Chapter 10 - “A Congressman from India”

Summary

In 1956, Dalip Singh Saund was elected as Representative of California’s 29th district, becoming the first Asian American member of the US Congress. This chapter approaches Saund’s 1960 memoir Congressman from India with particular attention to his complicated role as a “representative,” in multiple senses of the term – as a representative in the US Congress, but also in his various embodiments as a Sikh, an Indian, and an American. Published during his second term, Congressman is a carefully calibrated performance, in which Saund narrates his story as a sort of proto-model minority tale and constructs the USA as a global ally to Asia during the Cold War. Despite the tale of immigrant achievement and his indefatigable optimism, racial inequality persists as a theme throughout, and this chapter examines two moments in the memoir where the politics of race play a key role: his 1956 campaign for Congress; and his tour through Asia as an ambassador one year later. In attending to these moments, this chapter asks, how did the pressures of Cold War ideology impact how Saund rendered his past and how he imagined American and Indian futures? And how did his narrative shape the climate for the wave of South Asian immigrants who would soon arrive in the USA with the passing of the Hart–Celler Act five years later?