I run the monthly Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour ( http://www.berkeleysouthasian.org/ ). But with tours cancelled, I've been focusing on research, attempting to identify every single South Asian in Berkeley, CA pre-1920. So far, I'm up to 113 names. Some favorites so far…

Some names are (relatively) famous, like Dhan Gopal Mukerji, who came from a revolutionary family, studied at Berkeley and Stanford, hung out with anarchists and Ghadarites, and won the Newbery Medal. His autobiography is complicated and fascinating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhan_Gopal_Mukerji

But then you also have people like Boor Singh, the fortune teller who used to live right above McDonald's in downtown Berkeley, and constantly got pulled into absurd publicly-reported legal battles. I'm working on an article about him now. https://twitter.com/anirvan/status/1271529390250156032

There were also armed revolutionary Bengalis in Berkeley. Chatterji and Laskar got their military training at Mount Tamalpais Military Academy. J.N. Lahiri was teaching Ghadarites to shoot in the Berkeley hills.

(images via https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.45679/ and https://www.google.com/books/edition/Echoes_of_Mutiny/fCnnAwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=lahiri)

And then there were literally 30 (!!!) mostly-Sikh railroad workers, ages 20-45, living on Henry Street in Berkeley, as recorded in the 1910 census. I *really* need to dig into their story. Amar Singh, Babu Rau, Bhan Singh, Bishau Singh, Hagara Singh, Hira Singh, and on and on…

They're all adult men, except for the sisters Kanta & Prabha Chandra. Their brother Mahesh later married #KalaBagai, who survived Berkeley housing discrimination, and became a critical immigrant activist. I'm *really* hoping we can name a street after her https://www.berkeleyside.com/2020/03/12/opinion-berkeley-might-name-a-street-after-kala-bagai-this-is-her-story

I've also been mapping out households where South Asians in Berkeley CA lived pre-1920

For example 1731 Allston, 2023 Channing, 2043 Center, 2123 Kittredge, 2209 Union, 2632 Durant, 2108 Milvia, 2026 Center…

Who gets to decide what constitutes a landmark? Whose stories matter?

These stories aren't just trivia. Gatekeeping around belonging has real lived consequences, whether it's blatant housing discrimination like what Kala Bagai faced, or everyday NIMBYism that declares incumbent landowners have a special right to the city. https://twitter.com/anirvan/status/1268415857069195271

What would it look like to see Berkeley, CA as a South Asian city? When @berkeleycc students fight for police accountability, it could remind us of JP Narayan, who lived at 2026 Center in the 1920s, going on to be a hero of India's anti-Emergency movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayaprakash_Narayan

When we create murals of activism in Berkeley, we might want to include an image of the late Ghadarite Kartar Dhillon and her daughter Ayesha Gill defending the Black Panthers from OPD. Standing with Black activists wasn't invented by woke college students https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kartar_Dhillon

When we talk about the FSM and debate resistance to racist speech, we might remember Berkeley's first South Asian-led anti-racist protest in 1908 where int'l students spoke out against apologists for empire until the organizers shut down the whole event.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girindra_Mukerji

There are a million stories in Berkeley, from all our communities. When we fixate on White boomers in the 1960s, we're not talking about Japanese anarchist/anti-imperial zinesters in 1906, who resisted censorship and repression from both the US *and* Japan
https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SU19061230.2.16