First Punjabi women in the US

Nicole Ranganath

The growing presence of South Asians around the world is a significant feature of modern global history. India’s diaspora is the largest in the world with over 3.2 crore people of Indian origin living overseas. In 2020, there were over 44 lakh people of Indian origin living in the United States. This year, we are witnessing a groundswell of enthusiasm for Kamala Harris, the first US Vice President and presidential nominee of Indian heritage. But what do historians know about the first South Asian women who immigrated to America? Their stories remain mostly absent from history books and collective memory. Although largely forgotten, women’s lives represent an essential part of the complex past of South Asians in this country.

The earliest community of South Asian immigrants in America were Punjabi Sikh labourers and farmers who settled along the west coast of North America at the turn of the 20th century. Nearly 90 per cent of the roughly 6,500 South Asians in the US were Punjabi Sikhs on the eve of World War I.

The preponderance of Punjabi Sikhs among the early South Asians in America stemmed from the deep dislocations in Punjab in the wake of British annexation in 1849. British colonial policies created growing economic hardships for farmers in central Punjab, encouraging many young men to migrate overseas for financial opportunity. Sikh men first travelled the world as soldiers and police personnel throughout the British Empire. Sikh soldiers stationed in East Asia heard about promising opportunities in North America, prompting them to venture forth by ship to Vancouver and San Francisco.

In the US, Punjabi labourers faced a rising tide of racial antipathy and laws barring their immigration, citizenship and other civil liberties in the 1910s and 1920s. Very few Punjabi men were able to bring their wives to the US until after 1946, when immigration and citizenship were finally restored on a limited basis.

Scholars such as Renisa Mawani, Nayan Shah and Harish Puri have written insightfully about the early South Asians in North America, and yet there is little published work about women. Rattan Kaur may be the first Punjabi Sikh woman to settle in the United States when she arrived in 1910. She joined her husband Bakhshish Singh Dhillon, who had entered the country in the 1890s and who was deeply involved in the Ghadar movement, calling for the ouster of the British in India, that was headquartered in California. Their daughters, Karm and Kartar, were likely the first Sikh women born in the US, in 1914 and 1915.

One of the richest accounts of Rattan Kaur’s life was written by her daughter, Kartar. In her memoir, ‘A Parrot’s Beak’, Kartar captures her fraught relationship with her mother. Later in life, Kartar felt empathy for her mother’s circumstances. The family lived an itinerant life shuttling between farm camps from Oregon to California wherever her husband could find work. While her father enjoyed the company of other men, Kartar recalls, “My mother had no one, no other Indian women to keep her company.” “Imagine!” Kartar exclaimed in an interview, giving birth to “eight children in 16 years of married life!” Her mother spoke constantly of her youth in Punjab where she hoped to return, but she never saw her family or home again, and died at a young age.

The early South Asian Americans gathered in support of two common causes: Stockton gurdwara and Ghadar movement

The Stockton gurdwara was the centre of South Asian American life (it was the first to be established in the United States, in 1912). A few times each year, the South Asian community from across the western US would trek long distances to Stockton to celebrate religious events. It was also a vital gathering place for the Ghadar cause, in which labourers and intellectuals gave rousing speeches and sang anti-colonial songs. As Kartar recalls: “Every member of my family was a part of it. We lived for the Ghadar Party.”

Rattan Kaur saw the Ghadar movement as part of her family’s historical commitment to fighting against injustice. In her home, she proudly displayed a picture of her ancestors, the Kuka Sikhs. “Lashed to the mouths of cannons by smartly uniformed British soliders, they were blown to bits for their rebellion,” Kartar recalls. Throughout her life, Kartar carried the values that she learned as a youngster, having been involved in Ghadar activities, toward championing other progressive causes in solidarity with women and workers of diverse cultural backgrounds.

It wasn’t until the late 1940s that a generational cohort of South Asian women arrived in America. They came at a critical turning point in the community’s history. The community had dwindled to about 2,000 in 1940 due to the exclusionary immigration policies. The funerals of the Punjabi settlers formed the main rite of passage. The community comprised bachelors who lived together in dilapidated farm bunkhouses, and men who had married women from diverse cultural backgrounds, especially from Mexico. In fact, a vibrant Punjabi-Mexican American community thrived between the 1910s and the 1940s. Karen Leonard has documented the important role that Mexican women played in the Punjabi community’s development. Some of the men began to sponsor their wives from Punjab in the late 1940s from whom they had been separated for years, often decades.

The new wave of women who began arriving around 1950 joined their husbands in farming in California’s Central Valley, including Yuba City, a small town north of Sacramento. After World War II, Yuba City attracted a growing number of Punjabi Americans from across the western US, as well as newcomers. The Punjabi Americans, who largely came from farming backgrounds, relocated to Yuba City to pursue peach farming, which offered quick returns on investment.

The young wives from Punjab were mentally unprepared for the world they encountered in California. Growing up in the tumultuous years before and during India’s Partition of 1947, the women were married in their early teens and had received little formal education. Most had never travelled far beyond their villages. The four-day journey by plane from Delhi to San Francisco with multiple stops for refuelling was frightening and disorienting. The women also expressed their isolation and homesickness in the early years. Within a decade, many families saved enough capital to buy single-family homes. Peach farming was labour intensive, and the community’s success in farming involved the labour of women and children as well as men. Harbhajan Kaur Takher, one of the women known for her exceptional farm labour, recalled that she irrigated 40 acres of land, drove tractors, picked peaches, and hauled them to the stations for processing. Later, these women and their children helped manage the family farm operations.

The women formed an intimate circle of friendships. Harbans Kaur Panu described her relationships with other Punjabi women as closer than those she enjoyed with her own family: “The (ladies) were my friends, they were my parents, they were everything to me.”

These young women experienced intense pressure to conform to the cultural norms of rural America in the Fifties and Sixties. Nand Kaur, the matriarch of Yuba City’s Punjabi Sikh community, advised the newcomers to wear American clothes in public to avoid hostility. One of the elderly ladies describes how local whites would frequently curse her in public.

Beginning in the 1970s, Yuba City’s Punjabi community experienced a revival of faith and cultural traditions. The Immigration Act of 1965, with its emphasis on family reunification, led to the rapid growth of the Punjabi community. Visiting Sikh missionaries also advised congregations about returning to the faith. After Yuba City’s first gurdwara opened in 1970, women played an active role in its operations. Due to the scarcity of gurdwara staff in the early years, women performed a great deal of sewa, including preparing all of the food for local Sikh weddings. Large communal amrit initiation ceremonies were performed in Yuba City in which women took part. Swarn Kaur Johl, an Amritdhari Sikh well-versed in Guru Granth Sahib, started a prayer group and stitched the first Nishan Sahib. She had a gift for explaining Sikhi concepts in simple terms that people could easily grasp.

Yuba City’s nagar kirtan is one of the largest and most iconic South Asian festivals for the diaspora. During the first Sunday in November, roughly 100,000 people gather every year in this small town from as far away as India, England and Canada. The first nagar kirtan took place on November 9, 1980, and women played an especially visible role. The Sikh women who had arrived in the US in the Fifties and Sixties proudly represented their faith and community in public for the first time. As Takher exclaimed: “It was beautiful! We were walking together with our Maharaj (the Sikh scripture).”

The fragments of collective memory of the early South Asian American women were passed down to their daughters. Nand Kaur’s daughter, Dr Jane Singh (a Ghadar scholar at UC, Berkeley), interviewed her mother in the 1970s. Nand Kaur recounted the electrifying experience of hearing the revolutionary speeches and songs at the Stockton gurdwara in 1924. She brought the songs into her home and taught them to her children along with stories of the Gurus. Singing connected Nand Kaur to the global community of Sikhs and to her homeland, helping to ease her isolation.

She was particularly fond of ‘The Last Message of the Gunj’, a song composed two decades after the Ghadar movement ceased to be an active political force. In simple, direct language full of the pulse of life, the song is composed in the personified feminine voice of the Gunj, the reverberating essence of the Ghadar movement:

Rahin dilaan di dilaan nun raah hundi,

nikal dilaan nun aayi haan main

Moti chhant ke sattan hi sagaran de,

navaan lakhaan da haar sajai haan main.

The path to the heart is through the heart,

I come from the heart to you...

Selecting pearls from the seven seas,

I have created a precious necklace [of verse].

— The writer is the author of ‘Women and the Sikh Diaspora in California’ and teaches at University of California, Davis