Doctorji the Divorcé

Abstract

Using newspaper articles and previously sealed court records, this article analyses Bhagat Singh Thind through his almost entirely overlooked short and turbulent marriage to Inez Buelen, a marriage that occurred less than a year after the Supreme Court decision that ruled Thind ineligible for American citizenship and only months into his decades-long career as a metaphysical lecturer. In contrast to the prevailing view that Thind’s sense of his own race was unknowable, or that he defined himself as White as part of a legal strategy or a matter of expediency in gaining citizenship, I argue that the marriage and subsequent divorce show that he consistently claimed Whiteness for years after his Supreme Court case, both in public and in private, and on the basis of descent, geography, caste, racial science, previous court rulings, and his own blood.