Bhogwan Singh became Hollywood’s foremost turban wrapper. He also did small roles in several films that had Oriental themes. Pic courtesy/imdb.com

Her soon-to-release book, One Man, Many Lives: Bhagwan Singh and the Early South Asians in America (Simon & Schuster and Yoda Press), sees Kumar play armchair detective as she digs through directories, archives, newspapers, pamphlets and films to uncover the trajectories of the two men. “Some of the records are surprisingly detailed,” she says. “From whatever I found, it seemed like these two men lived too close to each other, sometimes in the same city. When one of them was in the limelight, the other somehow dropped out [of the scene],” she mentions.

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The South Asian population in America was a tiny and insignificant one in the 1920s. Following the landmark Bhagat Singh Thind judgement of 1923, which denied naturalisation to Thind—a native Hindu who argued he was ‘Caucasian’ and ‘Aryan’—the immigration laws only became more rigid. There were just about 3,000 or more South Asians, says Kumar, adding that this made it easier for her to trace these two men.  

Anuradha Kumar

Kumar, who is the author of Coming Back to the City: Mumbai Stories and The Hottest Summer in Years, has moved to non-fiction with this new book. But as a student of history, who had dreamed of pursuing a PhD but was unable to do so, this book became a sort of redemption, she admits. Her research for this one, went far and wide, beyond the protagonists she was chasing. Context is important, she says, explaining why it was important to tell the stories of other South Asians who lived during that time, too. “Every person lives their life in a certain context. The choices that both Bhogwan and Bhagwan made were decided by the circumstances they found themselves in. In a way, their lives seem to reflect the restraints that other South Asians also faced in America at the time. This book also tells that other vital story of the fight for citizenship by immigrants.” 
  
The arguments in the book are an unusual attempt to explore where and how the lives of Bhogwan and Bhagwan intertwined. For every “what if,” there is a historical fact, thorough enough for you to wonder if there were indeed two people, or one. In the 1920s, Bhagwan took on a new avatar, remodelling himself as Bhagwan Singh Gyanee, a spiritual guru. This came following a complicated relationship with the Ghadar Party, and an imminent threat of deportation after some members were hanged. In the book, Kumar writes about an advertisement that appeared in some west coast papers. “Bhagwan Singh Gyanee, whose face appeared in profile, was described as a mastermind and philosopher who had travelled the world and was now finally in the US. He had grown up in the Punjab, had mastered the scriptures at an early age, and was hence called ‘gyanee [wise],’” Kumar writes. “Bhagwan had cheated some of his colleagues in Ghadar. He wanted to cover up that past. And he managed to do that very well for many years. But it was a precarious existence, which is why he also doubled up as an actor sometimes,” she says. There was this one occasion when both Bhogwan and Bhagwan worked in the same film, the Korda Brothers’ Jungle Book (1942). “But, only one of them [Bhogwan] was credited,” she says. We will leave it at that.