Bhagat Singh Thind, and the fight for citizenship

By Anu Kumar

On November 18, 1920, Judge Charles Wolverton of the District Court of Oregon passed a verdict of weighty importance but limited effect. Before him was the case of Bhagat Singh Thind, a World War I veteran of the US Army whose stabs at gaining US citizenship had been spurned by the administration. In his plea, Thind contended that as a “high caste Hindu Aryan” he was Caucasian – a “free white person” who, under law, could not be denied American citizenship. After some deliberation, Judge Wolverton agreed, clearing the way for Thind to become a naturalised citizen, until the government intervened again.

The Oregon court’s judgement had followed similar conclusions reached by courts, at state and federal level. In the Bicaji Balsara naturalization case of 1909, Parsis were classified as Aryan and, thus, white. Similarly, in 1913, the court had granted Akhoy Kumar Mozumdar citizenship because he was a “high caste north Indian Aryan” and there was legal precedent for doing so.

While these verdicts were careful to insist that each was based on “legal precedence”, “congressional intent” and “scientific evidence”, they did coincide with rising antiAsian movements and increasing instances of violence against the Chinese, Japanese and Indians. Dubious racial theories and the pseudoscience of eugenics were gaining ground in the US, stirring vitriol in the society.

About sixteen months later, the Supreme Court reached its verdict, one of the most consequential of the time. Revoking Thind’s naturalised status, the court said that Thind did not meet a “common sense” definition of white. Judge George Sutherland, writing for the court, insisted the ruling was a matter of “racial difference”, not one of proving “racial inferiority”.

The decision would settle for the next two decades the question of who could become a naturalised citizen. By upholding the 1917 Immigration Act (the Barred Zone Act), the court effectively put a stop to migration from Asia, until the Luce-Celler Act in 1946 permitted an annual quota of 100 migrants from India and granted citizenship to resident aliens in the US.

Early life

Thind arrived in the United States in July 1913, on SS Minnesota, aged barely 20. In his first papers, the documents produced by every new immigrant, were the raw details of his early life. Thind was born on October 6, 1892, in Taragarh in Punjab’s Amritsar district, the oldest of three brothers. His father served as a junior police officer.

Thind studied at Amritsar’s Khalsa College, where he showed interest in philosophy and metaphysics, subjects that would help him later as a lecturer. Like many others in Punjab at the time, he decided to migrate to the US. But his journey first took him to the Philippines, where he worked as an interpreter for a few months. In his early years in the US (1914-1920), he worked in lumber mills on the West coast, including Hammond Lumber Company in Astoria, Oregon.

Astoria’s Hindu Alley, a street largely populated by Indian workers, was a major source of support for Ghadar Party, a movement started in the US in 1913 with the intent of securing India’s freedom by violently ousting the British. In Astoria, Ghadar leaders such as Har Dayal, Sohan Singh Bakhna and Ram Chandra addressed meetings and raised money for their newspaper, press and party headquarters in San Francisco.

For a time, in 1916 and 1917, Thind was a close associate of Bhagwan Singh, a key Ghadar figure. This association and British pressure on US authorities, as Thind himself and historians like Doug Coulson have hinted, worked against him in his quest for naturalization. Following the imprisonment of some key Ghadar figures in April 1918 for their role in what was called the “the Hindu-German conspiracy” to overthrow the British Raj in India, Thind briefly edited the Ghadar newsletter. It is said he took on the role to raise funds so he could study at Berkeley.

Spiritual lecturer

Despite the many setbacks in his life, Thind became a regular on the lecture circuit in the US. In his early talks, from 1922 to 1924, he spoke on subjects like opium trade, Gandhi, and British rule. But by the mid-1920s, it was the abstract and esoteric that attracted him, and he began speaking on, for example, the “spiritual debt of the world to India”, “dynamics of thought” and the “search for happiness”. While most of his lectures were based on Sikh precepts and the teachings he had learned, he drew on his wide reading of other sacred texts and philosophical tracts. Often in his lectures, he took time out to teach chanting and rhythmic breathing.

In De