The Documentary
“In Search of Bengali Harlem” a film by Vivek Bald & Alaudin Ullah
The Book
Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian Americaby Vivek Bald
Family Stories
Share your memories and imagesand read those of others…
Aladdin Ullah’s “Dishwasher Dreams”
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 …
New York
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 …
About the Site
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 …
New Orleans
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 …