Playing Indian

BRIAN BALOGH: We’re going to end today’s show with a story that blurs the line between passing and performance.

PETER ONUF: It’s the story of a California celebrity known as the “Godfather of Exotica,” an organist named Korla Pandit He was famous in the 1940s and ’50s for dreamy, jazzy tones that drew on melodies from an imagined South Asia and a make-believe Africa. Part of his appeal was that Pandit, who always wore a turban, was himself foreign and fascinating. But BackStory producer Nina Earnest reports that the truth beneath the turban was a little more complicated.

NINA EARNEST: Back in the early 1990s, journalist R.J. Smith and his music nerd friends– his words, not mine– would travel around Los Angeles visiting it’s old tiki bars and cocktail lounges. Korla Pandit, wearing his trademark bejeweled turban, was often one of the performers.

R.J. SMITH: We would pull into a nightclub or an old spot, and if they had a piano, or best of all, like a Hammond organ, there was Korla. And he would just play these amazing exotic sounding songs that evoked Asia, ancient Africa, Persian music. Not as it really exists or existed, but as those of us who’d grown up on Hollywood movies thought it existed.

NINA EARNEST: This is how the two men met. Smith says that the Godfather of Exotica was soft-spoken and philosophical.

R.J. SMITH: He also had this whole long, ever-changing back story about how he was from India, born to a Brahman family, an elite well-off family in India. And they sent him off, his family did, to the West to go to music school. Everybody knew that.

NINA EARNEST: Not long after Pandit died in 1998, Smith was interviewing black bebop legend Sir Charles Thompson. Thompson was originally from the Midwest.

R.J. SMITH: Out of the blue, he started talking about when he was a young man he’d heard a guy play that was the best piano player in the region he’s heard of, a real boogie woogie player, and he never knew what happened to that guy. His name was John Red.

So Sir Charles Thompson had moved to Los Angeles and established his career. He was watching TV one day and he saw this man with a faraway look in his eye and a turban on his head playing exotic sounds, allegedly of the Far East, and he knew who that guy was. It was John Red who he had heard play as a young man.

And that just blew my mind. I knew he was talking about Korla Pandit. John Red was Korla Pandit.

NINA EARNEST: Pandit wasn’t from India. He was actually African American and from Missouri. John Rowland Red was born there in 1921. But in the 1930s, he and other family members began to move to Los Angeles.

In LA, Red started looking for work as a musician. He was talented– an excellent piano player and organist. But southern California wasn’t all that welcoming. Opportunities for African American musicians were still hard to come by. So Red, who was light-skinned, began passing in his performances.

R.J. SMITH: On one level, it’s simply an equation. There were two different musician’s unions in southern California– a white one and a black one. Now, if you were in the black one, there were only certain places you were going to ever get gigs. Now, if you could pass yourself off somewhere in between white and black, your opportunities multiplied.

NINA EARNEST: Red first tried out a Latin American alter ego named Juan Rolando. But by the late 1940s, he had adopted the Indian born persona, Korla Pandit, the identity he would maintain for the rest of his life.

The centerpiece of his costume was his turban. Red was hardly the first African American to take this approach. Some black men were known to wear turbans to get around mistreatment and segregation laws in the Jim Crow South.

In 1944, Pandit had married a white woman named Beryl DeBeeson. Some speculate that she helped him craft this character, and it worked. Pandit got his big break in what was then a new medium.

R.J. SMITH: In southern California in the late ’40s and early ’50s, Korla Pandit was a TV star.

MALE SPEAKER: A program based on the universal language of music, it is our pleasure to present to you Korla Pandit.

R.J. SMITH: He would say nothing. He would just look into the camera, play the organ or the piano. It was sort of Liberace before Liberace even, in a way.

NINA EARNEST: “Korla Pandit’s Adventures in Music” first aired on LA’s KTLA in February 1949. The show, performed live, came on every weekday afternoon.

R.J. SMITH: And he would just look out into the living rooms of Southern California, and his eyes were intense and mesmerizing. And the music was intense and mesmerizing. And housewives all over southern California swooned.

NINA EARNEST: Pandit’s silent appearance on the show wrapped him in mystery. What his viewers didn’t know was that they were watching one of the first African Americans to have his own television show.

Pandit’s legend grew in the following decades as he told stories about his Indian upbringing. Take this appearance on a local talk show.

KORLA PANDIT: I was born in New Delhi, India. And started performing music in a sense at the early age two years and four months old.

NINA EARNEST: He went on to have a long career, performing well into the 1990s. That’s when Smith met him around Los Angeles. Smith says that once he learned that the enigmatic Pandit was actually African American, he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

R.J. SMITH: And that just told me if I’m fascinated by it and the people I’m talking to are, maybe this is something worth writing about.

NINA EARNEST: Not long after Pandit died in 1998, Smith published an article revealing Korla Pandit’s identity in “Los Angeles” magazine. Smith wrote that Pandit’s children didn’t know the truth. In fact, his son and even his wife Beryl denied the story. Pandit’s surviving son could not be reached for comment. By many accounts, the news shocked a lot of music fans. But it didn’t surprise the African American family of John Rolland Redd, many of whom lived in Los Angeles.

ADRIENNE HERNANDEZ: There was so much more to Korla than mainstream’s discovery of his cultural identity, because it wasn’t a secret within the community that he came out of.

NINA EARNEST: This is Korla Pandit’s great niece, Adrienne Hernandez. She’s the granddaughter of one of John Red’s sisters. Adrienne says she knew from an early age that her uncle was THE Korla Pandit, but also Uncle John. Since R.J. Smith’s article, Korla Pandit is now just as known for his racial passing as for his work as a music and television pioneer. But Adriane says she doesn’t really think of her uncle as someone who “passed.”

ADRIENNE HERNANDEZ: One of the things that is often covered when we discuss concepts of identity passing in this country is the sentiment that everyone who does that is in a place of forsaking the traditions and culture that they come from. I just don’t think that our family experienced it that way, because we had access to my uncle. There was never a feeling of, oh, we’ve lost him.

NINA EARNEST: Pandit was a big part of her life. He often visited the family and they attended his performances. Adrienne says many in their Los Angeles community knew he was the son of local pastor Earnest Red. She saw the persona of Korla Pandit as more of a performance costume.

ADRIENNE HERNANDEZ: If my uncle fits into that category of passing, it’s because American society needed him to have the look of Korla Pandit in order to fully receive the gift that he had to offer. The inside joke about Korla’s presentation was that the Hollywood story is that he was Hindu and Hindus don’t wear turbans. And yet, all of his audience was willing to receive him as a Hindu, because that’s what they wanted him to be. They liked the turban. They liked the jewel.

NINA EARNEST: Another of Pandit’s nieces, Maya Hernandez, also grew up knowing her uncle. She and Adrienne are first cousins. Maya says she’s proud of what John Red accomplished in the guise of Korla Pandit.

MAYA HERNANDEZ: Bravo for him, in some ways. I’d honestly feel comfortable with appropriating one culture for another, but I also think, too, he lived in a very oppressive time.

NINA EARNEST: There was secrecy in Pandit’s life. From what we know, he didn’t tell his children about his racial background. But he was a part of his African American family, who viewed Pandit and Red as one and the same.

MAYA HERNANDEZ: It was something, I think, in some ways was supported by the family. That any time any of his siblings could have outed him. There was opportunity there, but it was something that was supported because I think they saw the value in helping Korla be an individual and loving him for who he was.

NINA EARNEST: Some people have criticized R.J. Smith for being the one who outed Korla Pandit.

R.J. SMITH: What was I outing him as, an African American? Is that something to be ashamed of? I’m sure that Korla, son of an African American leader in the community in Los Angeles, I’m pretty confident he was not ashamed of that. I’m pretty confident that why he put the turban on was not out of shame, or guilt, or not liking who he was, it was for who the rest of us were.

PETER ONUF: That story was brought to us by BackStory producer Nina Earnest. Special thanks to John Turner and  Eric Christensen, whose recent documentary on Pandit is called “Korla.”

ED AYERS: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can still share your comments and stories of passing on our website. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org. While you’re there, contribute to our upcoming shows. We’ve got a special on states in the national spotlight, an episode on the 2016 Oscars, and one covering the history of unemployment in America.

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PETER ONUF: BackStory is produced by Andrew Parsons, Brigid McCarthy, Nina Earnest, Kelly Jones, and Emily Gadek, Jamal Millner’s our engineer. Julianna Durdy and Diana Williams are our digital editors. And Melissa just mainly helps with research. Special thanks this week this Cinder Stanton and the Getting Word Oral History Project at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

BRIAN BALOGH: BackStory’s produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Major support is provided by the [INAUDIBLE] Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional funding is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment, and by History Channel– history, made every day.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Peter Onuf is Professor of History Emeritus at UVA and Senior Research Fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

ED AYERS: BackStory is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.