When Kala Bagai Refused to “Go Home”
After the U.S. stripped her husband of his citizenship, one Indian American woman decided to fight on.
It’s easy enough to someone feel like an outsider. It takes just two words: “Go home.” Whether a first- or fourth-generation immigrant, the phrase can erase a person’s entire history, especially when that history is invisible to most.
It happened soon after 1915. Kala Bagai — one of the earliest South Asian women to arrive in California — had just bought a home in Berkeley. But before she could even move in, a group of angry neighbors barred her family from doing so. Worried about their three children’s safety at a time when anti-Asian riots were all too common, she and her husband Vaishno Das left for a more hospitable neighborhood. Only a few years later, federal law would strip her husband of his citizenship, turning an American family into outsiders once more. Her husband, a man who had come to America to be free from British rule, would take his own life as a final act of protest.