Bhagat Singh Thind

Three citizenships

Thind was a Sikh from Punjab, born in Amritsar district in 1892 by his family’s account.^4,13 He arrived at Seattle in 1913, and in July 1918 he began serving in the US Army at Camp Lewis, Washington, in his turban. He served six months, all at Camp Lewis, and did not see combat.^3,4,5

On 9 December 1918 he was granted citizenship in Washington State. Four days later it was revoked: a naturalisation examiner charged that, as a “Hindu”, he did not meet the law’s racial rule.^4,8,9 Section 2169 of the Revised Statutes let only “free white persons”, “aliens of African nativity” and “persons of African descent” become citizens by naturalisation. “Hindu” was the American label for any Indian; Thind, like most Indian immigrants of the time, was a Sikh.^1,4

In 1920 Judge Charles Wolverton of the US District Court at Portland, Oregon, held that he was “entitled to his naturalization”.³ The government moved to cancel the certificate, lost, and appealed to the Circuit Court of Appeals, which certified a question to the Supreme Court: was “a high caste Hindu of full Indian blood, born at Amrit Sar, Punjab, India” a white person within the meaning of section 2169?¹

The 1923 decision

Three months earlier, in Ozawa v. United States (1922), the court had read “white person” as “a person of what is popularly known as the Caucasian race”.² Thind’s lawyers argued from the race science of the day: that anthropologists classed the people of north and north-west India as Aryan and so Caucasian, and that caste had kept that ancestry from mixing.¹ The historian Johanna Ogden calls this “the convoluted math of racial pseudo-science”, and notes that it leaned on caste although Thind was a Sikh, of a religion doctrinally opposed to caste. She also explains why it was made at all: the “white persons” rule forced Asian applicants to seek whiteness in law.⁴ The argument was his lawyers’, and it rests on ideas now discredited.

On 19 February 1923 the court, in an opinion by Justice Sutherland, set the science aside. The statute’s words were to be read “in accordance with the understanding of the common man”, and “white persons” meant “Caucasian” “only as that word is popularly understood”. Its answer to the question was “No.”¹

Cancelled, and restored

His citizenship was formally cancelled in 1926.⁴ Dozens of other Indian Americans lost theirs in the same years; counts range from about fifty to more than seventy. Some, having given up British status to naturalise, were left stateless.^4,10

In 1935 Congress waived “the racial limitations” for alien veterans of the First World War who met the act’s conditions.⁶ Thind petitioned under it, and on 2 March 1936 he was admitted to citizenship in New York. The National Park Service gives 1935, which appears to be the year he petitioned.^4,5,12 In 1946 the Luce-Celler Act made people “of races indigenous to India” eligible to naturalise.⁷ Thind lived in the United States as a citizen until his death in 1967, and for decades lectured on spirituality from Los Angeles.^4,5

What is disputed or left open. Many accounts call him Dr Thind and credit him with a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley; Ogden found no record of his attendance or of a degree.⁴ The National Park Service calls him “the first turbaned soldier in the American military”, while Ogden says only “one of the first turbaned Sikhs to serve in the U.S. Army”.^4,5 Why the government fought his case so hard is argued rather than settled: the examiner in 1920 raised his ties to the Ghadar party, and historians read part of the opposition as politics.^3,4,11