‘LOST’ IN THE CITY

Abstract

Most popular and scholarly understandings of the South Asian presence in New York City have treated the passage of the 1965 Hart‐Celler Immigration Act as a kind of originary moment. The immediate post‐1965 generation of immigrant professionals and their now grown‐children are often both the authors and protagonists of the story of South Asians in New York. This obscures not only the multiplicity of (im)migrant lives in the present, but the history of South Asian migration and settlement in the city from the turn of the 20th century up to the 1960s. A consideration of the cultures pre‐1965 ‘South Asian New York’ requires a shift in focus from the spectacular and the commercial to the everyday. This shift takes us to a different set of stories – those of early 20th century Indian radicals, and perhaps more importantly, of escaped Indian maritime workers who were settling in areas like Harlem during the 1920s, 1930s, and the 1940s – as well as a different set of spaces – sailors' boarding houses, early Indian restaurants, specific New York City neighbourhoods and blocks – in our understanding of South Asian history diaspora culture.