Guide

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.

  1. Exterior of the HAAS Basketball Pavilion

    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.

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  2. View of a brown street sign that says "Kala Bagai Way" in Berkeley California.

    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.

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  3. An exterior view of a white home with the words Pacific Center in rainbow letters.

    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.

  4. View of a vacant storefront where a group of people are standing listening to a tour.

    Photo By: Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour

    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.

  5. Exterior of a high school building in Berkeley, California. I

    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.

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