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Our Name Is Our Work

The Syndicalist Ghadar

RADICALS

Almost immediately the Ghadar propaganda tours hit the fields. Kartar Singh Sarabha was particularly inspired in generating publicity, said Behari Lal, arranging meetings such as the one in Yolo that he describes here: “A good number” of farm workers gathered around, sitting on the ground around him and his kinsman. “They sat quietly and I said a few things. Then Har Dayal talked about the position of the Indian people in India and abroad, the need of independence.” Unresponsive silence met his finish. But after a few minutes, “one or two men came forward awkwardly, saluted Har Dayal with reverence and placed a few dollar bills before him, as they used to do when offering their contributions in a temple.”¹ Within a half an hour, they had collected a few hundred dollars in cash and checks. Har Dayal refused to take the money himself, insisting instead that it should be entrusted to a fully transparent and accountable committee. This went over brilliantly, setting him apart from “the other Babus,” whom Sohan Singh Bhakna had accused of cheating his constituency of hard-earned money under the guise of doing patriotic work.

An informant known as C later described the whirlwind West Coast “missionary tour” to his British handlers as follows:

Ram Chandra, Gobind Behari Lal, and others go out to the ranches, where poor labourers are working, on Saturdays and Sundays; they preach revolution to them until these poor and illiterate people think they must drive the English out of India or kill them. It becomes a fixed idea with them. The revolutionary songs which they sing have been committed to memory, and they sing them with great fervour. They do not know the meaning of what they are singing [!], but they almost treat it as a religion. Ram Chandra and the others who visit the ranches tell these people that the British are ruining them, and keeping them poor. The great danger lies among these poor people in America. The ordinary educated man soon commits himself and is arrested, but the labourer merely goes back to India and commences to sing these revolutionary songs in his native village, and in this way spreads the movement in India.²

The British ambassador to the United States, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, commented after the mutiny attempt: “The truth of these statements is abundantly illustrated by the long list of returned emigrants of the coolie class which figures in India judgments.”³ Aside from the astounding level of contempt with which Spring-Rice assumed that the Indian laborers, being poor and illiterate, could have had no understanding of the very matter that so inflamed them—as if their very enthusiasm was proof of naïveté, rather than conviction!—and that any catalyzing or leadership roles would have had to come from the educated elite, nevertheless he was plainly identifying the Ghadar mobilization as a class-based mass movement of racialized, low-wage migrant laborers—in a word, “coolies.”

The Ghadar Party

Building on the summer of touring, a November meeting in San Francisco consolidated and extended the PCHA infrastructure set forth in Astoria six months before. This time two new vice presidents, and two more organizing secretaries were elected, plus three coordinators—Kartar Singh Sarabha, Harnam Singh Tundilat, and Jagat Ram—assigned to “secret and political work.” ⁴ Bhai Parmanand made a proposal to institute scholarships, according to the logic that a free India once attained would require educated people. Har Dayal agreed, but some of the workers took offense. Bhakna and Tundilat made an alternate suggestion to prioritize “direct and effective” propaganda to the ripe constituency of Jat yeoman in their own language.⁵ This would be the Ghadar.

In his autobiography Bhakna identified the opening of the Yugantar Ashram in San Francisco and the activities based there as the real start of what can really be called the Ghadar movement.⁶ But the claim to the name was and is still contested: who were the real Ghadarites? Har Dayal’s use of the word in the first issue of the paper referred expansively to all of India’s patriotic revolutionaries to date, encompassing all the Bengalis, all the Punjabis, and the activists in the London and Paris circles.⁷ Yet at the same time he was stressing the need to form a party in the more specific sense: this would be comprised of the dedicated inner core of students and organic intellectuals who lived and worked at the Yugantar Ashram and put out the paper. It is perceptible from the account of Darisi Chenchiah, one of the Berkeley students, that class snobbery may have been difficult to eradicate completely, despite the Ashram’s egalitarian ideals. At the time, he and the other students saw themselves, despite the presence of such crucial planners as Sarabha and Tundilat, as the real brains of the operation, while portraying the equally committed Sikh workers largely as the muscle and the moneybags.

Meanwhile the PCHA officers and members of the Working Committee, consisting mostly of farmworkers along with a few big contractors or independent farmers, also considered themselves to be the true Ghadar Party. Both nuclei were making decisions and doing work on the ground, thereby leaving the door open from the start for a parallel leadership situation, and thus for confusion and potential conflict. For example, when Har Dayal left, some seemed to be under the impression that Santokh Singh was his designated successor, and others that Ram Chandra was. This may have reflected a tension between Hindu/intellectual-and Sikh/worker-dominated sectors, and historical narratives. However, setting these two groups up as polarities misses the point that the movement emerged, and could only have emerged as it did, from the synthesis between the two.

The Yugantar Ashram

As usual, Kartar Singh illustrated the ideal: folklorist Ved Prakash Vatuk described the youthful chemistry student at Berkeley, fresh off the boat in 1913, as being “at ease in the company of peasants as well as among intellectuals,” and embodying the link between them. He worked as hard in the fields as at his engineering and aviation studies, or as at the Ghadar office, where he wrote articles and poems as well as running the printing press.

In the introductory Ghadar, Har Dayal declared of the new party headquarters: “This is not an Ashram but a fort from which a Cannonade on the English raj will be started.”⁸ It also offered a kind of home to many who were far from theirs, which, according to Gobind Behari Lal, “a great many laborers and Hindus migratory in the United States and in Canada … generally use … as an address so that they can get their mail.”⁹

As Har Dayal conceived it, at the nucleus of the movement would be a disciplined, secretive, and exclusive group based at the Ashram and structured similarly to London’s Abhinava Bharat, which had drawn its recruits from the larger and more public-faced Free India Society. He also drew upon some of the rules used by the secret societies of Calcutta and London. To join, an activist had to be recommended by two members of the Ghadar staff; to be taken into confidence on important decisions he had to have worked at the Ashram for six months. Telling secrets or misappropriating funds could get him killed. Insiders used cipher codes for exchanging messages, and only the secretary or editor was authorized to open the mail. Cellular propagation was encouraged: “Let us form a secret society of those who prefer death and make the foundation firm by opening branches elsewhere.”¹⁰ Within a few months, membership had swelled to five thousand, with seventy-two North American branches, including Berkeley, Portland, Astoria, St. John, Sacramento, Stockton, and Bridal Veil.¹¹ Among them organization was relatively informal, sans official hierarchy but with active leaders selected by consultation among core participants. Division of labor, too, seemed to emerge more or less spontaneously.¹²

Though not their only activity, the most time-consuming and resource-intensive must have been the newspaper. And if there is anything available to us by which to anchor the identity and principles of a sprawling and slippery formation, it is the body of publications produced by the Hindustan Ghadar Press. Soon after the Astoria meeting, Kartar Singh, Harnam Singh, and others entered into discussion with Har Dayal as to what sort of paper they should produce. He “insisted on a straight fighting newspaper—which will be carrying forward the revolutionary nationalist work which had been started in London, Paris, Calcutta, other Indian cities, but had been almost entirely suppressed by the British.”¹³

The first number was dated 1 November 1913. It came out in an Urdu print run of six thousand, with a comparable Gurmukhi edition starting a month later, and a smaller Gujarati edition in May 1914.¹⁴ Behari Lal said that in accordance with the custom of Indian nationalist journalism of the time, only Har Dayal’s name appeared as editor-publisher, for security reasons. As in India, “when the authorities eventually put him away in jail, another stepped forward—just ONE MORE…. The succession was to be maintained … one by one.”¹⁵ Nevertheless, Har Dayal was adamant that “no man was ever to usurp all power, all responsibility,” and that although “the Editor was to be at the front, facing the public, and the opponents, … he must deal on terms of democratic, constitutional equality with the men of the Council.”¹⁶

The writing, translating, lettering, and printing were a true collective effort. About twenty-five volunteers lived and worked full-time at the Ashram in exchange for food, clothing, and “two dollars a month pocket money,”¹⁷ while everybody else available on the premises chipped in. According to Vatuk (who may be harboring a romantic bias, though since the core Ghadar workers were themselves consumed with this kind of idealism, maybe it isn’t inappropriate), “People lived there in a democratic way in a life style based on equality and devoid of any casteism, racism, religious bigotry and sectarianism of any kind. All who lived there were just Indian. They cooked, ate, and lived together like a family. They were the followers of one path.”¹⁸ This is quite a telling statement; however, rather than limiting the significance of the observation that they were all “just Indian” to nationalism per se, I find the inference of egalitarian participatory democracy equally suggestive. Moreover, this prefigurative practice implies that they were more clearly conscious of what their desired postrevolutionary society should look like than the Ghadar movement is oft en given credit for.

Important staffers among this utopian family included Ram Chandra, Amar Singh,¹⁹ Kartar Singh, Munshi Ram, and Hari Singh Usman.²⁰ Godha Ram Channon was the chief Urdu calligrapher, among other tasks. Behari Lal described his good friend as a quiet man who never pushed himself forward but “served with devotion” throughout the editorial regimes of both Har Dayal and Ram Chandra, and on into the 1920s incarnation. Behari Lal himself was kept busy as main liaison to the Anglophone world, in charge of maintaining contacts with the network of Bay Area intellectuals who regarded him as “Har Dayal’s younger brother … a Horatio to that Hamlet.” For their benefit he wrote pieces in English in addition to those he was contributing to the Ghadar almost daily. It became “a matter of principle” for him to write Urdu and Hindi articles on history and natural and social science, passing on the content of his own postgraduate studies at the University of California to those who would otherwise have no access to such information. To that end, he said: “I gave my books to the growing Gadar Office library. Now and then I would discuss for hours some new scientific or historical or ethical concepts with the boys.”²¹

The Ghadar

The paper’s purpose, in a nutshell, was stated in the first issue: “It conveys the message of a rebellion to the nation once a week. It is brave, outspoken, unbridled, soft footed and given to the use of strong language. It is lightning, a storm and a flame of fire…. We are the harbinger of freedom.” It was also, according to the masthead, the “Enemy of the British Race.”²² The lead article, “Our Name and Our Work,” declared the two to be identical: in a word, mutiny. A rising would be inevitable within perhaps a decade, and in the meantime all must prepare for it.

The paper’s task, the editor continued, would be to nurture the mental and spiritual growth necessary to future mutineers, offering the right type of nourishment and edification to “purg[e] the soul of avarice, greed, pride, fear and ignorance” while exhorting young men to embrace the ideals of sacrifice, revenge, and unity in taking action. Recalling the stages of “Hardayalism,” this was the first stage of moral preparation. But stage two was coming soon, at which “rifle and blood will be used for pen and ink.”²³ (Yet at the same time, the editor noted, in the pages of the Ghadar “the pen has done the work of a cannon, shaken the foundation of the tyrannous government.”)²⁴ In accordance with Sohan Singh Bhakna’s earlier advice, Har Dayal extolled the value of vernacular materials in movement building among the people and (although the label fit much of the staff) accused English-educated Indians of selfish hypocrisy: “No movement can grow strong till books, pamphlets and newspapers written in easy vernacular are brought out. No great work has ever been accomplished with the aid of a foreign tongue.”²⁵

Har Dayal’s introductory editorial stressed the need for an accurate understanding of politics and the science of political economy. Indian youth should be sent to military schools or to “schools of other nations to learn how to govern” and to root out spies and traitors, all in order to hasten the coming mutiny. He made sure to associate the present movement in the minds of readers, allies and foes, with all the revolutionists that had come before, in 1857 and 1905, and in a subsequent issue yet again compared the work of the Bengali militants to the Russians who had been enforcing justice against “bad officers” since 1881. He invoked the names of Ajit Singh, Lajpat Rai, Tilak, Hemchandra Das Kanungo, Aurobindo, Sufi Amba Parishad, Krishnavarma, and Cama, of whose august company now “a band of the same army has arrived in America.” California offered to them “a second free Punjab where they can talk openly to their brothers.”²⁶ Har Dayal seamlessly and cumulatively melded the casts of both revolutionary streams.²⁷

A typical weekly issue might contain accounts of past and present revolutionary actions, oft en featuring appeals or references to the other nationalist groups within the British Empire, namely, those in Ireland and Egypt; or other groups recently and currently involved in struggles against autocratic or imperial rule, such as those in Russia, China, and Mexico. One might also find biographical sketches of independence fighters of India, Ireland, Italy, Poland, or even colonial America, such as that renowned anti-British guerrilla fighter George Washington. Other edifying historical examples ranged from episodes of the French Revolution to services rendered by the likes of William Tell or Lafayette against foreign domination and for the principle of freedom, to even the unification of Germany.²⁸ There was a special edition of Rusi Bagion ke Dastaanen (Stories of Russian Revolutionaries),²⁹ praising the faithful toils, daring exploits, stirring statements, abscondments from oppressive marriages, prison stints, prison breaks, and martyrdoms of radicals such as Vera Figner, Leo Deutsch, and Vera Zasulich.

There was much praise of the Bengali movement for keeping the government in a state of anxiety, and of course frequent invocation of the Mutiny of 1857 (“the old Gadar”), including serialized installments from Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s book on the Mutiny of 1857. Following the practice of the London India House group, these were read out at public meetings, and a special anniversary issue came out annually on 10 May, featuring the Rani of Jhansi’s image on the cover.³⁰ Special issues commemorating such landmarks as 1857 or the Hardinge bomb of 1912 were printed on red or yellow paper, making visual the text’s exhortations to don the saffron of the patriot, martyr, and warrior.³¹

The Ghadar also printed meeting notices and accounts of proceedings, such as an important gathering described in the 6 January 1914 issue, held in Sacramento on 31 December 1913. Here, according to quite another sort of description, courtesy of the ubiquitous intelligence agents, “poems were read and violent seditious speeches delivered, the point of which was emphasized by lantern slides. Portraits of famous seditionists and murderers and revolutionary mottoes were displayed on the screen.”³² The now-familiar gallery included Mazzini, William Tell, Lenin, and Sun Yat-sen; 1857 heroes Nanasahib Peshwa, Tatya Tope, and Lakshmi Bai; and Swadeshi-era revolutionists Khudiram Bose, Kanailal Dutta, and the Maharashtrian Chapekar.³³ This pantheon was always expanding: there was a notice in the 13 December 1916 issue kindly requesting “from 1857 to date, photos of all the martyrs … from those brethren having them,” and noting: “Some of the Punjab martyrs’ photos have reached the Gadar. Photos of the Bengal and Madras martyrs are wanting.” The Ghadar office planned to reproduce and distribute thousands of copies and asked: “Those brethren who wish to hang them in their houses, will please let the Gadar know by postcard. This is most necessary.”³⁴ After an announcement that Har Dayal and Ram Chandra were to preach in upcoming issues on the nature of patriotism,³⁵ Kartar Singh led them all in song: the chorus was, more or less, “Come, let’s go, join us in the battle for freedom.”

Then there were news articles on current and relevant legal, political, or economic matters, especially regarding immigration or nationalism. Updates were requested from all towns, villages, districts, and departments, on recent dacoities and political killings, as well as on any acts of British government tyranny or police abuses.³⁶ One much-circulated item was titled “Angrezi Raj ka Kacha Chittha” (Balance Sheet of British Rule),³⁷ which, with “Ankon ki Gawahi” (Evidence of Statistics),³⁸ collated damning numbers that more or less echoed Dadabhai Naoroji’s economic drain theory: how much money was removed by British taxation, how much was spent on the army, how much on education, how much grain produced, how many lost to famine or treatable disease, and so forth. In this, in Behari Lal’s words, “For the first time the readers received the kind of information which they had never before been given—a revelation that shook them to their very depths”;³⁹ and at the same time they were provided a stock of facts and figures in which to frame grievances credibly to those who might previously have dismissed them. Among the damning legacies of colonial rule were the following: land tax over 65 percent of net produce; army expenditure (29.5 crore) over four times the amount dedicated to the education of 240 million people; 20 million dead of famine in the last ten years; 8 million dead of plague in the last thirty years, and rising; intercommunal strife instigated; arts and craft s industries destroyed; money and lives sacrificed to the conquest of China, Afghanistan, Burma, Egypt, and Persia.⁴⁰

The Ghadar Press also put out various individual pamphlets and leaflets both in English and in Indian languages. Some of these reprinted previous articles, such as “Zulm! Zulm! Gore Shahi Zulm!” (Tyranny! Tyranny! The Tyranny of White Rule),⁴¹ which was first printed on the occasion of Bhagwan Singh’s deportation in 1913; William Jennings Bryan’s scathing indictment entitled “British Rule in India”;⁴² and Har Dayal’s “Nayen Zamane ke Nayen Adarsh” (New Ideals for a New Age), which decried benighted social and religious causes that distracted tracted from the struggle for freedom and equality,⁴³ “Social Conquest of the Hindu Race,” which pointed toward what we now might call hegemony as well as domination, and “Barabari da Arth” (The Meaning of Equality).⁴⁴

Overall the movement revealed in the Yugantar Ashram publications with a romanticist emotional intensity was militant, insurrectionist, patriotic, internationalist, modernist, secularist and antisectarian, and egalitarian, favoring politically federated democratic-republicanism, while leaning ever more toward socialist redistributive economics—two factors that can be seen as the strongest expressions of their two beloved guiding principles, liberty and equality. But at this point tyranny and exploitation were still being framed in primarily moral terms, awaiting a more scientific restatement in the 1920s.

The Ghadar Press also produced a different and very popular (and populist) literary corpus: a series of poetry collections called Ghadar-di-Gunj (Echoes of Revolt).⁴⁵ The first edition came out in booklet form in April 1914. Unlike the editorials, essays, and reportage that appeared in the weekly, the poetry was primarily the work of the farm laborers. These Punjabi couplets were equally explicit in their indictments of British rule and their exhortations to prepare rebellion (and explanations of how to do it) and plainly well aware of the implications of colonial economics.⁴⁶

It may seem remarkable, commented Vatuk, that a print medium should become the glue and fuel of a massive movement of which only a small minority of the initial membership was literate. This was possible because of a thriving oral culture in which it could be read aloud and shared, and the songs and poems of Ghadar-di-Gunj were memorized and sung at gatherings.⁴⁷ Inder Singh, granthi at the Stockton gurdwara, formerly of Hong Kong, even “learnt by heart most of the poems … and prepared a cypher system into which he transcribed [them].” ⁴⁸

Darisi Chenchiah recalled that as “intellectuals arose” from among “the Punjabee labourers,” they began to contribute articles and poems to the newspaper and to address public meetings. “They were sincere and brave,” though until quite recently “ignorant and illiterate.” But now they had “suddenly become politically conscious, highly patriotic and intensely revolutionary. As a result, the Ghadar movement passed rapidly into the hands of these masses.” ⁴⁹ As a leader Har Dayal evinced great confidence in their potential as revolutionary fighters; this may be why they liked him as well. Moreover, while he may have been a professional intellectual, he was a Punjabi nonetheless. Har Dayal happily supported and encouraged their vernacular contributions, Chenchiah continued, even when they contained mistakes or “abusive words,” precisely because they were—to use an anachronistic term—organic.

Some translated excerpts courtesy of Gerald Barrier powerfully express the themes of sectarian and ethnic unity, courage and sacrifice, and redemption through taking responsibility for the plight of the country, all the while exhibiting a global perspective and a social vision linking personal and collective transformation. While addressed to the lionhearted Singhs, these poems also showed broad awareness of issues and allusions relevant to Hindus and Muslims.⁵⁰

The very first poem of the first collection set the tone:

The world calls us coolie.

Why doesn’t our flag fly anywhere?

… … … … … … … … … …

How shall we survive, are we slaves forever?

Why aren’t we involved in politics?

… … … … … … … … … …

From the beginning we have been yoked to thralldom. Why don’t we even dream of freedom?

Only a handful of oppressors have taken our fields.

Why has no Indian cultivator risen and protected his land?

Our children cry out for want of education.

Why don’t we open science colleges?⁵¹

Poem 6 called for unity as the veterans of foreign battles turned their attention homeward:

Why do you sit silent in your own country

You who make so much noise in foreign lands?

Noise outside of India is of little avail.

Pay attention to activities within India.

… … … … … … … … … … … … … …

You are quarreling and Hindu-Muslim conflict is prevalent.

The jewel of India is rotting in the earth

Because you are fighting over the Vedas and the Koran. [Does this imply Sikhs were above sectional strife?]

Go and speak with soldiers.

Ask them why they are asleep, men who once held swords.

Muslims, Pathans, Dogras and Sikh heroes should join together.

The power of the oppressors is nothing if we unitedly attack him.

Indians have been the victors in the battlefields

of Burma, Egypt, China and the Sudan.⁵²

Poem 8 interpreted faith as a call for social justice and reproachfully invoked the Sikhs’ historical role in the first mutiny:

The Gurus founded this Path for the welfare of others.

Otherwise what was the need?

Open your eyes and look at the world….

People say the Singhs are cruel and insensitive.

Why did they turn the tide during the Delhi Mutiny?

The country would have enjoyed freedom.

How and why did they commit this blunder?⁵³

Poem 11, after touching on the same themes of Sikh history, martyrdom, and sacrifice, called on the Singhs to avenge Bhagwan Singh, put in a cage; to think of Ajit Singh, Cama, and Krishnavarma in France; of Gandhi (is this the first mention of him?) rotting in jail for the injustice of Africa; and of Muhammed Barakatullah in Japan, for “he has complete faith in god alone.”⁵⁴

Song 17 was a striking reflection juxtaposing tactical guidelines with the ethical, psychological growth of the revolutionary needed in the process of creating a new society:

We have tired of just observing; let us work out a program for doing something.

We should make cowards lions before acting; convert men who have said “sir, sir” for ages.

We should be cautious lest on a rapid ascent we fall down.

We should first memorize the alphabet, then learn mathematics.

We should first handle fire and pistols. Then we will not be afraid of guns and rifles.

We should develop brotherly love so that we cannot be divided.

The enemy is initially the traitor within;

We shall deal with the whites after we teach the unfaithful a lesson….

If they are willing to be treated like gentlemen, we shall plead with them.

If they do not come to terms through dialogue, then we must consider other ways to make them understand….

You must meet the traitors in the way they deserve, with full force.

In this way you should unite and form a branch of the Ghadar party.

Then we shall send some brave persons to India….

They will organize secret societies.

Some branches should be left in foreign lands, branches with deep roots.

We can then commit dacoities on the government

And in this way awaken the Punjab and the whole country.

At some places we should use guerrilla warfare and adopt the methods that best suit us.⁵⁵

This was the source of the movement’s global influence, cementing its stature as a broad movement rather than as a localized party. As it spread abroad, the global “branches” functioned in an autonomous and self-organized way, not subject to the central authority or direct guidance of San Francisco. But the paper that issued forth from that source was nevertheless a tangible guide and inspiration. The Ghadarite ideas “spread like wildfire in foreign countries where there are Indians,” said Chenchiah. “Even the individualist terrorist movement in Bengal paled into insignificance in the face of this mighty mass movement in the estimation of the British Rulers.”

One might map the diaspora by the Ghadar’s path: by June 1914 Yugantar Ashram publications had been spotted in Egypt, South Africa, Fiji, Canada, British East Africa, and British Guiana. Ghadar organizers were reported to be active on the ground in the Philippines, Hong Kong, Thailand, Burma, the Dutch East Indies, Mexico, Panama, and Brazil.⁵⁶ In January 1915 the paper was intercepted in Trinidad, Sudan, and Aden; in March, Morocco, Manila, Siam, and Java; in April, Madagascar and Reunion; June, Canton; and July, Johannesburg and Nairobi, Fiji, and Australia. To this list F. C. Isemonger and James Slattery added Japan, Shanghai, Hankow, Tientsin, Singapore, the Malay States, Trinidad, and Honduras. It reached, “in fact, to every place where Indians were known to be residing,” and was oft en re-posted from these places to India.⁵⁷

The first copies arrived in India on 7 December 1913. Despite instant proscription and heightened interception efforts through the Sea Customs Act, hundreds of copies trickled into the country in the next few months via Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Bombay. Oft en the shipments were divided into small parts and “contained in ordinary envelopes, addressed by hand and having the appearance of private letters.” Some contained personal messages on “small slips of paper instructing the recipients to read the paper to others or to pass it on.”⁵⁸

The writer of one such letter began by exhorting fellow Sikhs not to stand for the whites’ expropriation of the Golden Temple and Khalsa College back home—a foreshadowing for the returned Ghadarites who flowed into and radicalized the Babar Akali mobilizations in the 1920s. He then proceeded to convey his New World perspective: “Now I will write about this country and what we see with our own eyes. The country belonged formerly to the Canadians but the English conquered it four hundred years ago. The original inhabitants now are not allowed to walk in the streets and they go about the country like wandering tribes. They do not possess an inch of land but subsist by fishing on the sea. In our country there is no sea. What shall we do?”⁵⁹

It is quite striking that he draws an implicit analogy between the plight of indigenous Canadians and his own Punjabi people, who nevertheless from one sentence to the next seem to have grown less landlocked: “This pride in the Feringhis will uproot us and throw us into salt sea water, and no trace of the name Bharat will be left ”; then, “Sikhs, Hindus and Muhammadans all will be treated alike. Brother, the means of salvation is this. Educate all your children, boys and girls. Hindus, Muhammadans and Sikhs must cultivate love among themselves and then the work will gradually be accomplished. Read to all what I have written and also the paper I am sending. The paper may be read by anybody, but do not give the letter to anyone. Burn it after you have gone through it yourself and read it to others. The paper may be read by anyone; there is nothing to fear on that account as the paper is printed in America and the English cannot stop it.” ⁶⁰

Another letter, this time sans newspaper, was written from a Sikh in California to a soldier in the Eighty-second Punjabis at Nowshera: “At first there were about ten thousand of our countrymen here but now only about six thousand remain. The English no longer require us and have stopped our migration here. These badmashes have plundered us and we shall not escape disgrace unless we get out of their hands…. All Indians living in America and Canada are prepared to kill and die. No one wishes to see these evil Englishmen…. It is written that it is far better for the community which loses its sacred places to die…. The only remedy against these tyrants is that the troops should mutiny.” The writer then repeats some of the facts contained in Balance Sheet of British Rule concerning economic drain and plague. As with the first letter, the writer’s concern for the control of Sikh sacred places by foreigners points the way toward the Akali Dal.

The writer concludes: “All these facts which I have written have been copied from a paper called Ghadr, which is printed in America. I intended to send you the paper in original, but as its entry into India is prohibited I have written these few things in this letter…. You should write to me what is going on in India at the present time…. Do not let the white men know what I have written. Remember, lest you get into trouble; but understand and inform your friends.” ⁶¹

It is easy to forget in the homosocial environment of work, study, and political organizing abroad, that some of these men still had wives and children in India—the restriction on whose immigration to North America had been a sharp goad to early discontent. Among the intercepted messages was one from a husband to a valiant wife: “Times are hard, very hard; there is no certainty of life. Here I hope the war with Englishmen is beginning and that in a short time there will be a great mutiny. The tyrants are ruling over us. We are justified in killing. We shall see the sword and gun in our hands and pressing forward we shall kill and die…. We shall meet if we survive. Is there any disturbance about the Government in India? Write about this. Receive Fateh like a brave woman. Pain comes first, but is followed by comfort. Do not despair, for the days of your comfort are drawing near.” ⁶²

The Action Committee

Next to the propaganda corps helmed by Har Dayal, the second-most important committee among the Yugantar Ashram inner circle was focused on militant action and directed by Pandurang Khankhoje, in collaboration with Vishnu Ganesh Pingle and Harnam Singh Tundilat.⁶³ While Har Dayal’s pracharak (propaganda) project depended by definition on broadcasting its message as loud and far as possible, the praharak (action) branch depended upon secrecy. Khankhoje was adamant on this point, wary of the danger of infiltration from British intelligence, and not without good reason, as it happened. So although he recalled in his memoir that there was no lack of “young freedom lovers” willing to “fight and die for the revolution,” he still maintained strict screening procedures. Even once enrolled, the workers oft en did not know what was going on beyond their own tasks. (Sadly, it would seem that as the mutiny preparations got under way, not everyone was up to Khankhoje’s disciplined security standards.)

The action committee derived a great deal of tactical inspiration not only from the previous Indian extremists but from Sun Yat-sen’s republican nationalists, who had recently effected a successful Chinese revolution from abroad in 1911, just as the Indians wanted to do. This had even included an “assault force” of Chinese militants launched from San Francisco.⁶⁴ Har Dayal had already been in communication with Sun when he was in Hawaii, and Sun’s son, as it happened, was a contemporary of Chenchiah’s at the University of California. Chenchiah met with his classmate’s illustrious parent in Tokyo in 1912; Dr. Sun encouraged the Ghadarites’ enterprise of overthrowing British rule and offered them the benefits of his party’s experience. Though the leader of the San Francisco expedition, renegade American Homer Lea, had recently died, Emily Brown speculates that some of his veterans or confederates may have been available in San Francisco to speak with Khankhoje and his Ghadar action squad.⁶⁵ Khankhoje had been in the habit of visiting Chinatown during his period at Tamalpais, with a Chinese classmate who was one of Sun’s veterans. There, says Savitri Sawhney, “he had many discussions with the Chinese about India’s independence and his own aspirations…. The idea that Chinese and Indians could join in their quest for freedom and help each other fulfill their mutual goals was never far from his mind. He had developed a tremendous rapport with the Chinese whom he admired for their tenacity and grit. Some years later, after the inception of the Ghadar, this was to translate into a more meaningful exchange of ideas.” Sawhney comments further: “It was only natural that the cadets in the academy—particularly the Chinese, the Mexicans and the Irish—with insurrection on their minds would meet and discuss problems common to their countries.” Khankhoje also drew inspiration from the Mexican revolutionaries, who were never far from his awareness; he had friends among the Zapatista patriots who joined the Yaqui rebellion in southern California, and hoped they might help train the (Asian) Indians in “practical warfare.” ⁶⁶

The plan the Chinese recommended was to start by cutting communications and telegraph lines, disrupting railways, and then destroying police outposts and military camps. When all of that was under way, they should proceed to establish revolutionary bases in the jungles, hills, valleys, and border regions, from which to harass British administrative and military functioning. They should get weapons and ammunition by raiding armories and military encampments; they couldn’t buy them. This, recalled Khankhoje, was exactly how they began to mobilize. (It seems the basic blueprint of guerrilla insurrection has remained unchanged for a hundred years!)⁶⁷ But once in motion, events quickly got away from such a neat, efficient plan.

Har Dayal’s arrest came only a few months after the launch of the paper, on 25 March 1914. He fled the country not long afterward. Although he continued sending incendiary articles back for publication—notably, “Do Cheezon ke zarurat hai … Ghadar aur banduqen” (Two Things Are Necessary: Ghadar and Guns) and “O Soldiers of the Ghadr! O Stars of the Eyes of India!” (which appeared 14 July 1914)—and played a role in the Berlin India Committee’s work in Europe and the Ottoman realm, this was the end of his functional involvement in the North American organization. Yet belying the notion that the movement’s radicalism went no deeper than Har Dayal’s idiosyncrasies, Isemonger and Slattery took note that far from dampening the Yugantar Ashram’s work, his departure actually seemed to give “fresh incentive to the revolutionary movement.” ⁶⁸ The “Big Three” triumvirate of Ram Chandra, Bhagwan Singh, and Mohammed Barakatullah stepped into the momentary leadership gap, taking on the duties of the endless round of motivational tours, editing the paper, and handling finances and ashram affairs. One matter that shortly required their urgent attention was the Komagata Maru.

The Komagata Maru Incident

The Komagata Maru incident is one of the most amply documented episodes in the history of South Asian immigration to North America.⁶⁹ The facts in brief are these: in May 1908 the government of India had discreetly authorized the Canadian government to take the necessary steps to defend the whiteness of its shores without being too obvious in “express discrimination against British Indians.”⁷⁰ The governor-general announced the continuous journey stipulation (that only those who had sailed directly from their port of departure would be allowed to enter, which disqualified every voyage originating in India) and a prohibitive entry fee of $200 a head. British authorities (including then viceroy Lord Minto) expressed their appreciation for the subtle elegance of this solution, keeping out Indians without needing to be clumsily direct in acknowledging the awkward two-tiered status of the dominions separating the white-settler colonies of Canada and Australia from His Majesty’s Asian and African possessions.

In April 1914, Gurdit Singh, a prosperous Singapore-based labor-transport contractor, chartered a ship to take a load of passengers to Canada from among the hundreds of his compatriots then awaiting passage in Hong Kong and other East Asian ports. Besides being a deliberate challenge to the statutes, it was also an act of altruistic self-interest, serving the community while also benefiting his own future shipping interest. After stops in Shanghai, Kobe, and Yokohama, the total manifest included 376 passengers, the majority adult male Sikhs, except for twenty-one Muslims.

When they reached Vancouver on 23 May 1914, however, they were refused entry. As they waited at anchor for weeks, provisions on the ship ran low and tempers ran high. A shore committee was formed consisting of Balwant Singh, Husain Rahim, and Sohan Lal Pathak; a support meeting in Vancouver in July was attended by “some 400 Indians and 150 white men. The latter were mainly socialists.”⁷¹ This was attributed to the fact that Husain Rahim, then editor of the Hindustani,⁷² was also the secretary of the local Socialist organization, one of whose more “rabid” members now “advised the Indians to return to India, raise the standard of revolution and become masters of their own country.”⁷³

Despite the efforts of the shore committee, the climax of the standoff was an attempt to forcibly transfer the passengers to another liner to be sent back. While a militia guarded the food stores on the wharf, which were to be loaded onto the new ship, a tugboat approached, bearing 120 police along with the chief and four inspectors, plus forty special immigration officials. Among them was the hated William C. Hopkinson, at whom the defenders of the ship were aiming particular wrath. The Komagata Maru passengers took over their ship and beat off the approaching vessel, outmatching its grappling hooks and water hose by throwing coal, bricks, scrap metal, and concrete. They had armed themselves with stoking irons, axes, swords, lathis, clubs, and even some spears handmade on shipboard. (We are reminded that many of them were, after all, “battle-seasoned veterans” of the British army.)⁷⁴ The wounded tug and three picketboats patrolled the harbor around them until a Canadian naval cruiser (one half of the national fleet at the time) came to support them, with orders to seize the ship. This time the furious passengers threatened to hold immigration official Malcolm Reid hostage until food and water were supplied to them for the return journey by the same vessel on which they had come. Eventually the Minister of Agriculture from Ottawa managed to talk them down to a tense compromise, agreeing that if the Indians relinquished control of the ship to its Japanese captain they might return across the Pacific in peace with full provisions.

On 23 July 1914, two months after arriving, they were escorted from the harbor by a cordon of navy vessels and an armed battle cruiser.⁷⁵ But Hopkinson, bespoke spy for the West Coast “Hindus,” had been warning authorities that the Komagata Maru passengers’ stiff resistance was being instigated by “a conspiracy headed by educated Indians living in the U.S.” This was something of an exaggeration, although it wasn’t untrue that the Ghadarites had approached the Komagata Maru passengers, spotting a ripe opportunity for propagandizing among their primary demographic. Bhagwan Singh, Barakatullah, and Balwant Singh had been making speeches and distributing literature on the ship in its East Asian ports of call on the outward voyage.

Angry and frustrated, the travelers docked at Budge Budge near Calcutta in late September only to be met on shore by police who tried to herd them onto a train to Punjab, subject to the new Ingress of India Ordinance passed on 5 September. The law allowed potential subversives entering during war time to be immediately arrested and detained without trial. (Yes, as the ship steamed across the Pacific, there had been a shooting in Sarajevo.) Ironically, many of them hadn’t even wanted to come to India at all, preferring to return to Japan and coastal China, where they had been before the voyage, but none of their previous embarkation points would let them land. Now, refusing to board the train, the majority of the Sikh passengers marched en masse toward Calcutta. The panicked police then foolishly escalated the situation into another standoff and shoot-out in which eighteen passengers were killed, twenty-eight fled, and most of the others were arrested, all of which simply increased the appeal of the Ghadar Party still more.⁷⁶

Meanwhile, news of the Komagata Maru’s fate lit a fuse for the already-primed West Coast community, speeding the escalation of demands for armed action to avenge such a grievous insult. Sohan Singh Bhakna caught up with the ship at Yokohama with a delivery of two hundred pistols and several hundred cartridges, before continuing on to India with another group from Shanghai. The first Ghadarite jatha (squad) reached Calcutta from Shanghai not long after. To the consternation of officials, many of the Sikhs apprehended at Budge Budge were found to be armed with American-made revolvers.⁷⁷ (On one of the propaganda stops Bhagwan Singh had reportedly sold a pistol to Gurdit Singh, and it was suspected that there had been an attempt to smuggle arms aboard at Vancouver as well.)

Meanwhile Bhagwan Singh, Muhammed Barakatullah, and Ram Chandra addressed public meetings along the length of California, holding mass meetings in Sacramento, Fresno, Stockton, Portland, and all the smaller towns where there were Indian communities, at which they collected funds and gathered recruits, who then converged on San Francisco to board ships. The Ghadar reported on the massive Fresno and Sacramento meetings of 9 and 11 August, informing readers of the war, telling them to be on alert for the mutiny, and to make haste for India if they wanted to fight in a rising that would join with all the “enemies of the Empire” to overthrow the existing government and found a republic.⁷⁸

Ram Chandra exhorted those gathered in Fresno: “The ghosts of our ancestors are branding us as a shameless progeny. They … will never know rest until we cut down every Englishman. Our Motherland is summoning us to come and free her from the clutches of these tyrants. If you claim to be sons of India deposit your belongings with the Yugantar Ashram and be ready to board the ship for India. Let each of my countrymen, who is prepared to undertake the work, come to the hotel and give me his name.”⁷⁹ Between five and six thousand men were counted present, in addition to some new recruits who had accompanied Amar Singh from Oregon, and between $5000 and $6000 was collected for weapons and ship passage.⁸⁰ Moreover, at all the gatherings “the speakers declared that India had received assurances from Germany that if they would revolt against England help would be received from the Germans,” and that although such a revolt was inevitable in time, “to strike now would mean victory for India.” The conspirators had not fully mastered the art of secrecy, it appears.

This article also hinted at how a mobilization of agricultural workers necessarily followed the rhythms of the harvest. Lecturers were fanning out from San Francisco “to different sections of the state where Hindus are employed in the fruit, and mass meetings are being held,” but “it is probable that no more meetings will be held in Fresno. The grape picking is almost finished and the Hindus in a few days will start to move. The next meetings will likely be held in Stockton and Sacramento.”⁸¹

MUTINEERS

After the declaration of war, things started moving very quickly. Kartar Singh set out almost immediately, at the beginning of August.⁸² Between sixty and eighty eager mutineers followed him on the SS Korea at the end of the month.⁸³ Small autonomous jathas, or squads, of four or five began organizing themselves at mills and ranches, pooling money to book passage.⁸⁴ The Stockton Khalsa Diwan was receiving numerous requests to handle the sale of land owned by Sikh immigrants to finance their return—thereby literally sacrificing an American territorial future for an Indian one.⁸⁵

Chenchiah recalled in his memoir that upon the outbreak of the war Berkeley radical Jatindra Nath Lahiri had proposed, and Kartar Singh and Chenchiah concurred, that while the Punjabis should depart immediately, the students had more learning and preparation to do. Presumably the Punjabis had already received sufficient military training during their army stints. Since military training was impossible at the university, they decided to seek out other schools, some quite remote. Chenchiah was one such; when he returned a year later in 1915 to await orders, he said, he was taken aback “to find myself in the midst of strangers in the headquarters.”⁸⁶ His old comrades had gone into battle.

The Big Three saw the travelers off with hortatory farewells, along now-familiar lines: “Your duty is clear. Go to India and stir up rebellion in every corner of the country. Rob the wealthy and show mercy to the poor. In this way you will win universal sympathy. Arms will be provided for you on your arrival in India. Failing this you must ransack the police stations for rifles. Obey without hesitation the commands of your leaders.”⁸⁷ At each port of call they paused to gather recruits and contact soldiers.⁸⁸ At Yokohama they picked up extra weapons, and at Kobe they met another shipload of rebels coming from Vancouver. At Manila they were met by Hafiz Abdulla, president of the local Ghadar branch; Nawab Khan and Jagat Ram then addressed a meeting on the beach, at which “a quantity of seditious literature was also distributed.”⁸⁹ By the time they reached Hong Kong their numbers had swelled to three hundred. But there a telegram arrived from Nidhan Singh, who had left the Korea at Nagasaki and gone on ahead to Shanghai. He warned them that they would be searched on arrival in Hong Kong for weapons, ammunition, and seditious literature, so the leaders collected all such incriminating material and threw it overboard. They were also informed that no ship would be allowed to land with more than two hundred Indians on board, so they divided themselves up. Two hundred transferred to the Tosa Maru, the bulk of whom were interned on arrival in Calcutta on 29 October.⁹⁰ Indeed, the Sedition Committee Report deemed the Tosa Maru group “the most dangerous” of the shiploads, as it “contained malcontents who had divided themselves into sections each of which was to work under a leader in a particular area of the Punjab,” had the mass internment not “disorganized these elaborate arrangements.”⁹¹ After that they soon learned to travel in less conspicuous handfuls to avoid this problem. The jathas arrived throughout the fall and winter, often choosing Japanese vessels in order to avoid British shipping lanes; once ashore they proceeded individually to Punjab to regroup at a set date.⁹² For inconspicuous travel, one returnee also noted that he had “exchanged my small turban for a large one to avoid being detected as a returned emigrant.”⁹³

From that fall to the spring of 1915, 579 “brave ones” embarked from North America, and 470 from East Asia.⁹⁴ During the first two years of the war, Rattan Singh estimated that 8,000 of his fellow Ghadarites made the return voyage, about two-thirds of the total overseas membership.⁹⁵ The government knew not yet how to gauge the new arrivals’ “relative inherent capacity for mischief,” but it did know that there was a hostile organization in America, and that the “abnormal number” of emigrants returning after absences of some years had risen enough to attract uneasy attention.⁹⁶ Further investigation hinted that scant few of the Indians in North America seemed to have “escaped contamination” from the “taint” of Ghadar ideas. Therefore, police authorities warned, “prima facie every Indian returning from America or Canada, whether labourer, artisan or student, must be regarded with the greatest suspicion as a probable active revolutionary, or at any rate a sympathiser with the revolutionary party.”⁹⁷ The disease was just as epidemic in Hong Kong and Manila, where Bhagwan Singh had returned from California to rouse and recruit, while others went to rouse the Malay States, Singapore, and Burma. Therefore “those returning from the Far East, other than Government servants and other persons vouched for by the Hong Kong and Shanghai authorities, must be regarded in the same light.”⁹⁸

Many arrivals were promptly interned or confined to their villages on security.⁹⁹ But for those who did reach their destinations undetected, the next step was to divide up into what Rattan Singh called “guerrilla bands” of four to five people, and then into gangs of around sixteen, under different leaders, concealing themselves throughout the country until the moment came to unite for a campaign. The decentralization was intended to reduce the chances of movement decapitation should any one leader and his party be captured.¹⁰⁰ Unfortunately, scattered arrests, some leading to confessions, discombobulated the organization from the start. Moreover, there were no systematic communication channels between the groups nor any structure in place to receive new arrivals.¹⁰¹ A few early dates proposed for an uprising passed without event: a general mutiny to be sparked by an attack on the Mian Meer arsenal on 15 November, with some soldiers assisting; a declaration of rebellion to follow a mutiny in the Lahore cantonment on 26 November; a rebellion to follow an attack on the Ferozepur magazine soon after. By December the efforts at rebellion appeared quiescent. In the meantime the gangs gave up waiting for vague and conflicting instructions from Lahore, where Bhai Parmanand had established a base intended for political and press work, and instead “wandered about from village to village,” having taken the initiative “to meet other returned emigrants, organise gatherings and look for likely places to commit dacoities” for arms or funds, to “preach sedition” and “corrupt the Indian troops,” or to pursue secret contacts.¹⁰²

Some looked beyond the imperative of resistance to take positive steps toward a postrevolutionary vision. A student in Ludhiana named Dalip Singh, who became an ardent Ghadar supporter after being “led astray by the anti-British and socialistic conversation of Nidhan Singh, Parmanand and others,” related:

Every time I met these men, I questioned them as to how they could overthrow such a powerful Government; and their reply was that the mainstays of the Government were their own brethren…. The Government was much preoccupied by the European war, and the number of British soldiers in India was very small. Hence we should soon be able to turn them out and form our own Parliament. In each village we should appoint representatives and decide cases in “Parliament.” This would be a success as villagers knew best what was happening in their neighbourhood.¹⁰³

Between 1913 and 1915, Balwant Singh, who hoped to win “converts” in the vicinity of his home village of Sangwal by reading to them the Ghadar newspaper that he received under multiple false addresses, created a village society that ran a school, a veterinary hospital, a library, and an on-the-ground criminal court—in effect, an autonomous community.¹⁰⁴ Piara Singh and some of his fellows established a school in Namana village with the aim of “educating their fellow countrymen and inspiring in them ideas of freedom and of their political rights,” a goal they had discussed while in Canada.¹⁰⁵ By 1915 the school had a gurdwara above and a schoolroom below and served as a meeting place for the revolutionaries. Overall, noted the comprehensive 1918 Sedition Committee Report, the returning rebels had been “indoctrinated with … ideas of equality and democracy in America and led to believe by Har Dayal … that India can be made into a Utopia in which all will be equal, and plague and famine cease to exist by the simple expedient of driving out the British.”¹⁰⁶

Progress toward that goal resumed once the returnees started to establish better contact with the Bengali Yugantar group, an important sector of the national-revolutionist Swadeshi movement. The conduit was the branch based in Varanasi, led by Rash Behari Bose and Sachindranath Sanyal; the latter became one of the most important liaisons between the Bengali revolutionary network and the returned Punjabi militants. Upon first meeting with Ghadarites Kartar Singh, Amar Singh, Pirthi Singh, and Ram Saran Das, Sanyal inquired about the conspirators’ arrangements, numbers, and needs: they had ample personnel but were lacking in money, arms, and capable, well-coordinated leadership. Sanyal left them a revolver and some cartridges, plus instructions on how to contact him for another meeting. But the arrest of Pirthi Singh, who had the information, forestalled this.

A month later Pingle, one of the architects of the Ghadar action wing back in California and Oregon, arrived as the next emissary tasked with making “definite arrangements for cooperation” between the Bengalis and the returned Punjabis, and building upon Sanyal’s initial contact. A Maharashtrian, he had returned to India in November 1914 with some Sikh Ghadarites but then joined with Rash Behari Bose’s “Bengal anarchist” circle and continued working to facilitate communication and organizational collaboration between the two groups.¹⁰⁷ Sanyal and Pingle then went through a round of secret meetings with revolutionaries throughout North India until Sanyal went to direct the eastern centers.¹⁰⁸

Early in the year a tactical headquarters for the Ghadar activities was set up in Amritsar, coordinated by Mula Singh. To the empire’s secret eyes, Bose’s arrival in Amritsar opened up a period of “the most concerted and the most dangerous activity since the birth of the movement.”¹⁰⁹ When Mula Singh met with Pingle and Sanyal in the Amritsar bazaar, accompanying them to a headquarters above a sympathizer’s dharmsala to confer, “Pingle told him that he could obtain four or five pistols, but needed money to bring a Bengali friend of his who knew how to manufacture bombs like that thrown at the Viceroy (Lord Hardinge) on his ceremonial entrance to Delhi two years before. Mula Singh asked if the friend was the man who had thrown it, but he was met with a smile and told that it was not necessary for him to know that.”¹¹⁰

Soon afterward, the headquarters moved from Amritsar to two secluded houses in Lahore to avoid police attention. Bose himself, when he arrived in Lahore after informing his comrades in Varanasi that he was going to “fix dates in consultation with the Sikhs,” then laid claim to the role of directing “all departments of revolutionary work.”¹¹¹ Bose’s claims aside, these departments included (a) the seduction of troops, (b) the massacre of loyal subjects and officials, (c) the setting up of a revolutionary flag, (d) the breaking of jails, (e) the looting of treasuries, (f) the seduction of youths, (g) the propagation of seditious literature, (h) union with foreign enemies, (i) the commission of dacoities, (j) the procuring of arms, (k) the manufacture of bombs, (l) the foundation of secret societies, (m) the looting of police stations, (n) the destruction of railways and telegraphs, and (o) the seduction of villagers.¹¹² The latter were to be encouraged toward actions of resistance, starting with the refusal to pay revenue, and eventually leading toward more confrontational tactics.¹¹³ (If we were to rephrase this agenda, replacing “seduction of” with “outreach to”; “massacre of [loyalists]” with “assassination of [loyalists]”; and “seditious” with “revolutionary,” I doubt any Ghadarite would have denied it.)

The planning committee in Berlin had given returnees to understand that they would be supplied with weapons upon arrival, but the promised German shipments went awry.¹¹⁴ The returnees smuggled in a few guns and cartridges themselves, having taken them aboard in small quantities in Japanese or Chinese ports, and sometimes hiding such weapons acquired en route under false bottoms of packing cases or in hollow table legs. But this would not be enough; raids on armories, magazines, and police posts would be necessary to build up their arsenal.¹¹⁵ Resourceful rebels armed themselves in the meantime with cavalry swords or bamboo staves topped with removable axe-blades.¹¹⁶

Besides weapons, the other pressing need was money. Throughout October and November, debates occurred on whether and where to loot treasuries. Although some leaders felt that this would simply invite unwanted attention and needlessly risk premature arrest, nevertheless they undertook a modest series of fundraising dacoities.¹¹⁷ The Bengalis collected 59,410 rupees in their home territory, while the Punjabis carried out up to fifteen attacks on villages, treasuries, and train stations, in one case leveraging a mandatory contribution of 22,000 rupees from “a pro-British rich man” whom they induced to do his duty and “replenish the national treasury.”¹¹⁸

Some were punctilious in their intention to choose targets in accordance with wealth and sympathies, and in their adherence to chivalry in action. One anecdote, for example, portrayed Kartar Singh taking pity on a widow whose house they were robbing, and leaving her with sufficient funds to get her daughter married honorably. In total, between mid-October 1914 and January 1915, “no fewer than 33 serious crimes, including five murders and several raids by large and well-armed gangs, were definitely traced by the Government of India to the ‘Ghadar incitement.’ ”¹¹⁹

A fascination with explosives had not abated since the Swadeshi days, and now the returnees from abroad were seeking out a mysterious “Bengali expert.”¹²⁰ Ram Saran Das recommended blowing up all the railway bridges in Punjab to forestall troop movements once the rising was initiated. “Hundred pound bombs would do the work,” he supposed, “unless the Bengali whom Sanyal had gone to fetch preferred the use of dynamite.”¹²¹ Not that the returnees lacked their own expertise, having trained with the same manual as their domestic counterparts had. Mathra Singh, bombing coordinator for the returning Ghadarites, had recently produced some successful samples from easily obtained ingredients. He had been part of a team that also included Amar Singh and Harnam Singh Tundilat, to undertake experiments at a remote workshop at Jawala Singh’s ranch in California, based on a copy of the bomb manual compiled by the Swadeshi activist Hemchandra Das in Paris under the tutelage of Russian Revolutionary Socialist exiles and delivered to California by Taraknath Das. (In the process an accident led to the loss of Harnam Singh’s hand.) Amar Singh, who was experimenting with electrical ignitions, suggested an iron foundry in Lahore where casings could be made. When the foundry proprietor’s growing suspicions led them to cancel the order, they made use of some brass ink pots they found in the Amritsar bazaar.¹²²

But even explosives would be useless without the most important component of all: popular support. Soon after the shift to Lahore—which had for the moment overtaken San Francisco as functional operating center, once most of the leaders had crossed over—they had purchased six duplicators to churn out revolutionary leaflets in Urdu, Gurmukhi, and Hindi.¹²³ Printing and distributing materials from inside India could circumvent the increasing hazards of smuggling them in past the customs inspectors; lately some travelers had taken to simply learning texts by heart and importing them that way. Moreover, since their arrival the returnees had been addressing gatherings at fairs and festivals in Sikh holy places, urging people to rise in rebellion against their British rulers.

While Harnam Singh Tundilat tramped from village to village bearing the message of revolt, Kartar Singh racked up hundreds of miles on his bicycle, making the rounds of the cantonments to talk with soldiers.¹²⁴ Above all, the envisioned rising depended upon the mutiny of troops; without this element, the agitators must remain ineffectual. With the empire’s military strength concentrated elsewhere, the Indian posts were being refilled with relatively raw and inexperienced “territorials.” As for the Indian soldiers, the Ghadarites felt deep kinship with them, so why not rally them? They were family, friends, and fellow villagers, and they held all the weapons. Their eyes only needed to be opened. Although most were content to spread literature and persuasion among the cantonments, a few, including Balwant Singh, even enlisted in order to better implant the desire for mutiny from within. “Already the army was seething with discontent,” said Rattan Singh. “Soldiers hated the idea of going abroad, to Mesopotamia, to France, to strange lands to die at the bidding of the British Government.”¹²⁵

During January and February of 1915, Ghadar emissaries reached most of the cantonments in northern India. Kartar Singh, Randhir Singh, and Nidhan Singh focused on Ferozepore, while Harnam Singh and Pyara Singh traveled to the frontier cantonments; Nidhan Singh and others to Jhelum, Rawalpindi, and Hoti Mardan; and Mathra Singh and Amar Singh to “stir up the Afridis on the frontier.”¹²⁶ The emissaries were equipped with tricolor flags (yellow for Sikhs, red for Hindus, blue for Muslims) and tools such as files, safety pliers, and wire cutters thought to be for use on telegraph or electric lines.¹²⁷ Their most successful “seductions” were among the Twenty-third Cavalry at Lahore Cantonment and the sepoys of the Twenty-sixth Punjabis at Ferozepore, whose “infect[ion] with sedition” while stationed in Hong Kong had already led to their redeployment back to India. But the Ghadarites also found receptive ears among the 128th Pioneers, the Twelfth Cavalry regimental lines at Meerut, and a few others.

In late October 1914 a reservist sowar (cavalryman) brought news to the Twenty-third that a sizable group of returned emigrants armed with guns, pistols, and bombs was planning to capture the fort at Lahore and was hoping for regimental support in this enterprise. Several sowars and officers were sympathetic, although reticent about unleashing mutiny prematurely. They wanted to be sure the rising was actually under way before risking it. But if a solid six to seven hundred emigrants were in place to attack the cavalry lines, they allowed, that might be a sufficient signal for the mutinous troops to kill their officers, commandeer the rifle racks and magazine, and deal with any unconvinced comrades-in-arms.

The “disaffected” cavalry regiment (stirred by two freshly enlisted returnees among their ranks) then kept faithfully in touch through Prem Singh and Hira Singh throughout the intervening lull, awaiting their moment for months.¹²⁸ Even so a few restive soldiers decided they couldn’t wait any longer and left to “do some mischief to the Government” by cutting telegraph lines and breaking railroad insulators.¹²⁹ Meanwhile, several Ghadarites had met some of the men of the Twenty-sixth Punjabis at the Ferozepore depot, encouraged them to take part in the rising, and arranged bomb-making instruction for them. Kartar Singh reported back to the Amritsar headquarters early in 1915 that the Ferozepore troops were ready.

On 12 February, Rash Behari Bose announced the date for the rising as the 21st, only a week and a half away. Emissaries fanned out to the cantonments and military installations to confirm their readiness and pin down the plan. Lahore and Ferozepore would serve as flint and tinder to the rest, which they hoped would then explode like a string of firecrackers spanning northern India from Lahore to Dacca. They would have to move fast, as there was a rumor that the Twenty-third Cavalry was soon to be transferred out to the front. Indeed, some regiments were already gone. When Kartar Singh brought the news to Randhir Singh, a priest serving the garrison at Ferozepore, he found the latter leading a prayer meeting in honor of some Indian soldiers stationed in France.¹³⁰

Meanwhile, there were still flags, uniforms, emblems, and declarations of war to be prepared, recalled Rattan Singh,¹³¹ corroborating the Sedition Committee Report’s list of last minute tasks: “Bombs were prepared; arms were got together; flags were made ready; a declaration of war was drawn up; instruments were collected for destroying railways and telegraph wires.” When the latter were cut, the last message they sent would be the signal for the uprising.¹³²

The plan was carefully laid: at Lahore, a small group of returnees would gather by the railway line. A guide from the cantonment would lead a half dozen of them to infiltrate the barracks emptied during roll call and collect the swords abandoned there, while another guide escorted a second squad to the reservists’ quarter guard to seize rifles and ammunition. At this point the cavalrymen would unleash the “massacre of the Europeans and British Artillery”¹³³ in pursuit of the maxim “Maro firangi ko!” (Kill the westerners!).¹³⁴

At Ferozepore, eight “disaffected” sepoys of the Twenty-sixth Punjabis were tapped as guides for teams of returned Ghadarites in attacks on several depots, the magazine, the arsenal, and the regimental lines. Amid the roar of the rampaging troops, the rebels would then mob the army camps, release political prisoners, secure all stores of arms and ammunition, and fortify all local cells sufficiently to hold out for a full year (in the process of which they too must maro firangi ko as much as they could). Randhir Singh set forth the plan to his flock after a prayer meeting and received a positive response.¹³⁵

However, they were betrayed by an informer in their midst. Raw Punjab Criminal Investigation Department police recruit Kirpal Singh was Balwant Singh’s cousin, whom Nidhan Singh had also known and vouched for in Shanghai. With such credentials all had trusted him, and he had won his way with (in retrospect) disturbing swiftness into the confidence of Bose and the inner circle. As soon as Kirpal Singh learned the proposed date of the uprising he informed the authorities, revealing to them the details of ongoing subversive activities. In the meantime he wired the Amritsar police to notify them of a large gathering of the chief conspirators in Lahore. Luckily he lacked contacts among the Lahore police, who would have gotten there faster, and so the mutineers slipped the noose this time. Kirpal Singh then carried on as if he were a committed revolutionary, helping with final preparations among the Twenty-third Cavalry and also among the villagers of Dadher near Amritsar, some of whom had been assigned to loot the local police station, seize its arms, and march to Lahore. In actuality he was arranging to have them ambushed.¹³⁶

But Kirpal Singh had started to provoke suspicion through some indiscretions in asking questions, and even more after being sighted at the railway platform in Amritsar (waiting for the police) when he was supposed to be at Lahore with the Twenty-third. Realizing there had been a leak, the organizing committee pushed the date of the rising up a couple of days to 19 February. When the informer returned to Lahore on the morning of the 19th, he found the gears already in motion. He nevertheless managed to get an emergency alert to his contact, K. B. Liaquat Hayat Khan, deputy inspector of police in Amritsar: “It’s happening tonight.”

At his signal, the police rushed the movement headquarters in Lahore and captured seven key organizers. Three more were apprehended, returning unawares to the house. The police also seized three finished bombs and sundry other materiel, flags, and incriminating papers. A coded warning was then radioed to the cantonments in plenty of time for military authorities to take preventive actions, which even Michael O’Dwyer admitted were “in some cases perhaps excessive.”¹³⁷ Indian guards were replaced with English ones, and all absent personnel were recalled to bases, at which troop levels were already the lowest in years. “Truckloads of white soldiers pour[ed] in” as British troops patrolled Lahore, Delhi, Ambala, and Ferozepore, rounding up as many of the rebel leaders as they could find.¹³⁸

In Shaukat Usmani’s pithy assessment, “Alas!”¹³⁹ The rest crumbled. At 7:00 p.m. when the entire regiment at the Lahore Cantonment was abruptly ordered to fall in, mutiny coordinator Lance Daffadar Lachman Singh of the Twenty-third Cavalry knew something was wrong. He sent Balwant Singh with an urgent warning to the other returnees: stay away, and tell the others immediately!¹⁴⁰ Meanwhile in Ferozepore the eight guides had already been discharged for seditious conduct. But rather than departing to their homes they stayed nearby, in contact with Kartar Singh. Around 9:00 p.m. he met fifty or sixty rebels who had arrived by train, and led them to the nearby rifle range to rendezvous with the guides. Along the way they managed to trick a patrol of territorials, called up for duty in response to the mutiny alert, into thinking they were just “an ordinary singing party,” since luckily one rebel had brought along a harmonium—“whether to accompany the singing of hymns or war songs is not known.”¹⁴¹ But the discharged sepoys did not appear; the revolutionaries waited until dawn and then dispersed. It turned out that the soldier whose task it had been to fetch his fellows was taken into custody before he could do so, and was held all night long for disobeying the order not to return.

Still loath to give up, about fifteen Ghadarites, including Harnam Singh and Balwant Singh, then took the train to Doraha bridge, intending to blow it up and attack the military guard there. But the guard was too strong to approach. They buried the bombs for safekeeping and planned to return later, but they never made it back. The bombs were eventually recovered by the police and were quite big enough, it was judged, to have done some serious damage.¹⁴²

Sanyal, waiting in vain with his people on the parade ground at Varanasi for the go signal that never came, still had not heard the catastrophic news, until the evening papers came out, and he read, with horror and disbelief, what had happened.¹⁴³ Back at the raided headquarters, Kartar Singh found Rash Behari Bose in a stupor of despair. Bose then fled to Japan, where he lived for the rest of his life. But the younger militant refused to give up until he was captured, along with Tundilat and ex-sowar Jagat Singh, still trying to subvert Jagat Singh’s old regiment, the Twenty-second Cavalry. “As might be expected of three such fire-brands,” said Isemonger and Slattery, they continued to “harangue the bystanders” even as they were arrested.¹⁴⁴ Pingle hadn’t given up either; after fleeing Lahore he tried to carry through the planned rising at Meerut anyway, only to be caught there in March amid the lines of the Twelfth Cavalry, carrying, in O’Dwyer’s words, “a collection of bombs”—(actually a box of ten)—“sufficient to blow up a regiment.”¹⁴⁵ Both Pingle and Jagat Singh were sentenced to death in the First Lahore Conspiracy Case.

Over the next days and weeks, the Lahore police swept up other conspirators, absconders, and incriminating materials, a process greatly expedited as Nawab Khan, Amar Singh, and Mula Singh turned approver, revealing detailed information on actions, methods, names of participants, homes, and meeting places. It was on their testimony that the conspiracy case largely rested. Contemporary documents revealed the magnitude of the colonial government’s panic, retroactively downplayed, at the closeness of their brush with disaster as bit by bit further details of the events came to light.

Clashes continued sporadically throughout the spring and summer of 1915 as those who had not yet been arrested “continued their revolutionary activities, spreading propaganda on the university campuses and in the military cantonments.”¹⁴⁶ For example, even after the failed rising a couple of the Ghadarites had been teaching the indomitable sowars of the Twenty-third Cavalry to make bombs and dynamite according to Mathra Singh’s recipes. They hoped in the future to seize opportunities such as large gatherings of officers and also plotted the death of the traitor Kirpal Singh. The accidental explosion of one of these bombs in their quarters led to the revelation of their participation in the February attempt. Eighteen sowars were court-martialed and sentenced to death. Twelve were executed forthwith, and the rest sent to the Western Front to die a slower death. According to O’Dwyer, the rest of the regiment had already left India, because “in time of war it was not thought advisable by the military authorities to have a court-martial which would make public mutinous preparations.”¹⁴⁷ Meanwhile, soldiers Puran Singh and Wasawa Singh had thought to get in touch with Hira Singh, a man “of strong revolutionary views” with a following in a nearby village who was working to convert other villages to the cause. He was also thought to be in touch with “a Beloch chief” boasting forty thousand followers and plentiful arms and ammunition, ready to join the rising upon receipt of a telegram bearing the coded signal “white wool.” After their regiment received its active service orders in late April or early May, the conspirators packed two bombs in Puran Singh’s luggage in case of opportunities to use them en route. One exploded on 13 May, injuring five people. The second was thrown down a well. But these actions remained fragmentary and failed to generate the cumulative synergy necessary for a large-scale rising. The republic would not yet be proclaimed.

AFTERMATHS

The rebels were tried under the Defense of India Act in a series of twelve special tribunals with no possibility of appeal. The main trial lasted from April to September 1915, followed by four supplementary cases, and several subsidiary cases between July 1915 and September 1918.¹⁴⁸ Of the 64 accused in the initial case, the results were 2 discharged, 4 acquitted, 24 sentenced to death, 27 to transportation for life, and 6 to lesser prison terms; commuted to a total of 7 executions, 34 life sentences, and 16 shorter terms.¹⁴⁹ In total 175 people were tried, resulting in 136 convictions, including 42 death sentences, though about half of these were commuted to transportation for life.¹⁵⁰

Official postmortems continually cited Ghadar’s fatal disconnection from the sentiments of the countryside, whose denizens, authorities liked to claim (just as Ghadarites liked to deny), were generally “loyal and contented,”¹⁵¹ sure in a crunch to “rall[y] stoutly on the side of law and order.”¹⁵² And yet it may stand as a testament to the Ghadarites’ persuasiveness, that 121 of 231 defendants tried in all of the conspiracy cases in Punjab were local residents rather than returned emigrants.¹⁵³ When the returnees of 1914–15 set out “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.”¹⁵⁴ Once the Ghadar community consciousness was dominated by a mass of workers, rather than by an elite intellectual secret-society network, a left ward evolution seems logical enough.

Before leaving on their doomed campaign, the party hard core in California had had the foresight to elect “a new collective to carry on the work” in their absence, with an executive committee consisting of Bhagwan Singh as president, Santokh Singh as general secretary, Ram Chandra as manager of the paper, and Gobind Behari Lal as editor, plus ten other Yugantar Ashram staffers.¹⁵⁵ Yet there were intimations of increasing disunity and ugly factional strife. Ram Chandra had taken over editorship of the Ghadar after Har Dayal’s departure in April 1914, and officially changed its name to Hindustan Ghadar in a deliberate move to deflect the persistent taint of anarchism linked to the name of Har Dayal. (Restricting revolt to Hindustan signaled that they had a specific grievance against British rule in India but posed no threat in principle to regimes elsewhere.) As the war gathered momentum key figures scattered to various tasks: Barakatullah to Berlin, and Bhagwan Singh to Manila, Tokyo, and Panama.¹⁵⁶ With his two cohorts gone, Ram Chandra was the dominant figure in San Francisco. It appeared to the informer identified in reports as C that Ram Chandra had taken over from Har Dayal and now reigned “supreme,” exercising “autocratic control” of the Yugantar Ashram, assisted in the work by “a few Indians of the educated middle class, such as Gobind Behari Lal,” plus “a large number of Indians of the lower classes chosen apparently from among the more intelligent of the coolies. These ‘poor people’, as C called them, lived in the Ashram without wages, lithographing the Ghadar, and performing other functions.”¹⁵⁷

The working-class collective members involved in a labor of love might have been surprised to hear themselves described that way. Nor did they meekly accept Ram Chandra’s autocratic and secretive behavior. He was drawing increasing criticism for his lack of transparency in accountability for German funds, as well as for his political views. There were accusations that he had appropriated thousands of dollars of the “national fund” for his personal use. Furthermore, many considered the new emphasis on German and Turkish interests in the Ghadar publications—at the expense of India’s own—to be a betrayal of the integrity of their own goals. Many had had their doubts about the German alliance in the first place; these enemies of the enemy were not their friends, just another racist and imperialist power no more to be trusted than Britain beyond immediate strategic interest. Added to this were the corrosive actions of provocateurs and informants, with pervasive distrust leading to the murders of several suspected traitors.

C’s true identity was Sagar Chand, a student from Lahore who had come to England in 1909, where he got involved with the India House “extremists” through a friend. The friend was Haider Raza, an India House habitué, Krishnavarma scholarship holder, and Chand’s tutor in Persian and logic. C attributed the failure of his academic career at Oxford and the Middle Temple to “the life of dissipation” into which Haider Raza had “initiated him.”¹⁵⁸ He remained an obscure figure until 1914, when he started writing seditious articles for papers in Punjab and energetically distributing the Ghadar, which his many “lady friends” helped him to post. In reality he had been feeding intelligence on the India House inner circle to the DCI from the beginning, having “lived a false life for over a year and won the confidence of the men he was hunting.”¹⁵⁹ When he arrived in the United States, after making contact with Freeman and Gobind Behari Lal, he managed to allay Heramba Lal Gupta’s suspicions about him sufficiently to make his way into Ram Chandra’s inner circle in San Francisco, from where he passed detailed information to British intelligence.¹⁶⁰

When Bhagwan Singh returned to California in October 1916 he was horrified at what he found, and resolved to reconvene the “real” Ghadar movement. He embarked on a campaign against Ram Chandra, and by February 1917 there were dual organizations printing dual papers. Ram Chandra claimed legal rights to the name Hindustan Ghadar, but Bhagwan Singh declared that his challenger, Yugantar, was the more genuine successor to the spirit of the original Ghadar.¹⁶¹ Judging by the issues and excerpts available, he was correct. For example, the first number of the new Hindustan Ghadar said its purpose was to “disseminate general education, knowledge, culture and science,” without mentioning revolution, India’s freedom, or any of the other key planks of its predecessor.¹⁶² The content of Yugantar, on the other hand, was very much like that of the earlier paper.¹⁶³

The schism between these two leaders has sometimes been portrayed as a case of Hindus versus Sikhs. As played out in personal loyalties, this may have occurred in effect; in 1917 the Stockton and Vancouver Khalsa Dewans united to denounce Ram Chandra—whose alleged embezzling, and the death and imprisonment of mutineers, were now equated with “Hindu leadership”—and declare their opposition to the Ghadar Party in defense of Sikh orthodoxy.¹⁶⁴ Yet the Ghadarite Sikhs portrayed their own party as a secularist, rationalist alternative to the Khalsa Dewan. Perhaps more than anything else, the difference was between moderates and radicals; between aspiration to the values of the American mainstream as actually practiced—even unto adopting its racialist categories and markers of socioeconomic success—or in their idealized form, venerating in principle the libertarian texts legible to early twentieth-century radicals of any provenance, such as the Declaration of Independence. One aimed to acquire land in America; the other to liberate land in India. In short, there were two different expressions of nationalism, depending on whether the focus of identification, as well as the chosen vehicle of the desire for individual and/or collective freedom, was American or Hindustani.

SYNDICALISTS

The Ghadar movement is significant because it managed so early to connect two frames of reference—the history of race and class in the United States, and of colonization in what we would now call the global south—and to link the related grievance of racial discrimination toward a low-wage immigrant labor force to an explicitly anti-imperialist revolutionary program, rather than simply calling for inclusion in the existing society.¹⁶⁵ Thus the Ghadarites’ galvanizing moment occurred precisely at the point where the politics of race, labor, and imperialism converged. The only other sector of early twentieth-century North American radicalism that was similarly able to articulate the concerns of labor, race, and imperialism was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies), which provided the prewar Ghadar movement with its foremost interface with the left in the United States.¹⁶⁶

Syndicalism may be defined as a form of radical trade unionism that peaked in the de cades around the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century. It was especially prominent in France, Spain, and Latin America, where it influenced important components of the Mexican revolution that were so compelling to Khankhoje and Har Dayal. Its foremost North American variant could be found in the IWW, a conglomeration of several radical unions into “One Big Union” committed to the ambitious vision of worker solidarity across all economic sectors, and to the ultimate abolition of the capitalist system through direct action. As a basic tenet, syndicalists bypassed the political sphere, seeking neither electoral advantage nor forceful seizure of the government. They insisted rather that direct action was to be applied at the point of production, and that its practitioners would do so in their capacity as worker-producers. Accordingly, the ultimate moment of transformation would be announced not by a coup but by a general strike to bring economic function to a halt, after which society would be structured as a horizontally interlocked federation of autonomous collectives in which the workers in each industry, not the state, would manage production and distribution. The trade union or syndicate would be the basic unit both of tactical resistance and of the future social organization.

The Ghadarites, too, by necessity, sidestepped electoral and parliamentary participation in favor of other tactics. In North America, this was because they were legally excluded from full participation; that indeed was part of their grievance. In India, of course, the rejection of parliamentary in favor of revolutionary methods was the hallmark of the extremists within the nationalist movement, from whom the revolutionary movement abroad had sprung. Without having set out deliberately to replicate the syndicalist manner or prefigure a future social arrangement, the Ghadarites’ conditions of living and working in the United States did happen to be such that they functioned in de facto collectives, as work crews and jathas—miniature syndicates, one might say.

On the other hand, nation, not class, still retained its primary claim on the Ghadarites’ loyalty. Furthermore, they pinned their millennial hopes on a mutiny, not a general strike. Nevertheless, the idea of a general strike (hartal), a boycott, or withdrawal of all participation in any production, consumption, and service sector of the economy associated with British rule was of course a pillar of the Indian anticolonial movement. It should be remembered that the Ghadarites’ other main form of participation in the overseas imperial labor market was through military service. Thus for them a soldiers’ mutiny was a workplace strike. From this perspective, focusing on suborning troops to mutiny or desert, as the Ghadarites did, was in effect much the same as encouraging workers to strike or engage in sabotage at the point of production.

All these traits helped make the Ghadar movement compatible with the IWW, which would provide the movement with important North American allies. Founded in Chicago in 1905, the IWW was almost exactly coeval with the modern Indian revolutionary movement.¹⁶⁷ Its presence in the agricultural, railroad, and lumber industries of the West Coast region corresponded neatly to the Ghadarites’ distribution. Yet despite this overlap, and although the Wobblies were unique among American organized labor in their inclusivity of immigrant and nonwhite workers, evidence of Indian participation in IWW-linked agitation or strike activity is elusive, other than a tangential reference to the presence of “Hindu” workers at the Wheatland Hop Riot of August 1913.¹⁶⁸ One has to piece together bits of evidence that Indians were in communication with Wobblies, or that there was at the very least an ongoing proximity and/or affinity. To my knowledge the connection is not hugely significant from the American perspective. However, it must be recalled that the Indian laboring population was not large in gross terms and was concentrated in one part of the country. Even so there are some clues that indicate that contacts with the IWW had an influence on the Ghadarites.

Khankhoje relates his own first encounter with the IWW, initiating his lifelong commitment to socialism. The young man had attempted to get a job in a lumber mill in Astoria around 1910, but the boss rebuffed him as a “black Hindu.” Then he met an old Wobbly who helped him find work in an Oregon lumber camp. There, while living in a cabin in the deep forest, he and his fellow workers gathered around the fire at night to “[listen] to the lectures of the old labour leader who had got me my job. This was the first time I had heard of the labour movement in America and it was my first introduction to socialist thought.”¹⁶⁹

Again it was Har Dayal who most explicitly articulated the Ghadar movement’s rapprochement with this form of American radicalism. He served as secretary to the Oakland branch of the IWW beginning in 1912 and lectured several times for them in their hall, including one speech called “The Future of the Labor Movement” that was covered almost verbatim in the San Francisco Bulletin of 12 July 1912. The speech, which he called his own “frank confession of faith,” indicated the importance of the radical labor movement in Har Dayal’s thinking of that period, and of labor conditions in fueling and shaping his community’s political unrest. He began with a list of the obstacles facing the worker, and the prerequisites for winning industrial freedom:

First, solidarity. Labor must think in terms of the whole world…. Should one nation acquire freedom, the rich of another nation will crush it…. For moral and practical reasons the labor movement must be universal.

Second, a complete ideal. We want not only economic emancipation, but moral and intellectual emancipation as well…. No man will lay down his life for a partial ideal.

Third, good workers and leaders. The rich and respectable cannot lead us…. We will have two kinds of leaders. First, the ascetics who have renounced riches and respectability for the love of the working man, men like Kropotkin, the St. Francises and St. Bernards of Labor. These will be difficult to find, for such renunciations are scarce and such intellects are few. Secondly, we must have the sons of toil themselves, who must take up their own cross and lead their brothers on.

Fourth, cooperation between the labor movement and the woman’s movement. The workers and the women are two enslaved classes and must fight their battles together.

Fifth, constructive educational system. We want central labor colleges where our young men can be taught, not by money, but by men. We do not want endowments, because endowments, with their incomes, are another form of exploitation….

Sixth, a feeling of actual brotherhood. The poor must love the poor. The shame of labor is that the poor must accept charity from the rich. We are not so poor but we can care for our own poor…. We must stand together.¹⁷⁰

Har Dayal condemned parliamentarianism and parliamentary socialism, which, he said, had ended in a blind alley in its strongholds of Germany and Belgium; it was useless, he said, for labor to attempt to free itself using “the weapons furnished by capitalism.” But he had equally strong criticism for the other extreme, which he had previously advocated: “Terrorism,” meaning propaganda by the deed, “is a waste of force and gives the other party a chance for needless persecution. It provides martyrs, but the labor movement, which eschews terrorism, will have its own martyrs in plenty…. A man who lives and acts in the interests of freedom is himself living social dynamite.”¹⁷¹

At another address in January 1913 Har Dayal was greeted with loud applause upon entering the IWW hall in San Francisco (where the dogged Hopkinson found himself quite unsettled by the ambient talk of “socialism, anarchism, and all matters pertaining to political agitation”). After expounding on the current efforts of Indian nationalist agitators, and the repression with which the British responded to them, Har Dayal expressed his goal of “establish[ing] an association based on IWW principles for ‘the benefit and uplift ing’ of the people of India.” Although this confirmed to Hopkinson that he was by no means barking up the wrong tree in attempting implicate Har Dayal for his politics, he was nevertheless eager to make a quick exit from “surroundings [which] were composed of a very questionable class of humanity … in the toughest part of San Francisco.”¹⁷²

Various Wobblies later popped up several times in the crevices of the so-called Hindu-German Conspiracy. Har Dayal persuaded an IWW member called Jones, who had become interested in the Indian movement while living for a time in Assam (!?), to serve as New York liaison between Germans and Indians in America. Ambassador Spring-Rice informed the secretary of state that the “world-wide organisation” centered in Berlin was not only employing some Irishmen as agents but also making efforts “to affiliate some of the industrial workers of the world [sic], one of whom is now in Berlin.”¹⁷³ Another, identified as an American anarchist or Wobbly named Jack or Jenkins, makes an appearance in M. N. Roy’s memoirs, while a Foreign Office Memorandum mentioned that Har Dayal “was on intimate terms” with an IWW member named Anton Johansen, one of the accused in the 1916 California dynamite conspiracy case.¹⁷⁴

The wartime repression, trial, and imprisonment of Ghadarites and Wobblies, then, followed a similar timeline, defined by the United States’ entry into the war and its attendant legislation against dissidents. Taraknath Das formed an acquaintance during his two years at Leavenworth with fellow inmates William “Big Bill” Haywood, one of the IWW’s founding heroes, and Ralph Chaplin, the movement’s legendary artist. According to Das’s biographer Tapan Mukherjee, Das habitually gathered with a whole group of IWW prisoners (ninety-three of whom had arrived there after the Chicago trial of 1918) “in a corner of the prison yard which they named the ‘campus,’ ” to discuss politics, poetry, current events, the Russian Revolution, history, and Vedanta philosophy, in which Das held special classes in the evening.¹⁷⁵

As it happens, yet another fellow inmate at Leavenworth was Ricardo Florés Magón, the Mexican transborder revolutionary leader and cofounder of the syndicalist Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM). Although kept secluded, Magón was imprisoned at Leavenworth from May 1918 until his death in 1922. He had been active in Los Angeles since 1910. Ghadar had little presence in Los Angeles, although it was reported that Munshi Ram, part of the Astoria Indian Association prior to its absorption into the PCHA and later assistant manager in charge of correspondence and subscription records at the Ghadar Press under Ram Chandra, was assigned to go “preach sedition” there in March 1915.¹⁷⁶ Har Dayal had declared himself a supporter of the Magón brothers and their activities back in 1912. Khankhoje was also a personal friend of Magón’s, whom he had met through a Mexican fellow cadet during his Tamalpais years.¹⁷⁷

I have found no evidence to suggest that any Indians took part in the IWW brigade that marched to Baja to support the PLM that year, although Khankhoje and Pingle had long been entertaining a similar idea. Together they dreamed up a (perpetually thwarted) vision of a home base in Baja, first for training their guerrilla army outside the view of United States authorities and later as a place where “after the revolution, Punjabi farmers could till the soil.”¹⁷⁸ The Indians’ intimate association with the Mexican farm labor population in California, and their habit of looking to the Mexican border whether for refuge from United States law or for covert entry and exit when necessary, would have made such a thing plausible.

This eventuality didn’t materialize, however, nor did Pingle and Khankhoje’s later attempt at joining the battle to the south in 1911. After the Mexican Revolution broke out Khankhoje was eager to join in at the head of a force of Sikh veterans recruited in Oregon and California, as a sort of rehearsal for the revolt against the British Raj. But his putative squad, more experienced than he, advised him to cool his hot young head and scout things out first. His Mexican friends advised him to cross from Calexico to Mexicali, which he did. But once across the border he concluded with disappointment that his men were right; the plan was not feasible. It was a brutally violent situation in which bandits were abroad, and Spanish fluency was required—no place for a training exercise and too risky for the premature sacrifice of Indian blood, which must be saved against their own urgent cause.¹⁷⁹ Nevertheless, the border-crossing revoltosos of various factions involved in the Mexican Revolution from 1911 onward offered a constant background to the development of official American attitudes to the Ghadar movement, offering the immediate precedents for the legal discourse around the launch of military expeditions from U.S. soil, and providing the alibi for Ghadar’s attempts to ship arms during war time.

Perhaps the most significant political divergence between the Ghadarites and the Wobblies was their attitude to the Great War. Many North American and European syndicalists and anarchists, including Har Dayal’s old friend, supporter, and Indian Sociologist printer, Guy Aldred, who spent several years in prison as a conscientious objector in England, expressed their anti-imperialism through staunch opposition to the war. Those who did take sides chose liberal Britain and France over militaristic Germany. But the Ghadarites, given their relationship to one of the major antagonists, saw the war not as a disaster but as a longed-for opportunity; they expressed their far more direct and personal anti-imperialism through an alliance with Germany against Britain. However, regardless of their feelings toward the war itself, the Wobblies and the Ghadarites may indeed have agreed on opposing the United States’ entry into the war, since that was what brought them to grief as violators of neutrality.

Finally, aside from the tasks of resistance, both the IWW and the Ghadar Party occupied themselves with worker education and mutual aid, defense of free speech and civil liberties (necessitated by the repression of their other work), and cultural production. Both the IWW and Ghadar sourced a prolific wellspring of militant propaganda, newspapers, pamphlets, and volumes of singable poems in the 1910s and 1920s: where the IWW had the Little Red Songbook, Ghadar had Ghadar-di-Gunj. These iconic repositories of lasting inspiration arguably proved more of an influential contribution to the history of radical movements than the immediate instrumental results of any of their direct actions. And even these tangents were fortuitously entangled: American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) founder Roger Baldwin was among the foremost supporters of the Friends of Freedom for India in the 1920s, serving on its executive committee during the postwar antideportation campaign. The ACLU, of course, was a direct outgrowth of the IWW’s war time free-speech struggles.

Hopkinson had attended another of his quarry’s lectures in early 1913, this one sponsored in some way, he reported, by the San Francisco Russian Revolutionary Society. Har Dayal opened with an apology for the presence of the American flag on the platform, for which he said he was not responsible, as he didn’t believe in any government, and all flags were a “sign of slavery.” He then proceeded to his planned remarks titled “The Revolutionary Labor Movement in France.” At the time, this would have referred to the syndicalist Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT). “Although he had not been in the United States very long,” nevertheless “he had carefully studied the revolutionary movement in America, to include socialist activities and the IWW. This latter, he characterized as bearing the closest resemblance to the Anarchist Society of France of which, he said, he was proud to be a member.”¹⁸⁰

Despite the relationship of Har Dayal and his overseas comrades with European Socialists, and their awareness of some individualist anarchists, they had not engaged with this sector of French radicalism; after all, it was only in North America and not in France or England, that a working class–based popular movement became significant as a radical partner on the Indian side. The Indians politically active in Europe were primarily intellectuals and students from elite backgrounds; they interfaced most with a rarefied circle of other intellectuals and exiled professional revolutionaries, not with local trade unionists. Even so certain parallels with the traits of the Ghadar movement suggest themselves.

Bernard Moss characterizes French syndicalism as the domain of independent skilled artisans who were not yet alienated from the process and product of their labor and retained an attachment to their national tradition of republican radical democracy, in contrast to the thoroughly proletarianized and alienated factory workforce to whose working conditions Marx’s more centralized and unified organizational model was most applicable. This syndicalist combination of libertarian and egalitarian principles strikes me as reminiscent of the Ghadarites’ tendency, albeit stemming from different situational origins. In any case Moss also points out that differences in approaches to radical trade unionism were related to differences in the specific social conditions of labor, and not indicative of a universally applicable ideological principle. Though the Ghadarites’ New World labors were of the more unskilled and alienated variety, their status prior to immigration had more resembled that of Moss’s artisans, and even in the United States many still aspired to their own landholdings.¹⁸¹

But to return to Har Dayal’s talk: he observed that the American revolutionary movement was far less mature than that of France and could learn much from both the successes and the mistakes of the latter. The moral of these lessons was, in a nutshell, “Love one another among the labouring-class, but hate, hate, the rich.” He continued that such hatred, however, if expressed through dynamite, was liable to do more harm than good to the revolutionary movement, unless aimed very precisely at the assassination of despotic oppressors. He closed by inviting all interested attendees to come to meetings of his Radical Study Club, “which he had inaugurated in San Francisco for the purpose of teaching the people Revolutionary Methods.”¹⁸²

One can only speculate about what might have happened had the Ghadarite radical branch remained oriented toward their lives in the United States, rather than having their attention fixed, by the war, wholly on an immediate uprising in India. What if the war had taken five to ten more years to erupt, as Har Dayal had originally thought? Would they have left a deeper trace in the record of the radical labor movement and antiracist struggle on the West Coast? Might they, for example, have played a greater role in cross-border struggles carried out by Mexican syndicalist libertarios? They would have had ample opportunity.¹⁸³ Of course, they still would have confronted the repression of the Red Scare and an exclusionary immigration policy and thus might still have formed an exodus, though under different circumstances not of their choosing. But the war did happen; and, to repeat a cliché, it did change everything.

For one, it changed the course of revolutionary syndicalism, forcing its adherents to define their relationship to the nation and nation-state. In his magisterial Fire in the Minds of Men James Billington fits syndicalism into his overarching thesis of a rivalry between national and social forms of revolutionary thought. Of the precarious configuration of these formations on the eve of the First World War, he remarks: “Whoever controlled the banner of nationalism tended to determine the nature of the syndicalist legacy everywhere after World War One. In the United States, labor unrest was doomed by its opposition to the nationalist fervor that swept through America during and after the war. The social revolutionary intensity and the internationalism of the IWW (and the anti-war, anti-allied sentiments of many Germans and Irish in the labor movement) provoked a patriotic backlash.”¹⁸⁴ These, of course, were Ghadar’s main American allies.

But Billington was writing about the European context. For an Asian anticolonial movement, the choice between national and social forms was less stark. The Indian revolutionary lineage of which the Swadeshi and Ghadar movements partook likewise drew upon both.¹⁸⁵ Given the unavoidable primacy of the national liberation struggle, the question facing European revolutionary syndicalists—nationalism or internationalism?—then faced the Ghadarites as well, perhaps even more acutely. How they negotiated this crossroads would determine the road home—from San Francisco to Berlin, Berlin to Moscow, and Moscow to Lahore.