Indian Americans Will Honor a Hero

Indian Americans from across the nation will converge Sunday on Cerritos to pay belated tribute to their long-forgotten hero: the late Dalip Singh Saund, the first Asian American member of Congress.

Though few remember or know it, India-born Saund, a Sikh who earned a PhD in mathematics from UC Berkeley in 1924, made history in 1956 when he was elected to Congress from the 29th District, which included Riverside and Imperial counties. He died in 1973 at age 73.

“He was a great man who is an inspiration not only to 1.7 million Indian Americans, but to us all,” said Inder Singh, president-elect of the Global Organization of People of Indian Origin and an organizer of the event marking the 45th anniversary of Saund’s swearing in.

The initiative to honor the long-forgotten “congressman from India,” as Saund referred to himself in his autobiography, started on what would have been his 100th birthday two years ago when Singh wrote an article that appeared in Indian newspapers across the United States.

In this post-Sept. 11 era, when some people of Indian ancestry have been targets of harassment because of their appearance, it is doubly important that Saund’s legacy be shared with other Americans, Singh said.

An admirer of Abraham Lincoln, Saund persuaded his reluctant family to send him to America for advance studies in 1920. Within four years of his arrival, he had completed a master’s degree and doctorate in mathematics, but he couldn’t find work in his field because of discrimination.

So, like many of his countrymen, Saund became a farmer instead, settling in the Imperial Valley. He began participating in civic affairs and Democratic politics when anti-Asian exclusion laws barred him from gaining citizenship.

He led a nationwide campaign that won his people the right to naturalize in 1946. He became a citizen in 1949 and was elected a justice of the peace in Westmoreland, a town just south of the Salton Sea, in 1950.

In 1954, Saund, by then a prosperous businessman, was elected chairman of the Imperial County Democratic Central Committee and a member of the state Democratic Executive Committee. He was elected to Congress in 1956 and served three terms. A stroke debilitated him in 1962 as he sought a fourth term.

Sunday’s event at the Cerritos Sheraton Hotel will include a seminar on the Indian diaspora, a screening of “Roots in the Sand,” a documentary on early immigrants, and a banquet, where state lawmakers of Indian ancestry from Maryland, New Jersey and Minnesota will speak. The seminar, which begins at 2 p.m., and the film, which follows it, are free.

Singh, a retired computer scientist from Tarzana, and Jayasri Hart, producer of the documentary chronicling the struggles of Punjabi Sikhs in California, hope the occasion will also awaken Indian Americans to their century-old American heritage, which began in 1907, when Sikhs from Punjab first came to the state.

“Since he was the first Asian American person to be elected to Congress, it’s the perfect person to organize around,” Hart said.

Despite their numbers, education and wealth, Indian Americans have wielded less political power than other Asian immigrant groups.

“Indians lagged behind because they were mostly professionals” who tended to be focused on their careers and kept to themselves, Singh said.

Indians also went through identity problems in this country because, although the Census Bureau considered them Caucasians, white society refused to accept them as members.

“We are at a crossroads in establishing our identity,” said Hart, whose grandfather came to study in the United States at the turn of the 20th century.

With the advent of the Internet, Indians living outside India--numbering 18 million worldwide--are connecting more.

“Until the Internet, we never met except when we went back to the homeland,” Hart said. “The first generation who stayed here dreamed of the past, and the new generation had no past to dream of.”