In his one-man show “Dishwasher Dreams,” actor and writer Aladdin Ullah draws on the story of his father, Habib (pictured in the suit and fedora in the upper corner of this page), a steamship worker from the region of Noahkali, East Bengal, who jumped ship and made his way to New York’s Lower East Side …
At the turn of the 20th century, news reports recorded a small, transient population of East Indian maritime workers living in the sailors’ boardinghouse district on the southern tip of Manhattan. By time of the First World War, thousands of these men were moving in and out of New York on British steamships. As colonial …
This website is part of an ongoing project by filmmaker and scholar Vivek Bald using different media – web, print, and video – to document the histories of two little-known groups of early South Asian migrants to the United States. Both were groups of Muslim men, predominantly from the region of Bengal, who entered the …
Between the 1880s and 1910s, small groups of Indian Muslim peddlers made regular trips from Calcutta to the port of New York. The men were from the district of Hooghly in West Bengal, a region renowned for its production of silk and cotton embroidery. These men spent each summer working along the boardwalks of Atlantic …
During World War I and for at least two decades afterward, hundreds of Indian Muslim maritime workers made their way to Detroit and Dearborn, Michigan after jumping ship or being left in port in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. They found work on the assembly lines of Ford auto factories, or in steel production – …
Some of the earliest news reports of Indian “lascar” seamen in the U.S. date back to the turn of the twentieth century in the port of Baltimore. Baltimore became one of the primary U.S. ports where Indian maritime workers were either left in port or jumped ship. In the 1910s-30s, it appears to have been …
Performances of “Dishwasher Dreams” in Chicago in February. Book, performance, and film events in New Orleans and New York in March, and a special event at the Schomburg Center in Harlem in April featuring a community forum with children and descendants of the Bengali Muslim men and African American and Puerto Rican women who built …