The Indian American Essayist Who Championed Social Justice and Feminism

After Kartar Dhillon gave birth to her first child in a Fresno hospital, a perplexed nurse asked why Dhillon was still using her maiden name. “Why don’t you use your husband’s name?” the nurse asked. Dhillon — who also refused to wear a wedding ring — shot back without hesitation: “Why doesn’t he use mine?”

It was the early 1930s, and though Dhillon was still in her teens, she was not a person constrained by the expectations of her era. The rest of her life would stand as solid evidence of that. She would go on to be a dedicated union member, a social justice organizer, a Black Panthers volunteer, a prolific essayist and a passionate campaigner for India’s independence. She also just happened to be the kind of live-wire who was always first on the dance floor at parties — especially if James Brown was playing.

Dhillon learned resilience young. Born the fourth of eight siblings to Indian immigrants in Simi Valley in 1915, she spent her early childhood in Astoria, Oregon. (Dhillon’s essays about this period were later adapted into a film by her granddaughter Erika Surat Andersen, titled Turbans.) The rest of Dhillon’s adolescence was spent moving around California to communities that were not always welcoming.

“We definitely were not accepted,” Dhillon said in a 2001 interview with Punjabi American Heritage Society co-founder, Dr. Jasbir Singh Kang. “They looked upon Sikhs and Indians generally as freaks as [if] we had come out of a circus of something. There was a great cruelty against our people.”

Still, Dhillon’s father, who left Punjab and settled in San Francisco in 1910, needed to chase work wherever he could find it. (Starting in 1913, California’s Alien Land Law prevented Asian immigrants from purchasing land or leasing it for more than three years.) For Dhillon, this meant changing schools frequently. Despite attending a total of 13 schools — three in a single year at one point — Dhillon successfully graduated high school in 1932, when she was 17. Sadly, her mother died that same year, five years after her father’s death; Dhillon was left to raise her younger siblings with the assistance of an older brother.

When her brother suggested that Dhillon might be better off moving to India, she opted instead to marry Surat Singh Gill, who had a degree in political science from UC Berkeley and was a passionate public speaker for the Gadar Party. He, like Dhillon’s entire family, was an active member of the group, which campaigned to free India from British occupation. (Dhillon’s father was a Gadar Party founding member.)

Dhillon’s first daughter was born soon after her marriage. She later exclaimed that she was “so happy it was a girl because I wanted to prove to the world that she could be the equal of any boy ever born.” She later had another daughter; a son from Gill’s first marriage also joined the family.

Life as a young mother was tough. The family lived in poverty, working as sharecroppers and sometimes day laborers. In the late 1930s, the family moved to Los Angeles, where Dhillon worked as a waitress and, sometimes, a movie extra. Dhillon and her family relocated once more in 1940, to San Francisco — the place that she would call home for much of the rest of her life.

In 1942, Dhillon’s life opened up in more ways than one. She got divorced, writing in her essay, “A Parrot’s Beak” (first published in 1989): “Freedom from marriage at the age of 27 with no job skills and three children to support is not quite the stuff of dreams, but I had finally taken my destiny into my own hands.”

Dhillon’s earliest days of freedom were not quiet ones. As part of the World War II effort, the single mom worked as a highly skilled machinist and a truck driver who delivered servicemen to ports on their way to deployment. She developed a habit of sketching portraits of these men to send back to their families in case they never made it home — a way to utilize her skills as an artist, while also showing compassion to so many with uncertain futures. Dhillon’s own brother Hari was killed in action in Okinawa at the age of 18.

After the war, while based in Hunters Point, Dhillon was determined that she and her children gain access to education and the arts wherever they could find it. She studied art and literature to fulfill her own personal passions, and shorthand and bookkeeping to support her family. She scraped together money to take her kids to museums, lectures, plays and operas. She found donated tickets for symphony performances. She sent the children for music lessons, taught them how to play chess and rented bicycles with them in Golden Gate Park.

“I believed that life was meant to be enjoyed, not suffered,” Dhillon later wrote. “We may have lived in the slums at times, but our apartments were sunny with life.”

Dhillon’s training enabled her to quickly pivot into administrative work. She spent some time working as a typist in an architects’ office. She was a secretary for the Teamsters and a variety of other unions. She wrote for People’s World, a workers’ paper. When her own union — the Office and Professional Employees International Union — went on strike in the 1950s, she joined the picket lines.

In a 2001 interview, Dhillon asserted:

If we’re born human, then we should have the same right to our two square feet on earth as anybody else — especially if we’re workers. We don’t have to worry about what would happen to the rich because they don’t worry about us … They belong to their clubs which rule the world together and working people should have one big union … We have to fight back in any way we can because [the] world should belong to those who work and who can produce something, and not to those who just live off of it.

Unsurprisingly, Dhillon’s dedication to working people also found its way into her writing. The plight of immigrant workers was something she documented extensively — sometimes to devastating effect. Speaking once at Stanford University, she recounted the 1933 death of a baby who was refused care at a hospital simply because its mother had been in the county for less than 90 days — the requirement to receive medical aid.

By the 1970s, Dhillon was living in Nob Hill with a beautiful view and rent she could only afford because her apartment had no kitchen. (She cooked over the fireplace and did the dishes in the bathtub.) Dhillon was such a respected figure in the Bay Area by that point that in one 1972 newspaper ad urging the public to vote for McGovern instead of Nixon, Dhillon’s name appeared among scores of other trusted “working people.” The “moral” of the ad: “Don’t be a Noodnik for Nixon.”

Dhillon was also respected in the community for her volunteer work with the Black Panthers — she typed up the party’s newsletter on weekends. After Dhillon’s 2008 death at the age of 93, her granddaughter Erika Surat Andersen found a copy of Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice that was inscribed by the author. His page-long note expressed warm admiration for Dhillon and for India’s struggle against British imperialism.

Dhillon’s life began thoroughly rooted in the ideas of the Gadar Party. In one unpublished autobiographical essay, she wrote, “‘Freedom for India’ was much more than a slogan: it was a battle cry of a disenfranchised people who were determined to reclaim that which was rightfully theirs.”

Her sense of fairness propelled her towards every equality movement that crossed her path, throughout her entire life. Dhillon’s quest for justice for all working and disadvantaged people literally knew no bounds.

As Dhillon herself noted in a 1994 grant application: “My sympathy remains forever with the underdogs of society, because I have never lost my place among them.”

To learn about other Rebel Girls from Bay Area History, visit the Rebel Girls homepage.

Special thanks to Erika Surat Andersen for sharing her research with the author for this essay.