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Introduction

History is the haj to utopia.

KIM STANLEY ROBINSON,

RED MARS

A week after Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, a clarion call appeared in the Ghadar, an ardently revolutionary newspaper emanating from San Francisco to reach a readership of overseas Indians in East Asia, North and South America, Mesopotamia, and East Africa: “O Warriors! The opportunity you have been looking for has arrived.” The prodigal children of Hindustan were summoned to return home and fight, for the battle of liberation was at hand.

The message of the paper’s Ailan-e-Jang (Declaration of War) was stirring and simple:

Arise, brave ones! Quickly … We want all brave and self-sacrificing warriors who can raise revolt …

Salary: death

Reward: martyrdom

Pension: freedom

Field of battle: Hindustan.¹

From the expatriate intellectual circles in London, Paris, Berlin, and San Francisco to Gandhi’s early career in South Africa to the passage of subcontinental natives throughout the realms mapped out by the Pan-Islamic Khilafat or the Communist International, much of the power of the independence struggle was incubated outside the territory of British India. Any dramatic events visible upon the lighted proscenium of the subcontinent were profoundly affected by a multitude of actors busy in the shadows off stage, including students, soldiers, pilgrims, traders, and laborers originating from a variety of distinct regional, linguistic, class, religious, and political backgrounds. And no small portion of this power was routed, sooner or later, along the channels of a circulatory system with its heart in California, headquarters for the diasporic Ghadar movement. Its name, it declared, was its work: the word meant “mutiny” or “revolt.”

As restrictions tightened on what activities counted as legal inside British India, prewar anticolonial activists in the throes of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal and the Canal colony unrest in Punjab had either to go underground or to go abroad, where they might “function in an atmosphere of greater liberty.”² Har Dayal, later one of the Ghadar movement’s key intellectual shapers, wrote from Paris in the March 1910 Bande Mataram: “We must … try to strengthen all groups of workers outside India. The centre of gravity of political work has been shifted from Calcutta, Poona, and Lahore to Paris, Geneva, Berlin, London, and New York.”³ Indeed, these foreign bases became increasingly important as staging grounds and logistical support points as “revolutionary movements at home and abroad gained momentum and world events evolved in their favour.” ⁴ The irresistible opportunity arose not only because Britain was at war, leaving its precious colony vulnerable and depleted of troops, but also because its archenemy, Germany, was offering support to those with their own interest in undermining the strength of the empire, such as the Indian and Irish national revolutionists and pro-Ottoman Pan-Islamists.⁵ It was largely through the German connection that the movement impinged upon the United States’ historical record, as the Ghadarites were put on sensational trial in San Francisco for conspiracy, sedition, and espionage during World War I, almost three years after their most spectacular thwarted attempt at mutiny in February 1915.

By the summer of 1915, when the Lieutenant General of Punjab Sir Michael O’Dwyer announced that the movement inside India had been crushed, the Ghadarites and their larger network had lost a major battle, but not a war. Revolutionary activities, sporadic fighting, and invasion plans continued to unfold beyond the northeastern and northwestern frontiers, while those jailed carried on the struggle through hunger strikes and other forms of resistance.⁶ Some veterans reemerged in time to take part in the next generation of militance, which they themselves had inspired, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In this way the Ghadar movement served as a missing link, a source of hidden continuity between the Bengali “anarchist” conspiracies, “national revolutionary terrorism” and Punjabi agitations of the early twentieth century; and the radical Left and revolutionist movements of the 1920s. Far more than an abstract inspiration, however, Ghadar’s printed materials and personnel served quite concretely as connective tissue or switching circuit, capable of linking various elements among the Indian radicals abroad, linking Indian radicals to other networks, and linking pre-to postwar revolutionary movements inside the country. In fact it could be hazarded that the movement’s wider network overlapped at some point, at no more than a degree of separation, with every radical tendency of its time. Of course this is a large claim, and so requires some careful qualification; we must distinguish relationality from identicality, while recognizing both where appropriate.

Why was Ghadar able to serve this function? One factor was its geographical reach. Another was the unique experience of its founding members, located as they were at a conjuncture of contexts enabling them powerfully to articulate American class and race relations to the economics and geopolitics of empire, by linking the grievances of discrimination against a low-wage immigrant labor force to the colonized status of their home country. Furthermore, amid the ambient dynamism of prewar social ferment, they managed to forge an eclectic ideological synthesis that in turn created possible points of contact with a variety of potential partners. Thus, to fully unravel the story of the movement we must examine its complex interfaces with other international radical networks in order to reveal at what nodes, through which actors, and based on which common threads of ideological principles, methods and tactics, instrumental goals, or political aspirations the radical networks were woven together; or, to put it another way, to reveal which molecular particles in this incendiary chemistry were being shared or exchanged at each covalent bonding site.

GHADAR AND ITS CORE PRINCIPLES

Ghadar is most often portrayed as a nationalist movement, pure and simple. Its members were indubitably patriotic, and their goal of a homecoming to liberate territory from foreign occupation is easily intelligible to a nationalist logic. Yet in both geographical and ideological terms they overspilled the purview of mainstream nationalism. Their indictment of tyranny and oppression was on principle globally applicable, even while generated by a historically specific situation and inflected in culturally specific terms; moreover, they increasingly envisioned a comprehensive social and economic restructuring for postcolonial India rather than a mere handover of the existing governmental institutions.

Ghadar is also often identified as a Sikh movement, exclusively and by definition, with the Komagata Maru incident triggering a burst of heroic activity to redeem the community from the lingering shame of loyalism in 1857. The Komagata Maru was a ship bearing several hundred South Asian immigrants to Vancouver in the summer of 1914. Conceived by its organizer, Gurdit Singh, as a deliberate challenge to new immigration restrictions, the voyage proved a catalyst for radicalization on both sides of the Pacific after the passengers were refused entry to Canada. The voyage culminated in a violent standoff in the harbor before the ship turned back to sea, and in a shoot-out on arrival in Calcutta in which more than twenty passengers were killed. This narrative reflected the tensions present within the coalition out of which the original movement itself was formed, by rejecting the original non-Sikh elements as no more than a superficial accretion of blowhard intellectuals speechifying about side issues, while the movement’s true heart was to be found among the salt-of-the-earth soldier-farmer-poets who went off to get things done. And without doubt these men were at the heart of the movement; particularly in the second phase, during the 1920s, the movement could be thoroughly identified with this community.

But the uniqueness of Ghadar’s radicalism was born of its combinations: of contexts, populations, issues, frames, scales. There was no hermetic seal between the Bengalis and Punjabis, the students and laborers; between activities initiated in California, or elsewhere in the Indian political network abroad; between schemes underwritten only by subscription among the farmers, or aided by German funds. None of its components in isolation could have produced the same phenomenon. Furthermore, to portray Ghadar as a Sikh organization by design would be to disregard its members’ own expansive universalist principles. Their minds were not narrow, and I believe that they themselves would have wanted to be defined not by ascriptive ethno-religious identity but by their ideological affinities and commitments. In this sense we could consider the Kirti Communists (regional rivals to the M. N. Roy-dominated Communist Party of India infrastructure), rather than the Akali Dal (aimed at regaining control of Sikh holy places, and later associated with the Sikh separatist movement), as better representing the true spirit and intention of the Ghadar movement among the next generation of Punjabi radical movements, although its returned veterans moved into both formations. Indeed, the Ghadar veterans were credited with injecting a more radical social justice and anti-imperial orientation into the Akali movement, which otherwise pointed the way toward a narrower Sikh nationalism.

Any attempt to validate or disqualify an activity as a Ghadarite enterprise based on whether it was conceived, authorized, and directed by a central guiding committee in California is to misrepresent the formality of its party structure. The reality was far more decentralized, as autonomous branches sprang up in various places among those who received the Ghadar, without any direct coordination regarding their activities or decisions. Any influence attributable to a core group stemmed from the stirring content of the published materials flowing from the San Francisco fountainhead, and the inspiration provided by the Ghadarites’ manifest willingness to act upon these ideals.

Similarly, when I argue that the movement functioned to provide connecting links and switching points to other related anticolonial movements, I do not mean that an official unified party line had necessarily endorsed or established formal links with any of them, but that numerous individuals wore multiple hats without conflict. Many activists who had been associated with California Ghadar, and were closely tied to its Yugantar Ashram headquarters in San Francisco, also participated in or supported other formations. There were Ghadarites or Ghadar supporters active in networks of revolutionary (Hindu) nationalism (Taraknath Das, Har Dayal), Marxism (Rattan Singh, Santokh Singh), Pan-Islamism (Muhammad Barakatullah, Obeidullah Sindhi), and various combinations thereof. Thus tracking relationships and connections is less a question of “Ghadar” than of Ghadarites. So we might speak of a party, referring to a distinct organization of particular people at a certain place and time; and a movement, referring to an idea, a sensibility and a set of ideological commitments that took wing—or rather, took ship—exuberantly outrunning their originators’ control.

Both ideologically and tactically, the Indian revolutionaries drew from a variety of sources, combining them without concern for the constraints of any existing orthodoxy; this very richness of ingredients, of facets, of splice-able threads, is what provided so many different opportunities for collaboration. “In the literature of unrest,” commented Valentine Chirol, then foreign bureau chief of the (London) Times and inveterate demonizer of revolutionists, “one frequently comes across the strangest juxtaposition of names, Hindu deities, and Cromwell and Washington, and celebrated anarchists all being invoked in the same breath.”⁷ Yet I do not think the links were casual or contingent, and though many observers and historians have tended to dismiss Ghadar’s political orientation as an untheorized hodgepodge, I believe we can perceive within Ghadarite words and deeds an eclectic and evolving, yet consistent radical program. A. C. Bose sums up a range of influences, as well as a range of target audiences: “Just as their sources of inspiration ranged from Rana Pratap and Victor Emanuel II to Sivaji and Garibaldi, and from Mazzini and Guru Govind Singh to the daring terrorists among the Carbonnari [sic], the Nihilists and the Fenians, their appeals for co-operation too were directed at the educated youth of their country and the near-illiterate soldiers as well as at conservative businessmen and the reactionary Indian princes.”⁸ Indeed, the Ghadar propagandists were far from insensitive to the knack of tailoring material to audience.

Elsewhere Bose quotes a Bengal official’s observation that in their practices the “Indian revolutionists imitate the Irish Fenians and the Russian anarchists. Their literature is replete with references to both. Tilak took his ‘no rent’ campaign from Ireland, and the Bengalees learnt the utility of boycott from Irish history. Kanai Dutt was compared to Patrick O’Donnell, who killed James Cary. political dacoity to collect money they have learnt from the Russians.”⁹ Of course, these were not instances of slavish imitation but of active selection, adaptation, and application, or the recognition of analogies. Elements picked up as “influences” or “borrowings” were those with which the borrowers already felt resonance, or which they deemed most relevant to their situation. For example, egalitarianism was a Sikh value long before contact with American democratic discourse—hence the receptive recognition of that particular element rather than another of many available varieties of Western political philosophy.

Moreover, their encounter with an ideal in the founding values of French and American political liberalism, combined with disgust at the distance between this ideal and the reality they encountered, was an important impetus of the emergent Ghadarite thinking, which gravitated toward the politically libertarian aspects rather than the classical economic elements of Enlightenment thinking as it invoked the touchstones of freedom and democracy. This was especially true of texts intended for potential sympathizers among American audiences:¹⁰ Ghadar editor Ram Chandra wrote to the Boston Daily Advertiser in October 1916, in response to accusations of a conspiracy “to stir up trouble against British rule in India” through the publication of seditious literature and fomentation of an uprising. Ram Chandra met these accusations with aplomb, saying: “We very cheerfully admit all this, but we wish to emphasize the fact that all we are doing is to preach Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, the birthright of every human being, and to awaken the world to a realization of the enslaved condition of India, where these great principles are denied to all.”¹¹

Another audience to whom Ghadarites soon began making “passionate appeals” was “the labour unions of the world.”¹² These appeals elaborated on the familiar economic drain theory and exhorted the people of the world to make common cause against systems of imperialism.¹³ Such a blending of political libertarianism and economic socialism, along with a per sis tent tendency toward romantic revolutionism, and within their specific context a marked antigovernment bent, is why one may argue that the Ghadar movement’s alleged incoherence is actually quite legible through a logic of anarchism—which thereby provides a somewhat ironic bridge between rival nationalist and Communist readings of the Ghadar story. In short, not only did Ghadar manage to join the impulses toward class struggle and civil rights with anticolonialism, it also managed to combine commitments to both liberty and equality. Initially drawing sustenance from both utopian socialism and libertarian thought, their critique of capitalism and of liberalism’s racial double standard gained increasingly systematic articulation in the course of the war and the world political shift s in its aftermath.

As to the blending of tactical models, since this was a definitively action-oriented movement, the method was no less important than the motive. this required balancing instrumentality with integrity, strategic with idealistic thinking. Ghadar is often positioned as a transitional phase between two modes of revolutionary struggle, namely, the conspiratorial secret society model and the mass organization model, which is also to say the voluntarist and structuralist theories of precipitating change. However, Ghadar’s should be seen not just as a temporary or intermediate half mea sure, but as a relatively stable mode distinct from other more unequivocal tendencies (in both directions) during both the prewar and the interwar periods.¹⁴

To sum up a distinct ideological and tactical profile, an internal logic and a common denominator of identifiable core values and approaches that remained consistent across periods, contexts, and idioms, a proper Ghadarite was

anticolonialist (which should go without saying);

passionately patriotic;

internationalist, pledging figurative kinship and active solidarity wherever people struggled against tyranny and oppression anywhere in the world;

secularist, emphatically opposed to communalism and the politicization of institutional religion, although not necessarily atheist or irreligious;

modernist, critical of tradition’s weight of fatalism and “slave mentality”;

radically democratic, and egalitarian in the face of class and caste differences;

republican, favoring a decentralized federation of Indian states;

anticapitalist (some by implicit moral terms, others, especially after 1920, by explicit Marxian analysis);

militantly revolutionist, opposed to constitutional methods or any compromise with the existing system;

in temperament audacious, dedicated, courageous unto death; in aesthetic romantically capable of gestures such as declaiming a bold slogan, witticism, or verse of farewell poetry at the foot of the gallows (the exemplary Ghadarite in this sense was the prototypical figure of Kartar Singh Sarabha, executed at the age of nineteen or twenty for his role in the attempted uprising of 1915, on whom Bhagat Singh later consciously modeled himself).

As for the Ghadarite goal, it grew increasingly sharper of outline and ambitious of scope over the years: from dignity and respect as Hindustanis at home and abroad

to a free Hindustan

to a free Hindustan, along with a free Ireland, Egypt, and China,

to a free Indian democratic-republican federation, plus a free Ireland, Egypt, and China,

to a free Indian democratic-republican socialist federation, plus a free Ireland, Egypt, and China,

to a free Indian democratic-republican socialist federation, and an end to all forms of economic or imperial slavery anywhere in the world.

The juxtaposition that was so incomprehensible to Chirol, who deemed it clear evidence of the muddleheaded irrationality of the insurgents, is exactly what I want to explore here, by seeking to understand the logic by which the insurgents selected, combined, adapted, and applied tactical and ideological content into a form that continued to develop, dynamically and yet consistently, throughout the trajectory of the revolutionaries abroad.

TRANSPOSITIONS

Beyond Nationalism

Ghadar’s definitive early theorist and propagandist, Har Dayal, in an October 1912 Nation Day speech to Indian students and select faculty at the University of California, declared himself an internationalist who did not believe in “narrow views of nationalism.” Perennial “seditionist” Taraknath Das, speaking at the same event on the “scope and aim of Indian nationalism,” pledged that beyond autonomy from Britain, Young India must “demand a revolution in social ideals so that humanity and liberty would be valued above property, special privilege would not overshadow equal opportunity, and women would not be kept under subjection.”¹⁵

The research that has culminated in this book began in an attempt to escape the reductive equation of anticolonialism with nationalism. Given numerous reservations about that project, both analytical and political, I hoped to identify precedents for ways of conceiving anticolonialism that transcended or critiqued it, and that were capable of proposing alternative visions of a liberated society that neither mirrored the logic of imperialism (and Orientalism) nor replicated the extractive and disciplinary institutions of the modern state while merely replacing foreign with local control. On the other hand, the historical salience and emotional power of a national liberation struggle in undertaking the work of decolonization is impossible to deny. Yet as the revolutionaries of Kirti and the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army well knew, truly liberatory struggle is not only against that which restricts freedom, but also for that which facilitates or produces freedom. The ejection of foreign rule is one thing, and the implementation of a postindependence socioeconomic and political order based on maximizing substantive liberty, equality, and solidarity quite another. What does the independent society actually look like?

A comprehensive radical critique of colonial rule entailed more than an analysis of the foreignness of the regime; it also required a response to the regime’s very structure and character. Colonization imposed complex processes of rationalization, bureaucratization, and technical-industrial development, as well as insertion into the unprecedented expansion of global capitalism.¹⁶

Regardless of what alternate forms of modernity would have emerged in the absence of European intervention, that intervention did produce a situation in which the material conditions, social destabilizations, and economic transformations associated with the modernization process were perceived as corollaries of colonization. By contextualizing the revolutionary movement abroad relative to the shift s, trends, and currents of international radicalism over the first few de cades of the twentieth century, we may see the configuration of factions within the Indian independence struggle mirroring the spectrum of possible responses to these conditions manifest within Western movements of opposition and critical resistance, including varieties of accommodation, incorporation, synthesis, transcendence, resistance, and rejection.

Three Anticolonial Discourses

In my exploration of ways of conceptualizing anticolonial struggle that transcended nationalism during this globally turbulent period (1905–1930), two major antisystemic movements stood out as transnational vehicles for opposition to Western imperialism and critique of modern capitalist society, both of which were available in various forms to Indian radicals: Socialism and Pan-Islamism. Yet any attempt to define either of these complex, multifold terms is fraught with as many contradictions and counterexamples as in the case of nationalism.

If we approach the three “isms” not as ideological monoliths but as heteroglossic discourses,¹⁷ we can recognize an analogous range of positions within each of them on the debates then in progress over how to respond to the confrontation with modernity—whether by espousing Enlightenment rationalism or by embracing its various antitheses, whether defined as spiritual, mystical, nihilist, millenarian, or romanticist.

Rationalism forms an important axis in the intellectual history of revolution, cutting across leftist, nationalist, and religious responses. While this epistemological axis does not replace those based in material economic or political structures, it is nevertheless necessary to take account of modes of resistance that cannot be “legitimated by a post-enlightenment rationalist frame,”¹⁸ and furthermore to acknowledge that such modes cannot be wholly identified with religious movements; rather, mystical/romantic or antiliberal modalities occur within all three discourses alongside those modalities legible to a rationalist, material interest–based analysis, whether of the liberal or socialist orientation. I suspect that in actuality both modalities may almost always be operating at once, and that it is simply a matter of relative proportion in each case. Ghadar and its analogues certainly contained elements of both.

In such a way (e.g., by positing nationalist, leftist, and Islamist modalities) each as a discourse or flexible idiom in which various ideological statements could be made, and a range of political and philosophical positions taken, rather than a unified ideology itself—the interaction of the three movements during this period could be reframed as a transposition of analogous ideas, goals, and aspirations among them. The Ghadarite network, through its various alliances and alignments, was capable of engaging with those who were making compatible utterances—that is, statements of militant anti-imperialism, economic egalitarianism, and social emancipation—in any of these three languages.

The Limits of Translatability

In order to recognize functionally comparable statements within separate “semantic fields,” a practical theorist must look underneath form for content, within idiom for intent, behind problematic for thematic.¹⁹ More directly, an organizer must ask whether alliances and coalitions are all necessarily provisional, based only on a negative term; whether a shared opposition is their common immediate goal. But is this enough? How much compatibility is necessary between the positive terms of multiple alternative visions to enable their adherents to work together beyond resistance? Which differences are semantic and superficial, and which are substantive and prohibitive?

Some of the confusion in defining an “ism” arises from equating a discourse in its totality only with the most dominant or authoritative statement it has been used to make (or with one’s preferred interpretation, dominant or not). The same tendency is also behind many orthodox exponents’ refusal to admit any possibility of rapprochement or compatibility with other discourses, or even with dissenters claiming to be part of their own. If X and Y may be defined as X and Y only in their most purified and homogenized form, then indeed there is no common ground, no possible overlap; the meanings of X and Y are polarized. But more often than not, I would guess, the strands that can most successfully interweave across categoric boundaries are likely to be the heterodox or counterdominant ones on both sides, the threads straggling from the fringes beyond the reach of doctrinal enforcement, though still recognizably part of the fabric.²⁰

A caveat, however: I am not therefore suggesting that all discourses were interchangeable, or even that the parameters of each spectrum were isomorphic. The threads they shared were nevertheless woven into fabrics of different shades and patterns. Moreover, every language imposes its own limitations and tendencies regarding what it is equipped to express most directly in its available vocabulary or repertory of concepts, and what requires more complex circumlocutions. And while each language is versatile, there may be points at which it becomes expedient to borrow words or even switch to another tongue better suited to the concept or construction one is trying to express.

Nevertheless, if the emphasis is on connections and alliances, the interface between different ideological networks, and the points of translatability between their idioms, then we might ask not what a nationalist says and does, but what is being said in the idiom and done according to the logic of nationalism; not what a socialist or Pan-Islamist stipulates, but what kind of socialism and what kind of Pan-Islamism are operative. In that regard, the question then became with what kind of nationalists, leftists and Islamists, in what contexts, and at what points of each network, via interfaces based on which shared traits or common elements, were the Ghadarites engaged in meaningful interactions; and how, precisely, were these Indian anticolonialists situated in the context of the international radicalism of the time.

Praxis

Finally, notwithstanding all this talk of ideology and discourse, this work is not intended to be an abstract philosophical exercise. Rather, my approach to intellectual history is much like that described by Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski in the preface to their 1986 book on Egyptian nationalism. Combining the “internal” and “external” approaches, the authors explain: “This work proceeds on the basis of several assumptions about historical inquiry. Perhaps the most basic of these is that there are crucial interrelationships between the intellectual life of a society and its political development. An adequate understanding … demands that attention be given to the complex connections between ideas of the world and behavior in the world.”²¹ Like theirs in this way, my work here is concerned with praxis; that is, not with theory in isolation, but with the way that ideas are generated within historical context and play a substantive role in bringing about historical change.

Moreover, this work is a narrative about people who felt the same way. The Ghadarites were pragmatists, not dogmatists; activists above all, not systematic armchair theorists. Above all, as Rattan Singh recalled, “Every step taken by the Ghadr Party … has been practical and has meant action. Its resolutions have never remained on paper; they have always been put into action.”²² Indeed, radicalism itself resides as much in the commitment to acting on ideals, making them effective in reality, and translating them into social form, as it does in the actual content of the ideas. In selecting their allies, the Ghadarites allotted more weight to shared goals and common sensibilities (notably their appreciation for fierce and total commitment to one’s objectives) than to niceties of doctrine. Yet neither were they ideologically vacant. Far more than an inchoate burst of quickly dispersed revolutionary energy, they created an important missing link in the genealogy of South Asian radicalism, as well as a bridge between contemporaneous radical movements. Therein lies not the least of their contributions to history.

Overview

Chapter 1 concerns the birth of the Ghadar movement on the Pacific coast in 1913, its activities in California, and the content and spread of its propaganda, culminating in its homeward journey of intended liberation launched at the outbreak of World War I. Although the attempted uprising of February 1915 was crushed by means of the First Lahore Conspiracy trials, the ideas it had reimported lingered significantly: when the would-be freedom fighters of 1914–1915 set out upon their return to India “to inform their kinsmen of the unequal treatment that was meted out to them” overseas, they did so by “preach[ing] the doctrines of revolution that they had learned from the Ghadr and the crude socialism that they had picked up in the towns of western Canada and the United States.”²³ Crucially, the radicalization of South Asians in North America in the early twentieth century was defined by labor relations as refracted by race, which facilitated their affinity with the IWW’s American form of syndicalism, as shown in chapter 2.

Chapters 3 and 4 together mark a turning point in the narrative, in which the nationalist aspect comes to the fore. Here I focus on the period of strategic anti-British partnerships in the context of World War I, through which a number of elaborate covert operations were carried out with German/Ottoman patronage, in contrast to the 1915 outbreak that the California Ghadarites had initiated autonomously. Nationalism also mediated the collaborations among Indian, Irish, and Egyptian revolutionists active in Europe and North America, and the analogies in sensibility and situation that they recognized among themselves. This period was shut down with another legal case in 1918, the sensational Hindu-German Conspiracy trial in San Francisco.

But the Ghadar Party appeared in a second distinct incarnation, this time Communist in the more orthodox Marxist-Leninist sense, in contrast to its prewar leanings toward the less systematic (though perhaps more holistic) utopian socialism associated with Har Dayal. This is the matter of chapter 5. Following the exhilarating success of the Bolshevik revolution, and given the Comintern’s strategic commitment to supporting Asian national liberation struggles, Ghadarites turned to Moscow as their new self-described mecca for political training, theoretical guidance, and moral and material support. During the 1920s, Ghadar sent batches of trainees to Moscow while establishing new organs and organizing centers in China and Punjab.²⁴ At the same time it helped seed the growth of civil rights and antideportation campaigns in the United States through the Friends of Freedom for India (FFI). In India meanwhile it helped seed the growth of the next generation of militant anticolonial struggle through Bhagat Singh, the Kirti group, the Naujavan Bharat Sabha, and the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army.

In the final two chapters I back up in time to pick up the parallel thread of Pan-Islamism, which had been continuously intertwined with Ghadar’s activities starting from the latter’s prewar overtures to Muslim soldiers identified as potential mutineers in the British Indian army. The interaction became even more significant through the German/Ottoman-backed schemes in west and central Asia during the war, reflecting the goals and preoccupations of this alliance. After the war, when Moscow displaced Berlin as center of patronage, this pattern of relationships did not change. It culminated in a rapprochement with the Khilafat movement of the early 1920s and its subset, the Hijrat movement. Theoretical links were elaborated by Obeidullah Sindhi and Mohammed Barakatullah, both of whom had complex Ghadar ties.

A Word for the Journey

Har Dayal commented in the Bande Mataram in 1910: “Exile has its privileges. It is the price paid for the right of preaching the truth as it appears to us. We do not deal in political casuistry mingled with erroneous philosophy. … We may pay homage only to our conscience and defy all the governments of the world to make us deviate a hair’s breadth from the path of Duty and Righ teousness.”²⁵

The Revolutionary Movement Abroad was a phenomenon of travelers; it could not have occurred otherwise. As perspectives opened out for economic migrants encountering new contexts, and as political trajectories became literal journeys of enforced exile and clandestine organizing, the leading edge of radicalism passed literally and figuratively beyond the bounds of the territorial nation-state. Yet in all these journeys, whether the world traveler’s face was set toward a home as a free Indian citizen or a free American or Soviet one, the destination was always a dream of utopia.

Kim Stanley Robinson has one of the transplanetary nomads in his speculative Mars trilogy declare that “history is the haj to utopia.”²⁶ In simplest terms, Robinson’s book is about the colonization and terraforming of Mars. But more deeply, it is about the process of designing a society, initially far beyond the reach of the old earth’s interstate relations and corporate economics, though these interests of course are pulled closer as breakthroughs in transport and communications occur, and as the immigrant population increases. Nevertheless, as the new society develops, the Martians have an unprecedented opportunity to define new categories of identity within social units based rather in affinity and ideology than in ethnic or national affiliation; and to negotiate a framework of principles for accommodating difference, by which the autonomy of communities who use different social blueprints can be maintained within a larger federation, in which ecological survival rather than political power forms the baseline for collective control. Aside from the anachronistic ecological aspect, this seems to me quite applicable to the vision of a Ghadarite India.

Lamin Sanneh has described the functions of ritual pilgrimage in spatially marking off an identity, purified and confirmed by certain practices carried out along the way and especially on reaching the destination—where, upon arrival, the traveler experiences the intensity of a sense of identification with a transnational community or “brotherhood” of spiritual kindred, resulting in a recommitment to an ideological program.²⁷ I am certainly not suggesting that the future Ghadarites set sail for America with any such conscious sense of ritual significance. Their journey began not as an intentional pilgrimage but a pragmatic journey of economic or educational opportunity. However, I suspect that they would recognize the effect that Sanneh describes. And the revolutionaries did begin to speak in the language of pilgrimage. For the Ghadarites “Moscow became Mecca.” Meanwhile, hajis bound for the real Mecca and muhajirin bound for the heart of the caliphate at Istanbul became literal fellow travelers. There was a mission to be fulfilled across the sea, and if they could not make it to the other shore, they were ready to immolate themselves so that others could. They spoke of an altar, and a sacrifice; they spoke of moths to the flame. But the Swadeshi activists’ Bharat Mata had been replaced as deity on the blood-spattered dais by inqilab (revolution) or azadi (freedom).

MAP 1. Ghadar’s global range

And after the revolution, upon reaching the odyssey’s end, would they dwell within the kingdom of god, the dictatorship of the proletariat, or the federated United States of India? For those who preached liberty, equality, and fraternity, would it make a difference whether their foundational logic and social ethic had been derived from transcendent or divine sources, natural law, or human reason? Would it matter by what map or method they had traced their path? Around what polestar they had oriented their voyage? Whether they had been steered by God’s plan, a Hegelian world spirit, a Marxian structural dialectic, or their own fiery wills?