South Asian Footsteps in Berkeley, CA
Footsteps. We leave them behind us, and we’re often unaware who has walked before us on the ground we tread.
In Berkeley, California, Barnali Ghosh and Anirvan Chatterjee are long-time San Francisco Bay Area activists and community-based historians who run a walking tour to fill this gap in knowing. You can find more on their Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour on a recent episode of the Atlas Obscura podcast.
The tour is based on oral history and archival research as well as the organizers’ active engagement with historical research in the field. Walking today’s spaces with narration and reenactments allows participants to share these histories. The tours aim to inform, ground, and inspire new activism, in the tradition of movement historians like Howard Zinn and Ronald Takaki.
A companion website contains research notes and links to original sources.
San Francisco Call & Post, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Ghosh and Chatterjee were also behind the successful campaign a couple of years ago to rename a downtown street "Kala Bagai Way" after a South Asian immigrant who arrived in the US with her family in 1915. Her arrival was noted mainly for her diamond nose ring. Bagai faced considerable discrimination—neighbours locked up the new home they had just purchased in order to prevent them from moving in. Whenever they seemed to succeed, they’d be tripped up by tightening restrictions America seemed determined to place upon them. Kala’s husband took his own life, writing: “Obstacles this way, blockades that way, and the bridges burnt behind.”
Despite that, Kala Bagai persevered, raising her three sons, sending all of them to college, becoming something of a mother figure in the town that had for so long refused to accept her. Now she has a street named after her: Kala Bagai Way. KQED covered the city council decision. Here’s an excerpt:
“A lot of times we don’t participate in city processes because we don’t know if we belong in a city," said Barnali Ghosh, a community historian and creator of the Kala Bagai Way campaign, at a live-watch and community celebration late Tuesday evening. "It’s a continuous sort of up and down feeling ... I see this as a way of grounding us. It allows me to put down my roots — it allows me to take leadership, feel a sense of community."
What else do we seek to do when we walk this earth than to ground ourselves and our stories?
