Nearly 200 Indian-Americans from across the country, including several Sikhs in colourful turbans, packed the Rayburn Room of the US Capitol along with several US lawmakers to participate in the unveiling ceremony of the official portrait of the late Dalip Singh Saund, the first Indian-American and also the first Asian-American elected to the United States House of Representatives.
Saund was elected to House of Representatives in 1956 from California.
Also on hand for the ceremony were his daughter Ellie Saund Ford, five grandchildren, including the eldest grandson Eric Saund -- the spokesman and archivist of the Saund family -- and several great-grandchildren.
Jon Friedman, a portraitist, landscape painter and sculptor, who has held 21 one-man exhibitions of his work and is represented in 49 corporate and private collections, says he considers the first Congressional portrait he sketched -- that of the late Congressman Dalip Singh Saund, "a great honour."
In an interview with India Abroad, he said it was, "one, for me, this is the capital of my country and it will be here permanently on view, and two, I really found, as I got to know more about Dalip Saund, that I admired him and I felt very privileged to be working on his portrait as he embodied a variety of values and attitudes that I think are just really wonderful and deserve to be commemorated and memorialised."
Friedman, who acknowledged that before being commissioned by the Congress to do Saund's portrait, he had "never heard of Dalip Singh Saund and so I knew nothing about his extraordinary life." He said that in the process he also educated himself about the Indian-American community, the immigrant experience of the Sikhs who came to the US over 100 years ago and the struggle Saund had waged to stave off discrimination.
Also read: First Indian-American Congressman's portrait in US Congress
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