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Vivek Bald. Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013. 320 pp. $35.00.
Vivek Bald has produced a masterful history of pioneer South Asian men and their women and children, mostly Bengali Muslim men who were peddlers in New Orleans and ex-seamen in New York. His painstaking research and fine writing gives us finely grained pictures of everyday life in those settings and others linked to them by these men's patterns of trade and work. There is no bibliography, but the footnotes and especially the list of abbreviations at the back show the range of sources that Bald managed to locate and consult. He has drawn on birth, marriage, death, and naturalization records, ship passenger lists, and most impressively, the United States censuses from 1880 through 1930. Four tables and two maps, not listed in the table of contents, locate the men and their families in place and time. But the impetus for the book and much of the material comes from oral history, from descendants of the men and Bald's interviews with them, so that we have their voices as well as we have statistical patterns....