Dalip Singh Saund: The Pioneer Who Opened the Door for Immigrants Like Me
On the afternoon of December 16, 1949, in a federal district courtroom in El Centro, California, a fifty-year-old Punjab-born University of California, Berkeley Ph.D. mathematician named Dalip Singh Saund was sworn in as a citizen of the United States after twenty-nine years of continuous California residency. Seven years later, in November 1956, the voters of California’s Twenty-Ninth Congressional District elected him to the United States House of Representatives—the first person of Asian ancestry ever elected to the U.S. Congress.
His story is not merely one of personal success. It is the story of determination against discrimination, of patience against injustice, and of one immigrant who changed the future for millions who followed.
Dalip Singh Saund was born on September 20, 1899, in the small Punjabi village of Chhajulwadi in Amritsar District of British India. He belonged to a prosperous Sikh farming family. His parents valued education and sent him first to a Christian missionary school in Amritsar, then to Prince of Wales College in Jammu, and finally to the University of the Punjab in Lahore, where he graduated in Mathematics in 1919.
Even as a young student, Saund dreamed of America. Officially, he told his parents that he wanted to study food preservation at the University of California, Berkeley, so that he could return to Punjab and establish a mango-canning industry. But there was another powerful motivation.
During his student years in Lahore, India was passing through one of the most turbulent periods of its freedom struggle. Saund became deeply involved with the Indian National Congress movement. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s ideals of non-violence and Abraham Lincoln’s vision of equality and democracy, he developed a lifelong commitment to justice and public service.
In the summer of 1920, at the age of twenty, he sailed for America. After arriving at Ellis Island on September 27, he crossed the continent by train to California. Like many new immigrants, everything around him was unfamiliar. Unable to understand the English menu in the dining car, he survived largely on bread and milk during the journey. His first night in San Francisco was spent in a cheap hotel infested with bedbugs. The next day he moved into a boarding house run by members of the Sikh community near the Berkeley campus.
He enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, intending to study food preservation. However, his exceptional mathematical ability quickly caught the attention of the faculty. They persuaded him to switch to mathematics. He completed his Master’s degree in 1922 and earned a Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1924, becoming one of the earliest Indians to receive a doctoral degree from Berkeley.
One might imagine that such an achievement would open every professional door.
Instead, it closed many.
American universities in the 1920s simply would not appoint an Indian-born mathematician to teach white students. Despite glowing recommendations from Berkeley professors, Saund could not secure an academic position. A promising industrial job in food preservation also slipped away when he hesitated, still hoping for a university appointment.
Unable to pursue an academic career, he moved in 1925 to California’s Imperial Valley, where many Punjabi Sikh immigrants had established farms.
There he supervised cotton-picking crews, calculated payrolls, weighed harvested cotton, and later farmed lettuce, sugar beets, and flax. His Berkeley doctorate hung on the wall of his modest room while he labored in the fields.
The irony was heartbreaking.
He possessed one of America’s finest academic qualifications, yet racial discrimination forced him into manual agricultural work.
The legal situation was even worse.
In 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the famous case of United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind that Indians were not legally “white” for purposes of naturalization. As a result, Indians became ineligible for U.S. citizenship. Many who had already become citizens even had their citizenship revoked.
California’s Alien Land Law then compounded the injustice by prohibiting people ineligible for citizenship from owning farmland.
Thus Saund farmed land that, legally, he could never own.
To continue farming, he had to lease property through American-born friends.
In 1928 he married Marian Z. Kosa, an American-born schoolteacher of Czech immigrant parents. Together they raised three children—Dalip Jr., Julie, and Ellie—all American citizens by birth.
Saund refused to surrender to discrimination.
Instead, he began writing.
In 1930 he published My Mother India, a powerful response to Katherine Mayo’s controversial book Mother India, which portrayed India as unfit for self-government. Saund defended Indian civilization and strongly supported India’s independence movement. His book circulated widely among Indian communities and university students.
His activism steadily expanded.
In 1942 he founded the India Association of America and became its first president. The organization had one principal goal—to secure citizenship rights for Indians living in America.
For four years Saund traveled repeatedly across the country, often with very limited financial resources. He spoke before civic groups, met members of Congress, testified before committees, and tirelessly campaigned for equal rights. He endured racial insults, suspicion, and countless disappointments, but he never abandoned the cause.
His persistence finally produced results.
In 1946 Congress passed the Luce-Celler Act, sponsored by Representative Clare Boothe Luce and Representative Emanuel Celler.
The Act allowed Indians already living in the United States to become naturalized citizens.
Three years later, on December 16, 1949, Dalip Singh Saund finally took the oath of American citizenship.
He was fifty years old.
Most people would have celebrated the victory and retired into private life.
Saund had bigger plans.
He entered politics.
His first election for Justice of the Peace in 1950 was won by only thirteen votes, but opponents successfully challenged the result because he had not yet satisfied the minimum citizenship requirement.
Undeterred, he ran again in 1952.
This time he won decisively.
As Justice of the Peace in Westmorland, California, Judge Saund earned a reputation for fairness, honesty, and integrity. He even closed down the town’s notorious red-light district, earning widespread respect.
In 1956 he aimed even higher.
He ran for the U.S. House of Representatives from California’s Twenty-Ninth Congressional District.
His Republican opponent was no ordinary candidate. She was Jacqueline Cochran Odlum, the legendary aviator, backed by Vice President Richard Nixon himself.
Many campaign advertisements highlighted Saund’s Indian name to suggest he was somehow “less American.”
The strategy failed.
The voters elected Dalip Singh Saund.
On January 3, 1957, he entered the United States Congress as the first Asian American ever elected to the House of Representatives.
He was immediately appointed to the prestigious House Foreign Affairs Committee and later traveled officially throughout Asia, meeting leaders including Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, President Sukarno of Indonesia, and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion of Israel.
He won reelection in 1958 and again in 1960.
He consistently supported civil rights and voted in favor of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960.
His belief was simple yet profound:
“There is no room in the United States of America for second-class citizenship.”
In 1962 tragedy struck.
While flying from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., he suffered a severe stroke that permanently impaired his speech. Although he courageously sought reelection, he lost that year’s election.
He spent the remaining years of his life quietly with his family in Los Angeles until suffering another stroke on April 22, 1973.
He was seventy-three years old.
Members of Congress from both political parties paid heartfelt tributes to him after his death.
Yet Saund’s greatest contribution may not have been his three terms in Congress.
His greatest contribution was helping change America’s immigration laws.
The Luce-Celler Act of 1946 opened the first small legal door by allowing Indians to become citizens.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 opened that door wide by abolishing discriminatory national-origin quotas.
Millions of immigrants from India and across Asia entered the United States through those reforms.
My Own Journey
As I read Dalip Singh Saund’s remarkable life, I cannot help seeing echoes of my own journey.
I arrived in the United States in 1991, more than seventy years after Saund first came to America and more than twenty-five years after the Immigration and Nationality Act had transformed American immigration policy.
Unlike Saund, I arrived in a country where Indian engineers, doctors, scientists, professors, and entrepreneurs were welcomed for their knowledge and professional skills. I did not have to fight for the right to become a citizen because pioneers before me had already fought that battle.
Still, like every immigrant, I arrived carrying dreams, hopes, and uncertainties.
Within weeks of reaching America, I developed a severe urinary infection that led to urinary retention. I had no medical insurance. My in-laws lovingly cared for me and admitted me to a local hospital. As soon as my wife learned of my condition, she made one of the most courageous decisions of her life. She resigned from her prestigious position as a Senior Class I Officer with the Government of India, sacrificing her pension, gratuity, and lifelong medical benefits, and came to America to care for me. That decision changed the course of our family’s future forever.
Together we started life almost from scratch.
With hard work, determination, and Waheguru’s blessings, I established a software consulting company in California. During the technology boom of the 1990s and early 2000s, our company recruited and placed nearly 250 highly skilled software engineers with some of America’s leading Fortune 500 companies.
Beyond business, I remained committed to preserving my heritage. I devoted years to digitizing the sacred Sikh scriptures, becoming one of the pioneers in making the Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji available in digital form. I continued writing about my family’s history, Punjab, Partition, Sikh heritage, and our immigrant experience, preserving memories for future generations.
Looking back today, I realize that my success—and the success of millions of Indian Americans of my generation—rests upon foundations laid by people like Dalip Singh Saund.
He confronted laws that denied him citizenship.
He farmed land he was forbidden to own.
He earned one of America’s highest academic degrees yet was denied the opportunity to teach because of the color of his skin and the place of his birth.
He refused to surrender.
Instead, he changed the law.
When I became an American citizen, built my business, raised my family, and watched my grandchildren study in outstanding American universities, I was benefiting from freedoms that pioneers like Saund had struggled to secure decades before.
Americans like me today proudly celebrate 250th Independence Day
Today Indian Americans serve as CEOs of global corporations, professors, physicians, engineers, entrepreneurs, judges, members of Congress, governors, cabinet secretaries, and even Vice President of the United States.
That extraordinary journey did not begin overnight.
It began with brave men and women who dared to believe that America could become more just than it was.
Dalip Singh Saund was one of the greatest among them.
As a fellow Punjabi who made America my home in 1991, I offer my deepest respect to this remarkable son of Punjab.
He opened the door.
Millions of us—including me and my family—were privileged to walk through it.
