Read an important announcement about the future of SAADA in our March 2012 update!
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April 18 2012

SAADA and the Community-Based Archives Model: What Is a Community-Based Archives Anyway?

By Michelle Caswell

When Samip Mallick and I started SAADA in 2008, we made a purposeful decision that we wanted the archives we created to remain an independent nonprofit organization, unaffiliated with a larger university or institutional repository, and to reflect the unique interests, needs, and priorities of diverse South Asian American communities across the country. We continue to see SAADA as part of a growing movement of independent grassroots efforts emerging from within communities to collect, preserve, and make accessible records documenting their own histories outside of mainstream archival institutions. These community-based archives serve as an alternative venue for communities to make collective decisions about what is of enduring value to them, to shape collective memory of their own pasts, and to control the means through which stories about their past are constructed.

Power is central to this conversation. As U.K. archival scholars Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth Shepard note, independent grassroots archival efforts first sprung up in response to the political and social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Flinn, Stevens, and Shepard provide a broad working definition of community archives as "collections of material gathered primarily by members of a given community and over whose use community members exercise some level of control (Flinn, Stevens & Shepard 73)." They also found that political activism, community empowerment, and social change were prime motivating factors undergirding these fiercely independent archival efforts (Flinn, Stevens & Shepard 73). Indeed, in remaining independent and encouraging community participation, SAADA strives to provide a platform in which South Asian Americans are empowered to make decisions about archival collecting on their own terms, ensuring their own priorities will not be buried under the weight of competing priorities within larger mainstream institutional archives. This need to uncover and provide a platform for previously marginalized voices unites community-based archives and distinguishes them from local geographically based historical societies, in my opinion.

April 4 2012

The complicated racial politics of Little Black Sambo

By Dashini Jeyathurai

As a gift for her two little girls, [Helen Bannerman] wrote and illustrated The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899), a story that clearly takes place in India (with its tigers and ‘ghi,’ or melted butter), even though the names she gave her characters belie that setting. For this new edition of Bannerman’s much beloved tale, the little boy, his mother, and his father have all been given authentic Indian names: Babaji, Mamaji, and Papaji.


Printed within a minaret-shaped column on its dust jacket, these lines preface one’s reading of Harper Collins’ children’s book The Story of Little Babaji (1996). The neatly packaged narrative that the dust jacket offers belies the fraught history of Bannerman’s original text, The Story of Little Black Sambo. Published first in England in 1899 and then in the United States the following year, it tells the story of a little boy who is forced to surrender his clothing and his umbrella to four tigers so as to avoid being eaten by them. However, it is Little Black Sambo who has the last laugh when the tigers begin fighting among themselves and ultimately chasing each other around a tree until they are transformed into a pool of ghee. Not only does he recover his possessions, his mother, Black Mumbo, uses the ghee to make pancakes for the entire family. In fact, in the French-language edition of Bannerman’s book, Sambo Le Petit Négre (1948), the little boy is depicted eating tiger-striped pancakes!

February 20 2012

Of Model Minorities and Hindu Nationalists

Review: The Other Indians: A Political and Cultural History of South Asians in America, by Vinay Lal. Los Angeles: University of California, Asian American Studies Center Press, 2008. 160 pp. $14 paper. ISBN: 9780934052412-14.
By Kritika Agarwal

The Other Indians by Vinay Lal charts the course of the Indian diaspora in the United States from its small origins in the early twentieth century to its status as an affluent, burgeoning, ethnic group today. More than anything, however, it is an indictment of the community’s embrace of the "model minority" standing assigned to it by the white, neoliberal state; its politics of Hindu nationalism and disavowal of more radical and progressive politics; and its claims to cultural authenticity and superiority. For its short length then (the text is only 135 pages long excluding the index and sources), The Other Indians packs quite a punch.

One of the most provocative highlights of the book is its note on the politics of identity and naming. The Indian diaspora in the United States, on various occasions, has been referred to as Hindoo, Asian Indian, South Asian, South Asian American, Indian American and desi, among others. The most popular among these today, no doubt, are the terms Indian American, South Asian American, and desi. Lal settles on Indian American as his preferred term of usage, but for reasons that are not entirely convincing.

February 14 2012

The Barbour Scholarship

Early International Presence at the University of Michigan
By Dashini Jeyathurai

In a letter to Ruthven Hutchins, then President of the University of Michigan, Regent Levi L. Barbour explained the rationale behind a scholarship program that was to support the educational advancement of women from the Orient. Barbour wrote, “The idea of the Oriental girls’ scholarships is to bring girls from the Orient, give them an Occidental education and let them take back whatever they find good and assimilate the blessings among the peoples from which they come” (Rufus 15). During his travels to Japan and China, Barbour had the opportunity to meet with three East Asian women who had been trained in medicine at the University of Michigan in the 1890s. Impressed by the kinds of work these women were doing, Barbour was inspired to create a scholarship that would allow other women from that part of the world to do the same. For its time, it should be no surprise that the discourse surrounding the scholarship was inflected by a rhetoric of uplift. As illustrated below, a Western education was seen to be key to emancipating these women:

Only one scholar came directly from the Indian purdah. She was accompanied from her seclusion to the secretary’s office by an uncle; during the first interview, in spite of many attempts to hear her voice, the secretary could distinguish only a faint response, and she looked up but once. Not long afterward, she was a free individual able to say that her soul was her own (Rufus 25).


While the perception that a Western education would liberate such women was not unusual, what was striking was Barbour’s hope that they would prevent future international conflicts. In a letter to Helen Hatch in 1917, he wrote, “If a thousand Japanese girls could be educated in the United States to be physicians and teachers and returned to Japan to ply their work, we certainly never would have any war with Japan…and I think the same is true of other Oriental countries” (Rufus 39). The scholars were imagined to be emissaries of peace.