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South Asian walking tour brings buried Berkeley history to life

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Standing in front of the Pacific Center on the corner of Telegraph Avenue and Derby Street, Anirvan Chatterjee and Barnali Ghosh start their South Asian Radical History Walking Tour with the story of Ali Ishtiaq, commonly referred to as Tinku by his friends.

Ishtiaq, a gay Bangladeshi man, was walking by the center, the oldest LGBTQ center in the Bay Area, in 1986, when he saw a flyer reading “Are you South Asian and gay?” two words that he thought would never be used in the same sentence at the same time. That sighting prompted him to help create Trikone , the first queer group focused on South Asians.

Ishtiaq’s story is not widely known, but it is the kind of history about pioneering South Asian activism that Chatterjee and Ghosh bring to life as curators and presenters of the walking tour.

“We try to highlight a range of themes, including Berkeley’s 100+ year history of South Asian LGBTQ+, labor, environmental, feminist, and anti-colonial activism,” said Chatterjee.

Chatterjee and Ghosh, who are married, started the tour in 2012. They came to Berkeley in the late 1990s as graduate students and kept hearing stories about South Asian activism in the area. While they worked their day jobs, Chatterjee as a technologist and Ghosh as a landscape architect, they started conducting interviews and collecting oral histories.

“We saw that the South Asian community had some amazing activists and we wanted to bring those stories to the activist community and the larger community,” said Chatterjee. “We felt like it was important to tell those to build our shared understanding of who we are as South Asians.”

The stories shared on the tour are all about people with roots in South Asia. That includes people from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and Afghanistan.

South Asians first came to the Bay Area around 1850 when hundreds of thousands of people from around the world came to California after the discovery of gold, they explain. The first South Asian community event in Berkeley was in 1899, and the first South Asian anti-racist and anti-colonial protest in Berkeley was in 1908.

People of South Asian origin now make up about 4% of Berkeley’s population, according to data from the 2015 American Community Survey done by the U.S. Census Bureau, Chatterjee said in an email. That’s about half the size of the Black community, which makes ups 8% of the population.

  Three hours long, with six stops, the tour snakes through Berkeley, from Telegraph Avenue west to Shattuck Avenue. At one point, Chatterjee and two volunteers put on masks made out of brown paper bags and stage a dramatization at Sproul Plaza, chanting energetically, “Free India Now! Down with emergency. Free India Now!” The scene is a recreation of a 1970 rally held by students from India protesting against then-Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s decision to declare a state of emergency in the country, curtailing and civil liberties.

The tour touches an older history during a stop at Haas Pavilion. Chatterjee and Ghosh speak about Kartar Singh Sarabha, an Indian student who came to study chemistry at UC Berkeley in 1912. Sarabha was the founder of the Ghadar Party, a group of Punjabis living in North America who wanted to stand up against British colonial rule. Sarabha returned to India to fight the British and was killed at the age of 19, they say.

“Anirvan and Barnali really brought the stories to life with their passionate re-creations of different chapters of local history,” said Liam O’Donoghue, the host and producer of East Bay Yesterday, a local history podcast. “I love stories about how things that happen in the East Bay impact the rest of the world.”

It took more than a decade of research before Chatterjee and Ghosh started their Berkeley tours in 2012. For example, they found out about Sarabha’s story and the racism against Indians in 1907 in Berkeley by digging into archives of the San Francisco Chronicle.

“Our research is based on archival work, oral history, and synthesizing academic historical research—in addition to our own involvement in Berkeley movements over the past two decades,” said Chatterjee.

Since then, they have run 126 tours, with about two tours every month. They charge between $5 and $15, proceeds of which go back to community projects.

By leading the tours, Chatterjee and Ghosh hope to break down stereotypes about how South Asians are always “model minorities,” who study and work hard and don’t engage in social justice movements. Chatterjee and Ghosh, with their tech and architecture backgrounds, fall straight into the mold of the model minority and saw that activism work was often looked down at within their larger South Asian community.

“The myth of the model minority conceals much more than it reveals,” Chatterjee said in an email. “For example, the model minority stereotype conceals the fact that many post-1965 Asian American communities are the product of highly artificial selection, with only certain kinds of immigrants welcomed to the United States. It also overlooks the lives of Asian Americans who don’t neatly fit the stereotype, including folks who are working class, refugees, undocumented, queer, artists, activists, etc.”

Kajol Gupta, 19, who was taking the tour for the first time, said he hearing about passionate and political South Asians helped clarify some of his own thinking. “This walk gave me validation to pursue what I’m passionate about and made me feel like I wasn’t alone in my radical beliefs.”

The tour ends at Berkeley High School, where Chatterjee and Ghosh discussed September 11 and its aftermath. After asking for volunteers to read stories of Islamophobic hate crimes, Chatterjee narrates the story of South Asian Berkeley High students who went from classroom to classroom telling stories about their faith and culture right after the 2001 attacks.

“We try to highlight stories that give participants a sense of the range of South Asian American activism in Berkeley, and that speak to the present moment,” Chatterjee says.

Javaria Khan is a student at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

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Explore the Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour

Curated by community historians Barnali Ghosh and Anirvan Chatterjee, the Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour brings over a century of South Asian stories to Berkeley, California's streets. The journey reveals hidden tales of community leaders, feminists, LGBTQ+ South Asian activism, and iconic protest sites. As Ghosh and Chatterjee described, these are "the secret histories we were never taught." The tour earned recognition from Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in Historic Preservation in 2016.

Too often, the full history of the United States is obscured by the lack of tangible resources that document those stories. This tour attempts to upend that, by asking visitors to see what was once invisible. Unexpected histories exist on every corner if you just know where to look.

Photo By : Melinda Young Stuart via Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED

UC Berkeley’s Haas Pavilion Basketball Stadium (1908)

While Berkeley is synonymous with activism from the 1960s onwards, its roots in protest run deeper. In 1908, about 16 students, mainly from South Asia and part of the Oriental Student’s Association, gathered to challenge a talk by an evangelical speaker. His speech focused on his experience evangelizing in India, and justified the violence of empire. For the students who gathered in this location, this was an opportunity to protest the British empire, becoming one of the earliest examples of what would become a key part of the city of Berkeley’s storied identity.

• Revolution Remix: South Asian American History in Philadelphia

Photo By : Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour

Kala Bagai Way (1915)

Downtown Berkeley's Kala Bagai Way commemorates one of the first South Asian women on the West coast. Born in Amritsar, Kala Bagai and her family moved from present-day Pakistan to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1915. On arrival in Berkeley, they were physically prevented from settling into their new home. Further tragedy struck in 1923 when Kala's husband, demoralized by a ruling that stripped South Asian Americans of their citizenship, took his own life. Kala emerged resilient, becoming a pillar in Southern California's Indian American community. After a year-long campaign by Ghosh, Chatterjee, and other community activists, Berkeley renamed a downtown street in her honor in 2020.

• The History of Kala Bagai (Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour)
• 1982 Oral History Interview with Kala Bagai Chandra (South Asian American Digital Archive)

Photo By : Rina Herring via Wikimedia/CC BY-SA 3.0

Pacific Center (1986)

One of the oldest LGBTQ+ community centers in the country, this was the site where a gay Bangladeshi American activist first connected with Trikone, the first South Asian American LGBTQ+ organization. When Ghosh and Chatterjee tell the story, they describe it as an example of how South Asian stories often layer on top of a diversity of spaces. While some Asian American groups, such as early Chinese immigrants, faced spatial segregation into designated neighborhoods, South Asian immigrants were often more spread out, meaning preserving South Asian histories is sometimes more about documenting and sharing the stories of people and movements, and less about preserving individual buildings or neighborhoods.

Pasand Restaurant (2000)

In 2000, following the arrest of human trafficker and landlord Lakireddy Bali Reddy, a group of South Asian feminists formed the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action (ASATA). ASATA members rallied to support the trafficked workers, holding a vigil at Pasand Restaurant, one of Reddy’s establishments. Today, the all-volunteer group still champions South Asian communities against violence, oppression, and exploitation.

Photo By : Sanfranman59 by Wikimedia/CC BY-SA 3.0

Berkeley High School (2001)

In the days and weeks after 9/11, the South Asian community, and particularly those who were Muslim or Sikh, faced a national surge of racial attacks. At Berkeley High School, South Asian students faced verbal taunts and acts of physical violence. In response, about twenty immigrant South Asian students, many of them working-class Indian and Pakistani immigrants, came together to organize a series of anti-racist actions, including a multiracial safety program, a speak-out against racism and Islamophobia, and about fifty anti-racist trainings. In a moment of pain and fear, their work helped bring safety to their community.

Priya Chhaya is the associate director of content at the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

This May, our Preservation Month theme is “People Saving Places” to shine the spotlight on everyone doing the work of saving places—in big ways and small—and inspiring others to do the same!

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Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour

Tuesday, 04/16/19 5:00pm – 8:00pm southside and downtown berkeley.

For our kickoff event for the Techniques of Memory symposium, we are pleased to present the  Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour —a "technique of memory" that evokes hidden histories of immigrant organizing in the absence of physical monuments and markers. We expect that this socially engaged and performative tour will provide surprises and stimulating grist for discussion at the symposium. There are just 25 spots available on this award-winning walking tour, so register now at  april16tour.eventbrite.com . The tour is wheelchair accessible. Tickets are $20 general, $12 student.

Visit the Techniques of Memory symposium page for more information.

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The Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour: Stories, Performance, and Resistance

Mapping a Radical Legacy of South Asian Activism in the Bay Area

Please try again

An earlier version of this story was originally published on May 6, 2022.

You’ve probably heard of Bobby Seale and The Black Panthers, and Mario Savio and The Free Speech Movement. But California and the Bay Area also were a hotbed of radical South Asian activism that began more than 100 years ago.

Throughout the 20th century, immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and other countries in the region — along with their children — laid the groundwork for social movements that still resonate in California today. And while this Desi legacy has largely been overlooked, two community historians in Berkeley have spent the last decade bringing these stories to life.

Barnali Ghosh and Anirvan Chatterjee run the Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour . The three-hour tour visits sites where there are often no plaques or markers. But the pair make the history come alive through photographs and props. The two even act out historical quotes and scenes.

They share tales of South Asians from California you probably know, like Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as those you may never have heard of, like freedom fighter Kartar Singh Sarabha. Below, we hit a handful of the stops on the in-depth tour and give you a taste of this little-known history. You also can listen to the full audio episode (above) for a deeper dive into the story.

[View a full-screen version of the interactive here .]

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Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour

May is AAPI Heritage Month, and you can see history come to life on a special tour through the streets of Berkeley. KTVU's Greg Lee is joined by community historian Barnali Ghosh, who started the "Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour" with her husband Anirvan Chatterjee.

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A curated take on South Asian art, literature, life and news

Berkeley Walking Tour Opens Up The Conversation On South Asian Radical History

Nishat Kurwa

May 30, 2013

Life , News

This is the story that launches Barnali Ghosh and Anirvan Chatterjee’s Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour , a Zinnian, two-hour walk through sites around the city where ordinary South Asians, many of them immigrants, mounted small revolutions, some of which are intertwined with watershed global events like 9/11 and the liberation of India from British rule.

Eloquently scripted and interspersed with enactments, poetry, and personal observation, the tour includes figures like Ishtiaq alongside turn-of-the-century anti-imperialist student organizers, because “we wanted  to show as many different modes (of activism) as possible,” said Chatterjee.

But there’s a subtext to their choice of stories, one that underlies a modifying word in the tour’s title. “Radical,” for some South Asians, is a notion freighted with negativity, an identity that doesn’t necessarily merit aspiration. This perhaps isn’t a surprise when you consider South Asian communities’ history of embracing the compliant, hard-working “ model minority ” stereotype. Once you get beyond the mid-century apex of Gandhi’s freedom movement, many South Asian parents — particularly those who came here on professional visas — tend not to celebrate those who foment revolutions, personal or otherwise.

Historian Vijay Prashad has described this generation as the beneficiaries of State Selection, and  described a dilemma  he observed among their children as “second-generation South Asian American progressive youth who had a real hard time being radical desis. Many felt that to be desi was to be conservative, and to be radical was to be not desi.”

One intent of the tour, Chatterjee acknowledges, is validating South Asians who’ve pursued activism that their communities might deem extreme, naive, or pointless. “We think the tour works in different ways for different audiences … for (progressives), we want people to feel, ‘There’s 100 years of history I”m building on top of.’”  But he adds that they’ve learned the tour resonates differently for various audiences, and for instance, that hearing these stories sometimes inspires elders to share their own experiences as the first in their communities to come to the States. “We don’t want it to feel like an indoctrination.”

A moment during a tour in April provided a glimpse into the trick of navigating this framing. On the march up Telegraph Avenue to UC Berkeley, where the tour proceeds geographically, rather than chronologically, Chatterjee paused to address the group with the coda to Tinku Ishtiaq’s story.

He began by explaining that to help care for an ailing family member, Ishtiaq eventually moved home to Bangladesh, where he was openly dating a younger man.

Then a question burst forth from a member of the group, interrupting him. “Do they have any danger to their life, or do they have security guards outside their homes … because any Muslim terrorists could issue a fatwa against them?”

Chatterjee, who’s participated in years of post 9/11 anti-scapegoating work both inside and outside Indian communities, didn’t miss a beat, deftly sidestepping the stereotypes embedded in the question, and referring back to his interview with Ishtiaq. “He says that money solves a lot of problems.” Now the crowd laughed, relaxed, and the questioner emphatically chimed in “it does!”

Having returned from the U.S. and owning a software company buffered Ishtiaq from discrimination to some degree, Chatterjee explained. But, he continued, “whether you like who he loves or not doesn’t matter, because he was the child who took care of his family. And in our community, that counts for a lot.”

In moments like that, he explained later, “it helps a lot that we’re not talking about abstractions.” They pair avoids being drawn into political debate by arming themselves with enough background information about their subjects to introduce texture that can illuminate the backdrop of a given story, instead.

In many respects, the walking tour represents a different mode of activism (“proactive, non-confrontational, and open-ended,” Chatterjee said) than the activist work that Chatterjee and Ghosh cut their teeth on. The pair has worked on issues that span anti-immigrant legislation, air travel’s impact on climate change, and youth organizing. They got the idea for the tour after they married, and were together engaging in activist work and delving further into local South Asian history.

“It’s a way to open up and normalize conversations on topics like feminism, civil rights, anti-racism, and LGBT equality,” said Chatterjee. “If those conversations take place, and audience members can come to understand the choices made by the people in these stories, then we’ve succeeded.”

This sentiment was reflected by an audience member at April’s tour, Vinaye Misra. “History’s interesting, because sometimes we have this naive belief that society is moving in a more progressive direction. The flip side of that is we tend to think that the people that came before us weren’t as progressive. The truth is, the more you learn about history like this, the more you realize is that they were pioneers in their own way. Your job is to learn that you’re standing on their shoulders.”

For more information on the Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour and upcoming dates visit the website. Photos courtesy of the writer. You can follow Nishat Kurwa on Twitter  @nishatjaan .

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Manhattan's Chinatown

Jackson heights, queens, crown heights, brooklyn, washington, d.c., los angeles, tour san jose’s vietnamese food scene.

by Quyen Ngo

Photos by Patricia Chang

T he Vietnamese restaurants in San Jose range from a family-run pho stand that opens before dawn to a restaurant that launched a franchise empire, with locations now in seven countries. In between there are snack shops and juice bars; keep reading to learn more about this culinary community.

1834 Tully Road

Thirty years ago, a pho restaurant inspired a business idea that would eventually become the largest international pho franchise outside of Vietnam. Although customers in search of home-style cuisine may be disappointed to find a streamlined restaurant with a sleek design — and even a hip bubble tea counter — Pho Hoa’s offerings tell a story about the evolution of the Vietnamese-American role in the American restaurant business.

In 1983, Pho Hoa opened in Lion Plaza, the first Asian American mall to open in the South Bay Area. At the time, Vietnamese immigrants, many of whom had fled communist Vietnam after the war, had little business knowledge. Founder Binh Nguyen, who expanded Pho Hoa into a franchise, earned an MBA specifically to learn the ins and outs of the business. Soon after, Pho Hoa could be found in Canada, Korea, and the Philippines. Pho Hoa bills itself as a “health-conscious choice,” with broth that is slow-simmered with meat rather than bone marrow. The result is a broth that is lower in calories and consistent across all its locations around the globe.

Audio: Pho Hoa

Aside from the pho, be sure to try the vermicelli noodle dishes, such as the grilled prawn and pork version served with pickled daikon and carrots and house fish sauce, as well as rice dishes, featuring grilled meats like lemongrass pork chop.

Pho Ga Hung

1818 tully road #120.

This small stand located in one of San Jose’s oldest Vietnamese food courts, in Lion Plaza, is a true mom-and-pop shop. In 1975, owners Hung and Karen Vu emigrated from Vietnam immediately after the end of the war. Over the course of the next decade they secured jobs at Northern Telecom, the phone-equipment giant at the time, while their children all launched various careers in tech. But when the economy began to sink, the couple dropped their careers and decided to open up a chicken pho shop.

The Vu children assisted their parents in the opening of the restaurant, splitting up the days of the week to help open up shop at 4:30 a.m., making slow-simmered vats of broth. The shop has remained a family-run business for 30 years.

Audio: Pho Ga Hung

Pho Ga Hung is the first noodle shop in San Jose to focus on in all types of northern noodle soups; pho is the speciality, but there are also pork and crab vermicelli noodle dishes.

Hung and Karen — both from Nam Dinh, a city southeast of Hanoi — had to innovate when key ingredients were not available in America. When they realized the water mimosa plant could not be readily found, they altered the dish canh bun rau rut (literally “water mimosa noodle soup”) and used water spinach instead. In a recipe that originally called for dog meat — now frowned upon by some in Vietnam and illegal to sell in America — the family used pork hock, making bun gia cay (“false dog dish”).

2549 S King Road

Cao Nguyen restaurant comes as close as possible to the experience of eating at a Vietnamese family’s home. Serving all types of Vietnamese comfort food, the dishes are best shared and eaten family-style.

All the dishes at Cao Nguyen are from recipes that the owner, Nga, adapted from those taught to her by her grandmother, who worked for a meal delivery service catering to French residents during the French colonial period in Vietnam. After escaping Vietnam by boat and coming to the U.S., Nga turned to cooking in order to support herself, as well as her parents and siblings who all remained in Vietnam. She opened a few restaurants until finally settling on Cao Nguyen in 1996. Her restaurant philosophy is that food is only great when you can taste the love and soul in it, and that’s what she’s sought to maintain at the restaurant for the past 20 years.

Audio: Cao Nguyen

Make sure to order a classic dinner pairing: claypot catfish and canh chua , or sweet and sour soup. At Cao Nguyen, you can also find a bowl of rich hu tieu , the well-loved Vietnamese adaptation of the pork and seafood rice noodle soup from Phnom Penh, kuy teav .

Nuoc Mia Vien Dong 2

979 story road.

Sugarcane juice is a refreshing drink served on the streets throughout Vietnam. In San Jose, you can find it served with a dozen different flavors at Nuoc Mia Vien Dong, which uses the classic method of mill-pressing peeled sugarcane. When kumquat is in season, it is squeezed into sugarcane juice. Otherwise, lime is used. Sugarcane juice flavored with strawberry, mango, pineapple, and other fruits, is also available, as well as one of their most popular juices: pennywort ( rau ma ) sugarcane juice, a leafy green version of the drink known among Vietnamese people for its myriad health benefits.

Nuoc Mia Vien Dong also offers sweets like Vietnamese waffles — in flavors such as pandan, durian, and taro — and sinh to , Vietnamese shakes made with fruits like strawberry, papaya, or avocado, as well as che .

The most popular che is the combination or three-color che ( che ba mau ), an icy treat layered with green tapioca noodles, yellow mung bean paste, and red beans — the three colors that give the dessert its name. While there are many shops that specialize in che, Nuoc Mia Vien Dong offers a variety of sweets and juices in one shop.

Eurasia Delight

1111 story road.

The history of colonization in Vietnam can be told through Vietnamese snacks available at beef jerky snack shops like Eurasia Delight across from the food court in Grand Century Mall — now considered the quintessential Vietnamese mall in San Jose, edging out the older Lion Plaza.

Beef jerky is the main attraction here, with over a dozen different types stored in clear cases surrounding the store. Beef jerky became a part of Vietnamese culture after roughly a thousand years of Chinese domination, beginning in the first century BCE. And like all Vietnamese foods that resulted from imperialism, beef jerky has become distinctively Vietnamese — with flavors like lemongrass and Vietnamese curry.

For those with a taste for the sour, among the cases of beef jerky are jars of pickles, featuring fruits like unripe ambarella ( coc non ), chili green mango, and kumquat. Lining the walls are French goods, remnants of the effect of colonization of Vietnamese tastes: You can find beurre Bretel (a classic French butter that is sometimes spooned into a cup of coffee), cans of paté, and boxes of French pastries. Eurasia Delight and similar snack shops all offer seasonal specialties as well: mooncakes during the Moon Festival, candied fruits during Lunar New Year, and at Christmas, boxes of panettone (an Italian sweet bread popular in southeastern France, and now, among Vietnamese Americans).

2871 Senter Road

Bun Bo Hue (Seafood Hut #1) is tucked inside a plaza of gift shops, groceries, and bakeries on Senter Road. When Ngoc Ngo, the owner of Bun Bo Hue first came to America, she started serving small dishes in takeout food shops. When the customers responded well to the food she served, she decided to take a gamble and opened her first restaurant, serving food from central Vietnam, which is characterized by spicy flavors. The restaurant is named after the noodle soup of Hue, the former imperial capital of Vietnam: Food from Hue is said to be fit for kings, thanks to the immaculate preparations requested by the emperors. The dishes are carefully cooked and presented, elevating flavors and ingredients found across the country to new levels.

Aside from bun bo Hue, you can find a range of dishes topped with small, dried shrimp: Banh beo (tiny steamed rice cakes), banh nam (flat rice cakes steamed in banana leaves), banh bot loc (chewy tapioca dumplings), banh ram it (fried mochi dumplings), and banh canh (a soup with thick, udon-like noodles) are all on the menu here.

Food from the central region features delicate dishes, each meant to be eaten with the correct fish sauce — flavored a bit saltier for banh nam, and sweeter for banh beo — for dipping. Another must-try dish from the region is mi quang — a turmeric-dyed pork (or chicken) and shrimp noodle dish from Quang Nam province that is light on the broth and served with a handful of herbs, plus toasted sesame rice crackers for crunch.

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