An entry in a 1635 Virginia land record is the earliest indication of the presence of a South Asian in colonial North America. “Tony East Indian” -- with a diminutive first name and no last name except for an epithet indicating a vague understanding of geographical origin and racial identity, “Tony” is an insignificant speck in the vast landscape of the emerging colony. But his presence is surely remarkable – this man who came from the very antipodes, as it were, in an era when even the voyage from Europe to the New World was lengthy and dangerous.
The person who listed Tony and 23 other men as headright to the 1200 acres of land he was registering was George Menefie, a prominent Virginia merchant, landowner, and colonial office holder who had himself arrived from England in 1623. Tony’s transport to Virginia might have been arranged by Mr. Menefie or an agent acting on Menefie’s behalf, but his journey most certainly involved forces of even greater magnitude than a single Virginia landholder.
In 1600, when Queen Elizabeth I had granted a charter to the “Company of Merchant of London trading into the East indies …,” the members of the East India Company, as it came to be known, had already recognized the tremendous profits to be made from trade with the enormous cluster of kingdoms and principalities known as “India.” Always a land of myth and marvel in the western imaginary, India, was, by the early 1600s, a still wondrous but also geographically precise space reached by navigable sea routes. The East India Company went on to become a behemoth of a corporation-cum-government, but even in its relatively modest early years, some Company officials returning to England took back with them (perhaps, in some cases, forcibly) Indian servants, many of whom continued to live and work in London. Adding to the East Indian population in England were other “lascars” or sailors employed in Company ships sailing to England who found themselves stranded and destitute in and around English ports. England, one can assume, was the mid-point of Tony’s journey to Virginia.
Although Tony and the other East Indians (as they were called) who followed him to colonial America are almost erased from our collective memory, the fact of their presence provokes some interesting questions and offers up some important reminders.