One Century After Thind: An Introduction

“Is a high-caste Hindu, of full Indian blood, born at Amritsar, Punjab, India, a white person within the meaning of § 2169, Revised Statutes?”

The question above animates United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (Thind). Bhagat Singh Thind was born in 1892 in the Amritsar district of Punjab, India, and despite the claim of being a “high-caste Hindu,” was a turban-wearing Sikh.¹⁴ He attended Khalsa College in Amritsar and migrated to the northwest region of the United States in 1913. Thind was one of the over 6,000 Punjabi men who migrated to the western coasts of the United States and Canada from the late 1800s to early 1900s,¹⁵ and originally migrated to pursue higher education at an American institution. Eventually enrolling at UC Berkeley, Thind also spent time working in lumber mills in Oregon. With other migrants from the Indian subcontinent in both the United States and Canada, Thind participated in the Ghadar Party, a revolutionary transnational anti-colonial project. In July 1918, soon after the start of World War I, he enlisted in the US Army and was honorably discharged in December of the same year.

Thind first applied to become a naturalized citizen in the state of Washington while in the army and was granted citizenship on December 9, 1918. Within days, however, this status was revoked as an examiner at the Bureau of Naturalization charged that Thind, a “Hindu,” did not meet the racial eligibility requirements for naturalization as a white person. At the time, naturalization rights were reserved for “free white persons” and “aliens of African nativity” or “to persons of African descent” as stipulated by the Naturalization Acts of 1790 and 1870, respectively, and affirmed by section 2169 of the Revised Statutes in 1875. The following spring, Thind applied again in the state of Oregon.¹⁶ The application was met with pressure from the same Bureau of Naturalization official to again deny naturalization due to the racial requirements, and now with additional objections due to Thind’s involvement in the Ghadar Party.¹⁷ Despite these objections, the judge in the case believed there was enough evidence to support Thind’s claim that he was Caucasian and thus qualified as white. With this line of argument and consideration of Thind’s military service, he was granted citizenship for a second time in 1920. In response, the Bureau of Naturalization appealed the decision to the Supreme Court.

By the time Thind appeared in front of the Supreme Court in 1923, dozens of naturalization cases that contested the scope and definition of “white” had been brought before the lower courts, including multiple successful cases brought by Indian petitioners.¹⁸ These cases brought claims for people who were not easily categorized as either “free white people” or “aliens of African nativity” or “to persons of African descent.” In contrast to the geographically specific requirement of an ancestral relationship to Africa, the amorphous quality of the category of “white,” offered a pathway to claim citizenship, primarily by migrants who were descended from Asia as their racial classification was inconsistent,¹⁹ erased, or excluded in the law.

While people of Asian descent were impossible to consistently locate within racial binaries of Black and white, the language of the Naturalization Act of 1870 was structured to exclude people of Asian descent, particularly Chinese migrants.²⁰ Their perceived threat to US economic and cultural systems was looming in the backdrop of contestations over citizenship. The potential of Chinese naturalization was seen as posing a threat to free labor ideology and practice, as they were from a “country of cheap labor, a country of paganism, a country with a civilization wholly distinct from [the United States].”²¹ This concern is expressed in the case of Ah Yup (1878), the first migrant from Asia to bring forth a naturalization claim through the argument that he should be considered legally “white.” The court denied Yup’s petition. In his opinion, Judge Sawyer declared that based on the dominant “racial science” of the time and “common sense,” natives of China were members of the Mongolian race, and, therefore, not white and not eligible for naturalization. His opinion clarifies that debates about the use and meaning of the word “white” in the revision of the naturalization laws was informed by “the Chinese problem.”²² Sandwiched between the Page Act of 1875, the first legal restriction of migration based on national origin as it effectively prohibited the entry of Chinese women, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, In re Ah Yup illuminated the ways that considerations of naturalization were directly informed by and also informed policies that allowed or prohibited migration across US borders.

The question of whether people of Chinese descent can naturalize generally comes to legal resolution before the start of the twentieth century. But the “Asiatic question” transcended the specificity of “the Chinese problem.” Migrants from other parts of Asia—specifically Japan, India, Syria, and the Philippines—continued to pursue naturalization claims on the basis of being legally “white.” Meanwhile, restrictions on Asian migration expanded through the Immigration Act of 1917, which halted all migration from the “Asiatic Barred Zone,” including India.

Thind’s legal argument is presented in the shadow of Ozawa v. United States (1922), in which Ozawa, a Japanese migrant, argued that he should be granted citizenship because he was white, in terms of character as well as skin color. The Supreme Court rejected Ozawa’s argument and affirmed that his status as a member of the “Mongoloid” race prevented him from being white, a classification limited to “Caucasian.” Consequently, Thind’s legal case hinged upon his argument that he was racially Caucasian. In his attempt to satisfy the logics of the racial pseudoscience of the time, Thind provided ethnological evidence that he belonged to the “Aryan race” and that his status as a “high caste Hindu of full Indian blood” meant that his ancestral lines had not mixed with other racial groups in India. This evidence also served to distinguish his racial categorization from that of the “Asiatic,” as it did for Bengal-born Akhay Kumar Mozumdar who had previously brought religion and caste status into his claim for naturalization.²³

Dismissing lower court precedent about Indian eligibility to naturalize and ethnological racial evidence, the court stated “the words ‘free white persons’ are words of common speech, to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man. This interpretation was to be synonymous with the word ‘Caucasian’ only as that word is popularly understood,”²⁴ and Indians were not included in this definition. With the court’s decision in Thind, all Indian migrants were brought under the category of “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” This decision was retroactively applied and stripped Thind and over fifty other naturalized South Asians of their citizenship, applied the Expatriation Act of 1907 to American wives of South Asian men, and brought those residing in California under the Alien Land Law provisions, revoking their ownership and leases of farmland. While Thind himself was eventually granted citizenship under the 1935 Nye-Lea Act, a pathway afforded to veterans regardless of their racial status, Thind effectively closed off avenues of naturalized citizenship to South Asian migrants in the United States until the Luce-Celler Act of 1946. Luce-Celler permitted migration and naturalization for a limited quota of 100 Indians (and 100 Filipinos). Racial restrictions to naturalization were lifted in 1952.

As Asian American studies scholars, we are interested in the ways the Thind case continues to circulate, how the interpretations both persist and are re-constituted through political and social dynamics in South Asian American communities that have largely been formed in the almost sixty years since the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act. We conceptualized this special issue as an opportunity to revisit this case and the ways it serves as a critical signifier of South Asian American history and racialization.

In putting One Century After Thind together, we wanted to explore the meaning of the case by analyzing it within its sociohistorical context as well as examining its implications for contemporary South Asian America through broader questions of migration, citizenship, the structures of caste, and the racialization of South Asians in the United States. In doing so, we approached the question of naturalization at the heart of Thind as a site of inquiry beyond immigrant incorporation but as one that can illuminate dynamics of empire, colonization, and nation-building. In doing so, we have been able to include pieces that are grounded in different forms of scholarly inquiry, disciplinary approaches, methodologies, and intellectual frameworks. We offer this collection as a contribution to generate thinking and learning about the case, its themes, and ongoing questions it provokes.

We open the issue with three historical articles. The first two pieces provide bookends for understanding the lead up to and the aftermath of Thind, while the third focuses on a brief period of Thind’s life after his infamous case. In the article “‘Gilded Cages’: Race, Labor, Citizenship, and the Fabrication of the ‘Hindu’ in the American West,” Amrit Deol explores debates about the racialized category of the “Hindu” in the early twentieth century to show how it is curated and remade to protect claims to whiteness in the years before Thind. Following, Janna Haider examines five denaturalization cases triggered by Thind in “The Aftermath of US vs Bhagat Singh Thind and the Legal Construction of Race.” Haider shows how Thind forced a reinterpretation of immigration law to hold South Asians accountable for legal definitions of race that were not in place when they naturalized. Finally, Philip Deslippe’s piece, “Doctorji the Divorcé: Understanding Bhagat Singh Thind Through His Marriage to Inez Buelen” examines Thind’s brief marriage during the early part of his career as a spiritual teacher. Using documents from the divorce proceedings and media coverage in which we “hear” Thind, Deslippe sheds new light on how Thind understood his own position within America’s racial hierarchy. All three pieces add not only to our understanding of Thind, but bring new and marginal archival materials to add to the collection of primary sources through which we can interpret the case.

The next three pieces reinvigorate readings of Thind to expand its framing and application to contemporary understandings of South Asian American racialization. In “U.S. v Thind and the Rhetorical Labors of ‘Where are you from?,’” Andrew P. Boge analyzes the rhetorical logics of Thind to unravel the racial dimensions of the question, “Where are you from?,” and offer a historical origin story of a phrase endemic to the Asian American experience. Stanley Thangaraj’s poem, “Thind and Belonging Across the Edges of Time” places Thind in relation to Ozawa v. United States to advocate for the importance of comparative racialization to conceptualize social justice and citizenship as broadly as possible. Sherally Munshi’s hybrid essay, “Remembering Thind,” combines personal reflection and intellectual inquiry to argue that a radical remembering of Thind could focus on the ongoing relevance of anticolonial and anticapitalist movements that were critical sites for Thind and his cohort rather than on the racial wounds engendered by the case.

We close the issue with four pieces analyzing the legacies of Thind through critical examinations of circulations, intersections, and structures of race, caste, and borders. Arjun Shankar’s article, “On Brown Blood: Race, Caste and the Bhagat Singh Thind Case,” attends to the ways in which the racial politics of “brown blood” has deployed casteist discourses in new migratory patterns, mobility regimes, and accumulationist politics for dominant caste people in motion. Falu Bakrania’s article also analyzes the intersection of race and caste through a close reading of the briefs submitted by Thind and the US Bureau of Naturalization to the US Supreme Court in 1923, alongside the Hindutva response to the 2020 case, California Department of Fair Employment and Housing v. Cisco Systems Inc. By placing these two landmark cases in relation, she traces the shifts in how upper caste South Asians have mobilized caste to uphold Brahminical and white supremacy. Soham Patel’s piece, “South Asian and Indigenous Experiences at the US-Mexico Border: From US v Thind to the War on Terror,” juxtaposes the short film, Thank You, Come Again, and an interview with Tohono O’odham activist Ofelia Rivas to illustrate how the expansion of the US security state in the post-9/11 era enacts violence against South Asians and further dispossesses Indigenous communities at the US–Mexico border. Patel considers the settler logics entangled in Thind to suggest the possibility of the South Asian diaspora forming a relational politics against white settler nationalism. Closing the collection is Passport Photo, 2020, a series in which visual artist Sa’dia Rehman looks at their family through the lens of surveillance and government-issued identification to illuminate how documentation has been central to the control of Black and brown people through colonization, enslavement, and their afterlives. Rehman cuts, erases, copies, and redacts faces, amplifying the violence of surveillance while also pointing to the subjectivity of the artist and the viewer.

The next section of the issue contains book reviews of recent scholarship that examines relationships between naturalization, migration, and racialization in sites outside of the South Asian American context. Included here are reviews of Neda Maghbouleh’s The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (2017) by Mitra Rastegar; Maile Arvin’s Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania (2019) by Jonathan Borja; Niambi Michelle Carter’s American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship (2019) by Prathiba Kanakamedala; and, Michael R. Jin’s Citizens, Immigrants and the Stateless: A Japanese American Diaspora in the Pacific (2021) by Chrissy Lau. Our hope is that the reviews of these texts contribute to critical and comparative understandings of Thind within contemporary discourse about citizenship, race, nation, and colonization.

Finally, in an effort to aid in new engagements with Thind, we include the two briefs submitted before the US Supreme Court. The first “Brief for the United States,” United States of America v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) was submitted to the court by James Beck and Alfred A. Wheat in support of denaturalization. The second, “Brief of Respondent,” United States of America v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1921), was submitted by Thind’s attorney, Thomas Mannix, in support of Thind. Though more easily available, we decided to include Justice George Sutherland’s opinion of the case so that all three critical case documents would be accessible in one place.