grandfather were awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and the Order of the British Empire (OBE), respectively! In any case, 67 countries participated in the program, and my grandmother met farmers from Israel, the Netherlands, Denmark, Uganda, Rwanda, and several other countries. She was given eight dollars upon her arrival. After orientation, she stayed with six families, each for four weeks, three in North Dakota and three in Michigan, with a one-week midterm conference in Nebraska. She watched Camelot at a drive-in movie theater. She listened to Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Elvis Presley, and Connie Francis.

She was involved with farming and household activities with each host family. The first family had six sons. The boys put on their gumboots and trudged through the mud each morning to milk the cows. Their poor mother was extremely overworked: constantly cooking, cleaning, and washing jeans. The second family was of Polish descent. In addition to farming, they worked part-time on the railroads. The third family was German. With them, she saw Mount Rushmore, a rodeo, a horse auction, and an Indigenous reservation. Months later, she was enchanted by the sprawling apple orchards of northern Michigan. At the end of the trip, she stayed in Vermont for 10 days. Her host family later gifted her an acre of land, a Maple forest on a hill, with a beautiful view overlooking a river.

Over 30 years later, her son moved to the US with my mother. Permanently.

II

Sikh immigration to the United States began at the end of the 19th century. By the year 1900, estimates report that there were approximately 2,000 Sikhs in the US, living primarily in California. The city of Stockton was the site of the first Sikh temple, known as a Gurudwara. The early Sikh population in the US was almost entirely men, the vast majority of whom worked in farming. Hundreds of years of “agricultural heritage” equipped Sikhs to pursue economic independence in the American Frontier.

Racial animus and anti-Asian sentiment were rampant at the turn of the 20th century, and Sikhs were categorized as part of a broader threat of “dusky aliens.” In 1907, a mob of 600 white men laid waste to a predominantly Sikh lumber mill in Bellingham, Washington, and further attacked some 250 Sikh homes. Similar riots took place in Seattle and Everett. That year, disgruntled members of working-class white communities had founded the Asiatic Exclusion League, which lobbied policymakers and took part in violent measures to address Asian immigration.

Overriding President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, the Immigration Act of 1917 enhanced restrictions on entry to the US with provisions that expanded the categories of inadmissible immigrants to “idiots,” “imbeciles,” and “Indians,” among others.

The reversal of the Act by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 eliminated the “alien ineligible to citizenship” category and set up quotas for immigration from “Asiatic barred zones.” With this policy came a new wave of Sikh immigration. As time went on, there was further relaxation of stringent immigration policies which allowed for the growth of the Sikh-American population to 500,000 today.

III

I’m the third generation of my family to live in the United States. I was also the first American citizen. My grandmother’s experiences in the States helped to shape her. Without them, my father might never have moved here in 2000. I’ve never been to North Dakota, Nebraska, or Michigan. Indeed, my grandmother knows the American heartlands better than I do. On the other hand, I’ve had the special but not rare experience of tutoring both my parents for their citizenship tests.

The experiences of early Sikh Americans are part of the collective Sikh diasporic consciousness and certainly resonate with me. I find the stories of immigrants resisting oppression more powerful than their stories of oppression itself. It didn’t come up in my historical analysis, but the story of Bhagat Singh Thind is one that I think belongs in school curriculums. After fighting in the US Army in the First World War, he sued for his citizenship and ultimately made his case before the Supreme Court. His citizenship was granted, revoked, granted, and then revoked by United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind in 1923. He earned a Ph.D. in theology and literature from UC Berkeley and was a writer and lecturer on Sikh and comparative philosophy, making extensive reference to Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau. He finally obtained citizenship in 1936.

I doubt my parents know who he was. The truth is that recent waves of “aeroplane immigrants” and their children are disconnected from the legacy of xenophobia and the struggle for equality. For those of us who seek it out, however, its study can help make sense of our place in American society and situate our personal experiences within a broader context.