According to the 2023 estimate by the US Census Bureau, more than 453,000 Bengali-speaking people live in the United States. 

The term “Bengali” is multivalent as it refers to individuals from the state of West Bengal in Indian and from Bangladesh, whose shared history predates the Indian partition of 1947 that divided the British Indian province of Bengal along religious lines, creating Hindu-majority West Bengal (India) and Muslim-majority East Bengal (Pakistan, later Bangladesh). Besides this religious difference, the dialects, food, and cultural norms of Indian Bengalis and Bangladeshi Bengalis are also distinctly diverse--but the shared language and history forge an unbroken line of connection despite geopolitical events. Although it would be immensely rewarding to celebrate this cultural diversity through oral histories of Bengalis on both sides of the India-Bangladesh border, due to time constraints, this project focuses only on Indian Bengalis living in the United States, especially the San Francisco Bay Area. The geographical focus is solely due to it being the locus of my own life and work, although there are several other regions within the United States that boast a similarly vibrant Bengali community. Similarly, the focus on Bengalis instead of other Indian communities is also based on my personal cultural background and desire to document the challenges and triumphs of how Bengalis in the diaspora sustain their cultural traditions.

In 2022, the Bay Area Equity Atlas demonstrated that 27% of the San Francisco Bay Area residents identified as Asian American or Pacific Islander, i.e., roughly 2 million people, out of which 16% were Indian. They also reported that the Indian population is concentrated in Silicon Valley and East Bay cities, such as Fremont and Dublin. Although I have not been able to locate specific records about the Indian Bengali population in the SF Bay Area, the existence of multiple Bengali cultural organizations, theater and music festivals, and Durga Puja events are evidence of a thriving community. Just within the past few months of the time of writing this content in August 2025, the South Bay region has celebrated the Bengali Music Festival in April, Bengali Natyamela [Theater Festival] in June, as well as the [Bengali] Summer Fest in July. 

Vivek Bald’s research in Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America charts the history of Bengali immigration to the US, beginning in the mid-1880s. These earliest immigrants were Bengali Muslim merchants from what would later become the Indian state of West Bengal visiting port cities to meet the demand for “Oriental” goods, primarily silk from colonial Bengal. This wave was followed by Indian laborers on British steamships who deserted to find better work opportunities in the US (Bald 6-8). 

The tough immigration laws in the 1910s and 1920s halted Indian immigration and naturalization: the 1917 Immigration Act made East Indians "undesirable aliens, to be turned away at the borders. In 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court ... [ruled] that those East Indians who were already resident in the United States were racially ineligible to become U.S. citizens" (Bald 2). Eventually, President Truman signed the Luce-Celler Act into law in July 1946 that permitted a quota of 100 Indians to immigrate to the United States per year and allowed those Indian nationals already residing in the U.S. to become naturalized American citizens. A significant wave of skilled professionals also began arriving after President Johnson’s Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, which, as the South Asian American Digital Archive explains, "abolished the previous 'quota' system and removed discrimination against South Asians and other demographics, giving preference to reunifying families and skilled professionals." This wave was followed by another influx starting with India’s IT boom in the 1990s. 

The experiences and contributions of these South Asian immigrants to the United States from the 1950s through contemporary times are stored in the valuable oral history records of South Asians in the United States, such as (i) the South Asian Oral History Project at the University of Washington, with interviews conducted between 2004-2018. There are also other vital collections in (i) the Oral history interviews of the India Association of Minnesota Oral History Project at the Minnesota Historical Society that captures the lives of Indian and Indian Americans members of the India Association of Minnesota, conducted between 2003-2005, and (ii) the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) Oral Histories, (iii) the Indian American Communities in Indiana at Indiana University, conducted between 1998-99, (iv) the Punjabi and Sikh Diaspora Digital Archive at the University of California Davis, and (v) the South Asian Immigrants in the Philadelphia Area Oral History Project at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, conducted in 1996.