On a warm April morning in Berkeley, a group gathered on Center Street, footsteps and chatter folding into the rhythm of crosswalk signals and passing traffic. They were there for the South Asian Radical History Walking Tour — a project that traces more than a century of South Asian presence in the Bay Area, much of it largely absent from public memory.
“There’s something really powerful knowing that there have been South Asians in the Bay — in some cases before the Gold Rush — that we have been doing some kind of progressive political work for four-plus generations,” said Anirvan Chatterjee, a co-founder of the tour.
May is AAPI Heritage Month — a time to reflect on the histories that shape Asian American communities.
In the Bay Area, South Asian history is often flattened, reduced to tech, recent immigration or economic success.
And that version leaves out a longer, more complicated story.
Chatterjee said those histories include organizing against colonialism, building labor movements and creating spaces for queer community — work that rarely appears in textbooks or popular narratives about South Asians in the region.
Part of the reason, he said, is that those histories are harder to see.
“There’s not necessarily an old ‘India town’ to look at,” he explained.
Unlike communities that formed around dense ethnic enclaves, South Asians in the Bay Area were often more geographically dispersed, frequently renters and part of multiracial suburbs, leaving fewer visible landmarks tied to their history.
“What’s really exciting is what happened inside those houses,” said Chatterjee.
One of the stories highlighted on the tour is that of Kala Bagai, who arrived in California in 1915, one of only a handful of South Asian women in the country at the time.
Her family built a life in the Bay Area until a 1923 Supreme Court decision, the Bhagat Singh Thind case, stripped Indian immigrants of their citizenship. The ruling eliminated legal protections tied to property and residency, leaving families like the Bagais effectively stateless.
Bagai created community in the face of adversity, building bridges for newer immigrants. Today, a part of Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley bears her name.
For Barnali Ghosh, who co-leads the tour, Bagai’s story is not just one of resilience, but a reminder of how fragile belonging can be.
“Money can’t always protect you, being fully Americanized can’t protect you,” Ghosh said.
The tour also revisits the story of Kartar Singh Sarabha, a teenager who arrived in 1912 with the intent to study at UC Berkeley. He was detained at Angel Island for few days upon entry into the county and eventually chose a life of activism. Sarabha was one of the first members of the Ghadar party, which organized from California to challenge British colonial rule in India.
During the tour, Chatterjee did a re-enactment of Sarabha's life. “We are the citizens of a colonized nation,” Chatterjee performed. “I’d come to the United States thinking it was going to be this land of equality for everybody, but I felt shocked.”
For some participants, like Pallavi Phartiyal — a first-generation immigrant — the historic parallels feel immediate.
“I’ve been here for 26 years and my niece and nephew have never visited me” she said, describing the barriers her family faces navigating visas. “It’s a humiliating process.”
Others said learning this history has changed how they understand their place in the Bay Area.
“What is my piece in this history?” said Srinitha Dasari, who recently moved to the Bay Area.
Chatterjee said the lack of access to South Asian American history growing up motivated him to create the tour.
“When I was growing up, I didn’t have any access to South Asian American history — the curriculum I was getting did not reflect the story of my family at all,” he said.
He sees the tour as a way of filling that gap.
“The day you get off a plane, nobody hands you a South Asian American history book,” said Chatterjee.
As AAPI Heritage Month encourages reflection, the tour offers a broader view of South Asian history in the Bay Area — one that extends beyond recent immigration and economic success to include organizing, exclusion and the ongoing effort to build community.
Some ways to get acquainted with Bay Area’s AAPI history this month include:
- Events at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center.
- Friday nights at the Oakland Museum of California
- AAPI fest in Daly City
- Tiburon AAPI Heritage Fest
- Live On Larkin in San Francisco
- Events at the San Francisco Public Library
- South Asian Thespians in Conversation at San Jose State
- Filipino Fiesta Fest in San Jose
