Gobind Behari Lal’s Racist Attack on South Asian, Chinese, and Japanese Laborers
“Caucasian Hindus”
The San Francisco Bulletin letter to the editor by G.B. Lal is an overtly racist argument published in 1920.1 In it, G. B. Lal supports keeping California free of what he calls “non-assimilable aliens,” explicitly targeting Indian peasants, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants. He then tries to carve out an exception for “Hindus of Caucasian blood,” using discredited racial pseudoscience to claim that many Indians are biologically “white” and therefore should not be excluded. While endorsing racial exclusion overall, he argues that only those Indians who maintain “Oriental manners and customs” should be barred — revealing a mix of white-supremacist racial classification and assimilationist gatekeeping.
G. B. Lal not only discriminated against people of his own country — laborers who formed the backbone of early South Asian migration to the Pacific Coast — but also against Chinese and Japanese coolies, echoing the same anti-Asian rhetoric used by exclusionist politicians and newspapers of the era.
Many educated Indians in the early 20th century, shaped by British colonial racial hierarchies, expressed similar contempt toward poorer Asian migrants on the Pacific Coast. These migrants were already targeted by Anti‑Asiatic laws, Anti‑Asiatic Leagues, and a hostile press, yet they also faced exclusion from their own countrymen, including figures like Lal, who used platforms such as the San Francisco Bulletin to distance themselves from working‑class Asians and reinforce white‑supremacist racial categories.Transcription
Editor, The Bulletin: Would you permit me to say through The Bulletin that I am opposed to the immigration into this country of non-assimilable aliens—like the peasants of India or the coolies of China and Japan? I am in hearty accord with all that is being done to keep California a commonwealth of civilized and civilizable peoples. But when you debar someone from coming here because he is an Asiatic, do not forget that not all Asiatics are Mongolians or Malayans. There are about one hundred million Hindus of Caucasian blood. The majority of these Indo-Aryans are not Nordic or blond. They fall within the Mediterranean group of the European races. But they are nevertheless “white.” On the ground of “biology” you cannot keep them out.
But on the basis of a different social milieu, you would be justified in debarring them — at least such of them as adhere to their Oriental manners and customs — from entering this country.
San Francisco, July 16.
Respectfully yours,
G. B. LAL
References
- The Bulletin (San Francisco, California), Mon, Jul 19, 1920, Page 8.