Despite having gone through years of a liberal education that focused on the history of immigration to the United States, especially that of historically marginalized and racialized communities and people, I had never heard of Dalip Singh Saund before embarking upon this project. Perhaps this was due to the nuanced perspective that his narrative necessitates—in no way is Saund a cut-and-dry historical figure and his life story, accomplishments, and impact on American history can be read and interpreted in many different ways. Saund was the first Asian American, the first Indian American, and the first member of a non-Abrahamic faith to be elected to the United States Congress. His election to federal office was a milestone for the United States, ostensibly representing, as Saund often said himself, how equal and diverse the American government truly is. His autobiography, Congressman from India (1960), employs patriotic and anti-communist rhetoric in order to obscure the struggles and hardships that Saund and the generations of Indian immigrants that both preceded and succeeded him experienced in the United States during a time of highly racist and restrictive immigration policies and rampant anti-Asian racism.
How can we as Americans make our immigration system more equitable and accessible to all? How can we uplift systematically impoverished and marginalized communities and create a system that is based on inclusion and compassion rather than exclusion and greed? What is the role of racialized politicians such as Saund in the transformation of our immigration paradigm and the promotion of a just and equitable society? These questions have remained relevant throughout the 20th and 21st centuries and were at the forefront of my mind throughout this project. By exploring two personal letters that Saund received during his tenure as congressman from 1957 to 1963, I will illustrate how conceptions of American exceptionalism are exported internationally to solicit Asian immigrants into immigrating to the United States despite the hardship that they are bound to face and how the lived experiences of Indian immigrants in the United States reveal the illusory nature of the American Dream.
In 1960, nearly forty years after Dalip Singh Saund’s immigration to the United States, Ranjit Singh Chawla from Indore (a city in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh) wrote to Saund asking him for help funding higher education abroad for his two sons. When reading Chawla’s letter, I sensed that, much like Saund’s autobiography, there was much left unwritten between the lines. Chawla dedicates the majority of the letter to the unabashed flattery of Saund and extols his various virtues while politely mentioning his sons almost as an afterthought. He writes that he was “influenced and impressed by the zest and spirit [Saund is] imbued with even at this age of 61 for extending help to the poverty-stricken people of the underdeveloped lands” and claims that Saund “is in the centre of the situation and properly equipped with the resources to help secure admission for these boys.” Chawla’s deferential tone clearly illustrates his belief in Saund’s relative socioeconomic privilege in the national contexts of both India and the United States and implies a certain denigration of his own home country. Simultaneously it feels as if Chawla’s flattering tone is not meant for Saund in particular but is meant for an idealized form of the U.S. government that Saund represents as an abstracted historical figure who symbolizes and validates hegemonic narratives of the American dream and American exceptionalism. Chawla has complete trust in Saund’s ability to help his sons because he has faith in the American dream and in America as a land of opportunity for all. Chawla’s tone and the unwritten implications of his letter reveal how Saund is used as an abstraction of an idealized version of the U.S. government as a whole and reveals how narratives of American exceptionalism such as the American Dream are exported internationally and influence potential immigrants’ perspectives on America as well as their own home country.
While Chawla’s letter reveals the transnational influence of the American dream, Banarsi Dass’s 1959 letter, sent to Saund asking for help with his imminent deportation, illustrates how the lived experiences and struggles of Indian immigrants in the United States reveal the falsity of such narratives of American exceptionalism. Dass explains in English riddled with missing words and grammatical errors that he and his wife immigrated to the U.S. in 1955 on student and visitor visas respectively. Their immigration sponsor had died a few years earlier and the Dasses were taking care of their sponsor’s twelve-year-old son alongside their own two-year-old daughter. Stretched thin attempting to financially support his suddenly enlarged family, Dass was not able to meet the stringent academic and financial requirements placed upon him by the U.S. immigration system and was facing deportation. He begs for Saund to remedy his situation, writing “Please help us. We no have nobody here except you who can help us.” Dass’s hardship, which continues to be commonplace to this day, reveals the reality of U.S. immigration: the U.S. is not a land of opportunity for all regardless of race or socioeconomic status but is instead a land where a small subset of people are awarded certain privileges and where immigrants must constantly prove and re-prove their validity as Americans and as people.
I was quite moved reading Dass’s letter. The helplessness that he was feeling came through clearly, and I couldn’t help but think about the perpetually increasing number of Black and Brown families that still go through the same experience today. Where Chawla was forward and confident with his flattery, Dass seems meek and almost desperate—someone who had fallen on hard times and was willing to do whatever it takes to secure a successful future for himself and for his family. Reading this letter after Chawla’s letter felt especially on the nose; the illusion of the American Dream was unraveling before my eyes as Dass’s lived experience contradicted Chawla’s idealized image of America and revealed the illusory nature of national and international narratives of American exceptionalism.
I began to feel frustrated with Saund for not making enough material change in the intergenerational experiences of Asian immigrants in America. I became disappointed in his unwillingness to think outside of the box and explore avenues of radical sociopolitical change in order to consistently advocate for immigrants and increase their quality of life in the United States. It seemed as if Saund was content with, or had at least resigned himself to, the fact that countless other Asian immigrants faced and continue to face interpersonal and institutional racism in the United States, as long as he was successfully included into the American political and social spheres. Saund’s participation and active engagement with the same political system that caused him and other Asian immigrants such as Banarsi Dass so much hardship reveals a certain complicity in the perpetuation of the racial and socioeconomic inequality that has defined America since its inception and obscures the reality of living as an Asian immigrant in the United States.
In reality, much of my frustrations lay not with Dalip himself, but rather with both the sociopolitical stagnation, inaction, and outright racism that defines the U.S. government and immigration system to this day as well as the explicit discrepancies between the idealized version of the United States propagated through narratives of American exceptionalism and the actual lived experiences of immigrants and marginalized communities in the U.S. In a way, much like Chawla and Dass, I was also guilty of interpolating an idealized version of the American government through the character of Saund. Saund after all is just one person, and politicians, despite consistently being mythologized and pseudo-deified in popular culture, are victim to the same systemic inequities and challenges as the rest of us.
Spanning the hundred years between Saund’s immigration in 1920 and my writing this, solicited by narratives of American exceptionalism, thousands of immigrants have faced struggles coming to the United States and attempting to integrate into American society and culture. With tremendous pressure placed upon them by the U.S. immigration system to rapidly assimilate and succeed both socially, academically, and financially, the immigrant experience was and continues to be shaped and defined by highly racialized and restrictive legislation. The narrative of Asian immigrants in the United States, as revealed through the letters sent to Saund by fellow and prospective Indian immigrants, clearly reveals the illusory nature of the American Dream and illustrates how historical narratives such as Saund’s political and social success are wielded both domestically and internationally to shape immigrants’ perspectives and desires and obscure the struggles demonstrated by their lived experiences. If we don’t want immigrant families of the present and future to experience the same hardships as those from the past and if we want to make tangible changes in the lives and narratives of immigrants in the United States, we need to emphasize radical class solidarity, community/labor organizations, and a progressive education while moving the focus away from mythologized political and historical figures such as Saund and the idealized narratives of American exceptionalism that they are meant to exemplify.