It was in the summer of 2016 that I first came across Bhagwan Singh. He was a popular “turban-wrapper” in 1930s Hollywood who shared his name with a revolutionary-turned-lecturer who too lived in Los Angeles. Bhagwan was a common enough name, so I surmised these were two very different men: Bhagwan Singh and Bhagwan Singh.
I was right – and wrong. Soon enough, I gathered that their names were spelled differently. The turban-wrapper was Bhogwan Singh, with an o in his first name, and the revolutionary-turned-lecturer was Bhagwan Singh. This is it, I thought. I have figured them out now.
But their stories kept surprising. When the two appeared in old records and newspapers, their spellings were occasionally changed, leaving me wondering, who is this: Bhagwan Singh or Bhogwan Singh?
The more I read about them, the more their lives seemed to intersect, complement and sometimes even interchange. I felt I was being somehow misled by history.
Fascinated and intrigued, I decided to seek these men out in archives, retrace their footsteps, figure out the years and places where they had lived close to each other, or the times their journeys mingled and merged.
This was not just a mystery of two men with similar names. It was the history of South Asians migrating to America, their delayed acceptance and their quest to become naturalised citizens.
As fortune would have it, Arpita Das, the publisher of Yoda Press, liked the idea and so the mystery, or my attempt to solve it, became a book. One Man, Many Lives: Bhagwan Singh and the Early South Asians in America told the story of Bhagwan Singh along with the story of South Asian migration to the United States.
The book was released in 2022, but it turned out, the life of Bhagwan Singh was not fully unpacked. There were still more nuggets to discover, more threads to pull.
Following footsteps
While researching the book, I had followed Bhagwan and Bhogwan step by step, despite being separated from them by time and distance.
I had drawn up tables recording their movements from 1910 – when both names are listed as arriving in Canada, just as xenophobia against Asians was building up – right up to 1962, the year both men died, months apart. I searched old telephone directories for places where they lived and then traced them on Google Maps. Sometimes, zooming into the maps, I could almost imagine what Bhagwan Singh might have seen when he stood on the doorstep of his home or looked out a window.
The more I pinned him to a place, the more elusive he became. At times, I felt like a detective who had rung the doorbell of a house, only to find that the person she wanted to meet had made a swift exit through the backdoor. Entire chunks of Bhagwan Singh’s life were shrouded in the fog of time. During a month in 1934, while he was in custody in Florida, he was also lecturing in Minnesota. Was this Bhagwan or Bhogwan?
I had no way to tell for sure. Bhagwan Singh’s grandson, Surinder Pal Singh, was equally intrigued, but could not add more. He only wished not to have his revolutionary grandfather mixed up with Hollywood.
In the winter of 2022, I emailed Hugh Johnston, professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University in Canada, to get some answers. Johnston had written about Bhagwan Singh’s days in Vancouver in 1912-1913, describing his key role in inciting Punjabis (or Hindoos, as South Asians were called) against an administration that regarded them as aliens and illegals. Bhagwan Singh was put under surveillance while a detective of British Indian police, William Hopkinson, investigated him for entering Canada by assuming the identity of another man.
Hopkinson’s probe led to the courts ordering Bhagwan Singh’s deportation in November 1913. This was five months before the infamous Komagata Maru episode when a shipload of Indian migrants was denied entry into Canada.
Johnston and I corresponded about Bhagwan Singh briefly but from it emerged another surprise. Along with his email Johnston attached a photograph of a Yamaha reed organ (also called a pump organ or foot-pedal organ) with the name B S Jakh inscribed on the wooden front, just above the couplers. BS Jakh was the name Bhagwan Singh assumed when he surreptitiously slipped into San Francisco from Canada after his deportation. It was one of the aliases he lived under during his time on the run in 1913-1918.
Johnston told me that the photo of the reed organ had been sent to him by its owner William van Orden. On van Orden’s website, you can see his painstaking recreations of marine life found along Canada’s west coast. As the website, which mentions his workshop on Quadra Island, east of Vancouver Island, notes:
“The quest is to create a permanent three-dimensional record of every fish [species] found along the Pacific coast. With over 400 different molds cluttering his shop, it would appear that the quest has turned into an obsession.”
Van Orden died in December 2021. Around the time he passed away, he was restoring the 100-year-old BS Jakh reed organ in the hope that he could return it to Bhagwan Singh’s heirs: grandson Surinder Pal Singh, who too incidentally died in 2021, and great-granddaughter, Joti Singh.
Van Orden’s curiosity led him to do his own research and I have since felt that I have been mirroring his moves. That is what led me to the musician Joe Mock.
Musical journey
Yamaha, initially called Nippon Gakki Company, was established by Torakusu Yamaha in Japan in 1887 as a reed organ manufacturer. Around the turn of the century, it expanded its line of products and began making portable reed organs, one of which came into the possession of Bhagwan Singh or BS Jakh.
As BS Jakh, Bhagwan Singh travelled from Kobe to California in 1914 and used this alias on several occasions as he sailed between East Asia and California in the initial years of the First World War. It is not clear today if, or when, Bhagwan Singh carried the reed organ with him. Once deported from Canada, he did not return to the country till 1949. So how did it land up in Vancouver, ultimately with van Orden? Did it come to California and was then taken north by some members of the alternative music bands that were moving up and down the coast in the 1950s? Or was it transported from Japan to Vancouver by someone known to Bhagwan Singh in the forlorn hope that he would claim it one day?
Whatever the case, the reed organ came to Joe Mock in 1968 as a gift from his then wife Elisabeth, who worked at the Mediterranean Guitar Shop, described as a “hippie days co-op shop”. In an email, he told me:
“‘B.S Jakh’ came to me as a present from Elisabeth my wife, at the time, circa 1968. I called and she said she could not recall how it came about that she bought it. We think it is because she was in charge of the cash in the Mediterranean Guitar Shop and that someone put it up for sale. Neither of us can recall any ‘Wow’ moment, it kind of showed up where it belonged.”
Mock was at the time with the band Mock Duck, which “recorded and played what is now called Acid Jazz and other things and on other things that are not normally described as musical instruments”. The band went through various line-ups, with Joe Mock remaining the one enduring member. He was later part of the Pied Pumpkin, a popular band known for its “timeless music, fearless arrangement and irreverent humour”.
Mock shared with me a song he had played on the BS Jakh reed organ. “‘Borrowed Song’ is the opening song on an unreleased album from 1969/70,” he said. “I was very taken by the sonic enormity contained in the instrument and even chose to honour the sound of the pumping mechanisms in the intro. As I now hear it again after all these years, it remains an unusual, interesting piece of music.”
Mock recalled that he once performed with the reed organ when opening a concert for BB King “to present a new composition but otherwise it was too awkward to transport. It was also used on a video documentary, Potlatch, for the Canadian National Film Board.”
Mock kept the reed organ until 1986, after which it was with his mother-in-law until she died. In the late 1980s, it left Vancouver for Protection Island, a ferry ride away, and went into the hands of Mock’s Pied Pumpkin bandmate Rick Scott.
Following my email correspondence with him, Mock reached out to Scott, who never found anyone to repair the reed organ and still remained reluctant to let go of it. He says he once thought of using its wood to build dulcimers, a stringed instrument that some find similar to the santoor, but could not bring himself to do it.
To both Scott and Mock, “the instrument felt like it had a sacred place in our times and the music that came from it. In the Pied Pumpkin repertoire, there are the songs, ‘Christopher’ and ‘Eliza’, performed on it.”
Scott offered the reed organ for free to anyone who wanted it, with a woman from the town of Nanaimo on the eastern side of Vancouver Island taking him up on it. From there, it moved to Tahsis on the western end of Vancouver Island, from where it came to van Orden in August 2020.
Black suitcase
There is still another strand in the Bhagwan Singh story.
After my book was published, I received a message on Facebook from someone intrigued by the cover image. The photograph, showing Bhagwan Singh with a ceremonial sword, was taken in a Tokyo studio in 1914. My correspondent wanted to know more about the photo, but it was I who learned more about Bhagwan Singh from her. For she was no casual reader but Bhagwan Singh’s daughter Bebe Pritam Johnson.
Bhagwan Singh had three children from his first marriage. The family lived in Hong Kong while he travelled but later returned to India. In 1929, he married Florence Brown in Washington, and in 1936, as I learned from Bebe Johnson, he met Adele Hunn on a lecture tour.
The two began corresponding, exchanging thoughts about books and philosophies, which led to romance and, in 1940, Bebe Idyl (from Ideal) was born.
Hunn saved all the letters she exchanged with Bhagwan Singh in a black suitcase, which was the one thing she salvaged when their Chicago apartment caught fire in 1955. Johnson still has those letters.
Bhagwan Singh refers to Johnson in his will, a document that she says was found some years ago by a writer friend of hers in Surinder Pal Singh’s garage in Atlanta, Georgia. She is now working on a book about her parents – she calls her mother mana and her father data. The book is aptly titled The Black Suitcase.
In the recent past Johnson has found more letters, which has made even her wonder if her attempt to piece together her parents’ lives will ever be complete. “An incomplete and tragic love story,” is how Johnson describes her parents’ relationship. It would be nice, I feel, to hear more of Bhagwan Singh’s story from others, especially those in his life. But, at the same time I ask myself, can the story of anyone’s life ever be complete? And can one ever hope to know another life completely?
