In 1965, the US Immigration and Nationality Act allowed previously-restricted professionals from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh to migrate legally to the USA. For the first time in US history, immigrants from South Asia had a clear path to permanent residency in the country, and eventually, US citizenship through naturalisation. But the history of South-Asian America began decades earlier, in a little-known community called Bengali Harlem.

The original Bengali Harlem emerged from the extraordinary circumstances of early South Asian migration to America. Between 1880 and 1920, approximately 1,500 Bengali men arrived in the United States as part of two distinct waves of migration. The first wave consisted of Bengali Muslim merchants who arrived in New Orleans in the final years of the 19th century, carrying embroidered silks, perfumes, spices, and other “oriental goods” that symbolised sophistication in middle-class American homes.

These early entrepreneurs traveled from British India, landing at Ellis Island’s newly constructed immigration processing center, where they established the first networks within America’s communities of colour. From there, the American demand for “oriental” silks, perfumes, and spices took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s boardwalks into the heart of the racially segregated American South.

The second and larger wave, in the 1920s, involved sailors and maritime workers known as ‘lascars’, from villages in what is now Bangladesh, particularly from regions like Noakhali and Sylhet. These men worked their way from their villages to Calcutta, secured employment on British steamships, and then jumped ship when vessels docked at American ports in Boston, Baltimore, and New York, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore. As factory owners sought their cheap labour and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest.

Most of these Bengali migrants found acceptance in Harlem's African American and Puerto Rican communities. Eventually, this community came to be known as 'Bengali Harlem'. Here, these early Bengali migrants forged families and identities in an America that refused to recognise them as citizens. Immigration laws barred them from bringing wives from Bengal, so they married African American and Puerto Rican women, creating multiethnic, multireligious households. Their children grew up at the intersection of Black, Latinx, and South Asian cultures — an American experience that complicates right-wing conservative narratives of race and belonging in USA.

New York-based comedian, actor, and playwright Alaudin Ullah’s father Habib Ullah was one of these Bengali migrants who arrived in New York in the 1920s. Over the last 25 years, Alaudin has been documenting the forgotten story of his father and thousands of other Bengali Muslim seamen who jumped ship at American ports in the late 19th and early 20th century. Ullah’s family history, and his research into Bengali Harlem served as the foundation of academic and filmmaker Vivek Bald’s 2012 book ‘Bengali Harlem & the Lost Histories of South Asian America’. Ullah’s story and the history of other Bengali Muslim men like him is also the focus of the 2022 documentary ‘In Search of Bengali Harlem’ by Bald which features Ullah as the narrator.

It’s a fascinating story of migration, assimilation, and resilience. Facing deportation under the 1917 Immigration Act, which banned Asian labourers from entering the United States through the Asiatic Barred Zone, these undocumented immigrants survived by “passing” among people of colour. They settled in Black and Hispanic neighbourhoods across New York City, from the Lower East Side and downtown Manhattan to Spanish Harlem, where they could blend in and remain undetected by white authorities.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Bengali Harlem became a remarkable space of cross-cultural exchange and radical politics. Bengali Muslim men engaged in theological discussions about Islam with Black Muslim civil rights leaders like Malcolm X. Jazz musician Miles Davis would browse through records of Bollywood playback singers like Mohammed Rafi, while Black Muslim celebrities, including Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul Jabbar frequented Bengali-owned restaurants like the Bombay India Restaurant for halal food and Muslim company.

The Bombay India Restaurant — run by Eshad Ali and his wife Ruth, an African-American woman from South Carolina — was a central gathering place on New York’s 125th Street for over 40 years. The restaurant attracted many prominent figures from the civil rights era, providing a friendly environment where both Black and Indian patrons could enjoy authentic Bengali cuisine and engage in political discourse.

Today, Bengali Harlem’s legacy continues in the thriving Bengali-American communities in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, in Jackson Heights’ Little Bangladesh, and in the generations of Bengali-Americans who created space for South Asian Bengali Muslim communities within America’s urban landscape.

But as recent ICE raids have affected immigrant communities across the USA, New York City’s Bengali Muslim communities have remained conspicuously absent. In a recent interview with Scroll.in, Alaudin said: “I think we’ve lost something important about what it means to be part of broader justice movements (...) When I see protests against immigration raids in California or New York, I ask: where is the South Asian solidarity?”

Learn more about Bengali Harlem here.

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