In the Margins

Is a high-caste Hindu, of full Indian blood born in Punjab, India, a white person?

This question was asked before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1923 The plaintiff, Bhagat Singh Thind, was an educated English speaking Indian immigrant and U.S. army veteran who had already tried to naturalize twice as a U.S. citizen by arguing that he was white.

And that's because at the time, Congress limited naturalization to free white people and those of African ancestry and nativity.

So what does this little known but consequential court case tell us about the larger story of white supremacy and citizenship in America?

On July 4th, 1913, 20 year old Bhagat Singh Thind arrived aboard the S.S. Minnesota to Seattle, Washington.

Over 14.5 million immigrants came to the U.S. between 1900 and 1920.

Thind was one of 8,000 South Asians who had emigrated to the United States during this period of mass immigration.

At the time of Thind's arrival, the U.S. had a population of over 92 million people.

So South Asians on the whole made up a tiny fraction of the population.

The few Indians who came were primarily from the Punjab region, which at the time was ruled by the British.

Most came from rural farming villages and small towns in India, and in the US were consigned to backbreaking work for very little pay.

South Asians arrived at a time of rampant anti-Asian hysteria.

And Indians quickly became the next iteration of a perceived "Asiatic invasion".

A 1911 U.S. Immigration Commission even called Indians "the least desirable race of immigrants admitted thus far".

Six years later in 1917, all Indian and most Asian immigration was banned through the creation of a barred Asiatic zone.

Asian immigrants are extremely diverse.

They come from many, many different countries throughout Asia.

They have different histories, different cultures, different religions, different ethnicities.

However, once in the United States, they were more often than not lumped together as "Orientals" or as an "Asiatic Invasion".

And what this does in the American mind is that it sets South Asians into this already existing framework of Asian immigrants being economic competition, Asian immigrants being unassimilable aliens, Asian immigrants being a threatening horde.

Citizenship was and still is a necessary pathway to social and economic opportunity.

Without citizenship, many states barred Asian immigrants from voting, becoming doctors, lawyers, or government workers.

They were restricted from owning land and could not protect themselves from deportation.

The only way for immigrant men like Thind to become U.S. citizens was to naturalize, which is the process of voluntarily becoming a U.S. citizen, as opposed to being born one.

The first federal law on naturalization was the Federal Naturalization Act of 1790 which limited citizenship to free white people.

After the Civil War, the Naturalization Act was amended to include "aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent", granting citizenship to millions of Black people previously enslaved and living without citizenship rights.

Although citizenship did not confer equal rights.

At the time there was no comprehensive legal definition of whiteness.

But there was legal precedent.

Most European immigrants who arrived during the 19th and early 20th century were able to naturalize, and their whiteness was rarely contested by the courts.

Though we know they suffered periods of acute discrimination.

Meanwhile, it was very difficult for immigrants from across Asia to naturalize.

This included not only Indian immigrants, but also Syrians, Afghans and Armenians who nevertheless still applied for and sometimes won citizenship.

How?

Well, not all judges agreed on what made someone white or white enough, but appearances mattered.

According to legal historian Hardeep Dhillon, "Embracing Western dress, hairstyles, and English in U.S. courts fostered a sense of visual whiteness and upper-class decorum that was required of those proximate to whiteness to naturalize as U.S. citizens".

In 1917, the same year Indians were barred from immigrating, Thind submitted his declaration of intention to naturalize to a county clerk in Oregon State, and wrote in his color as white.

Thind hoped to join the very small group of mostly well-to-do Indian immigrants who had successfully naturalized in lower courts.

While he waited for his application to be approved, Thind enlisted in the U.S. Army.

Despite rampant xenophobia, the military actively recruited immigrants and non-citizens to serve.

And so Thind received his first certificate of U.S. citizenship while stationed at Camp Lewis in Washington State.

But just four days later, the federal government revoked his citizenship.

In 1919, Thind applied for citizenship a second time, but a federal agent from the Bureau of Naturalization tried to convince the court that Thind could not naturalize.

However, the district judge acknowledged Thind's military service and "his genuine affection for the constitution, laws, customs and privileges of this country".

He also referred to a line of cases that proved Indians were white.

And so on November 18th, 1920 Thind was granted citizenship a second time.

But this ruling would not stand.

The Department of Justice had been tracking Thind's applications from the beginning.

The government wanted to prove once and for all that Indians were not white and planned to use Thind as their test case.

So the Department of Justice appealed the ruling, and the case eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

On January 11th, 1923, the Supreme Court began hearing arguments in the United States versus Bhagat Singh Thind.

This would be Thind's final chance to become a citizen by proving that he was white.

The Supreme Court explicitly framed the case as a test of the Naturalization Act and its intended meaning of whiteness.

To prove Thind's whiteness, his lawyers built on previous naturalization cases, pulling together arguments that had convinced lower courts that Indians were white people.

First they argued that as a high caste Indian, Thind was racially pure because high caste families did not intermarry with other communities.

Further, his lawyers argued that because of this supposed racial purity, Thind shared a common Aryan ancestry with Europeans.

And as an Aryan, Thind was Caucasian and therefore white.

The now debunked notion of a common ancestry due to a supposed Aryan invasion would later be used by the Nazis, but that is a whole other video.

The Supreme Court unanimously rejected all of Thind's arguments.

Ironically, they rejected the scientific racism used by Thind's lawyers but to equally racist ends.

In the final ruling, Justice Sutherland noted that while a "blond Scandinavian and brown Hindu may have once had a common ancestor, the average man, would see unmistakable and profound differences between them today".

Thind just didn't look white enough to those nine white men.

According to the court, all Indians were definitively of "Asiatic stock" and therefore ineligible for U.S. citizenship.

Period.

The follow up from the trial was swift and devastating.

Indians became the first group in the U.S. to have their citizenship revoked.

Between 1923 and 1926, over 70 naturalized Indians were stripped of their citizenship.

They found themselves in social, economic and legal limbo along with their wives and children.

This included the Bagai family.

Vaishno Das Bagai emigrated with his family from Peshawar, part of modern day Pakistan.

In 1915, Bagai settled in San Francisco with his wife Kala and three young sons, Brij Madan and Ram.

Bagai embraced his new life in America.

He wore western suits, spoke fluent English, and adopted western mannerisms.

He even opened a store, Bagai's Bazaar.

But the Thind ruling unraveled the life of the Bagai family, who all lost their citizenship and then their livelihood.

In 1928, Vaishno tried to visit his relatives in India, but was denied a U.S. passport.

This was the final straw for Vaishno who took his own life in both grief and protest.

Vaishno sent a letter to the San Francisco Examiner which published wrenching excerpts.

"Is life worth living in a gilded cage?

Obstacles this way, blockades that way, and the bridges burnt behind".

The Thind ruling emboldened the U.S. government to revoke citizenship from other immigrants, including Mexicans and Afghans.

It also set the stage for the most comprehensive and restrictive Immigration Act to date, which passed Congress with overwhelming support in 1924.

Thind finally received U.S. citizenship in 1935 through a law that permitted all veterans, regardless of race, to naturalize.

He earned his PhD in Theology and English Literature at UC Berkeley and lectured on metaphysics.

Thind passed away in 1967.

During the last two decades of Thind's life, immigration and naturalization policies slowly changed.

A series of federal laws beginning in 1946, opened immigration up to Indians once more.

Though these laws still maintained quotas that privileged certain countries over others.

Even so, the decades that followed saw large scale immigration from India and other Asian countries.

As of 2020, over 5.5 million people identified as Indian or Pakistani in the US census.

That same year, the city of Berkeley, California named a street after Kala Bagai, Vaishno's widow, almost a century after her family had been driven out.

After the tragedy of Vaishno's death, Kala persevered despite a very uncertain future.

She remarried, put her three sons through college, and became a U.S. citizen in 1946.

She dedicated herself to building community for other South Asian immigrants, hosting functions for women who immigrated as restrictions loosened after 1965.

By the time Kala's death in 1983, she was affectionately known as Mother India.

Race still animates our discussions around immigration.

In fact, immigration persists as a top campaign issue.

And our elections still feature explicitly racist rhetoric about immigrants.

Legal scholar Amanda Frost estimates that over the last two centuries, millions of people have had their citizenship revoked.

And denaturalization continues to this day, whether for small errors on applications or the actual wrongful deportation of American citizens, particularly those living near the Mexican border.

As the daughter of South Asian immigrants, we constantly question what it means to be American.

Balancing the desire to belong without losing one's cultural identity is a perpetual tightrope that all immigrants must navigate to this day.

Bhagat Singh Thind's case and Vaishno Das Bagai serve as reminders of the struggles of not just South Asian immigrants, but all immigrants who exhibit courage and resilience in the face of incredible uncertainty to claim a piece of the American Dream.