PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Growing up in Michigan, Samip Mallick didn’t see himself in the traditional “American story.” His parents left India for the U.S. in the 1960s and eventually settled in the Great Lakes State, where Mallick was born.
“I didn’t see ways that my community or my identity was shared,” he said. “I didn’t learn these stories in school. I didn’t see them reflected in textbooks. I didn’t see them in popular media.”
He wanted to do something about that — to make sure such stories were not lost, but preserved, and easily accessible.
In 2008, he co-founded the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), a nonprofit based in Philadelphia. SAADA’s mission is to give a voice to South Asian Americans, tell their stories and share their experiences. And over the years, the material has piled up — more than 5,300 items in the largest publicly accessible archive of South Asian American stories.
“Oral history interviews and photographs and newspaper clippings and letters from one person to another,” said Mallick, “dating back to the 1800s all the way up to the present day.
“We use the archive as a jumping-off point and we collaborate with scholars and filmmakers and artists and musicians and community members to bring the stories from the archive to life.”
Mallick and his team did just that for a program they developed in Philly, their home base. It’s a walking tour called Revolution Remix.
“One of the stories that we share on the walking tour is of someone named Anandibai Joshi. She was the very first South Asian woman anywhere in the world to become a physician, to become a medical doctor. She came to Philadelphia in 1883 and she came here to Philadelphia because, at the time, this was one of the very few places in the entire world where a woman could earn a medical degree.”
When such stories are told, they live on from generation to generation, Mallick said.
“As the parent of an 8-year-old, it’s incredibly important to me personally now to be able to see my daughter growing up with these histories and these stories,” he said, “so that she doesn’t, I hope, have to go through that same search for belonging and acceptance that I had to do.”
Throughout Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, KYW Newsradio is celebrating the contributions of these diverse and essential communities with an audio series called “Asian Americans Making Their Mark.”