exclusion and a gentlemen’s agreement with Britain to stem the flow of East Indians, as they were by now “universally regarded as the least desirable race of immigrants thus far admitted to the United States”;32 also, the report suggested, requiring a literacy test might help curtail East Indian immigration.
In 1912, the Root amendment to the pending Dillingham immigration bill called for the deportation of “any alien who shall take advantage of his residence in the United States to conspire with others for the violent overthrow of a foreign government recognized by the United States.” It was defeated. In 1913 the Alien Land Law was passed, in part to prevent Japanese or Sikh agricultural workers from accumulating their own profitable land base in California’s Central Valley, a process already underway. At the same time another bill was debated though not passed, restricting not entrance, but eligibility for citizenship. Of course, restricting immigrants from entering and disqualifying them from citizenship were two different tasks. It was not until 1917 that the Asiatic Barred Zone was declared, drastically restricting entry for anyone originating within a geographically (if not politically) arbitrary latitude and longitude that covered most of China, part of Russia, part of Polynesia, and all of India, Burma, Siam, the Malay States, Arabia, Afghanistan, and the Indian Ocean islands.
ACTIVISTS
As early as 1907, officials in Punjab noted the circulation of “seditious pamphlets” addressed to soldiers in the local army garrisons “pointing out to them how easy it would be to throw off British rule…. The circular emanated from some Natives of India now in the United States.”33 As North America grew as an organizing center, revolutionaries abroad in Europe, such as Har Dayal, Ajit Singh, and Bhai Parmanand, increasingly started looking west in hopes of advancing their work. Once there, the necessary tasks would be to carry out anti-British “sedition” and to protect the community from North American racism. The two imperatives were complementary: in the organizers’ calculations, the latter was precisely what might prime a potential mass movement to develop its consciousness of the former. In other words, the rage fueled by discrimination might be channeled toward anticolonial struggle. Still, this conjunction of Indian independence and American civil rights could also lead to conflicts in priority. The difference in primary aspirations for status as American citizens versus status as free Indian citizens was eventually reflected in a divergence of interest between moderate permanent settlers and radical temporary sojourners, though this may ultimately be a circular argument, given that it was the radicals who left to go fight in the mutiny, leaving the moderates behind. But it was only between 1912 and 1918 that the Indian frame came to override the American one with such urgency, and that the narrative arc of national liberation came to blot out that of immigrant arrival and success. Before the Ghadar movement coalesced, while organizers did habitually speak against British rule, in the immediate sense they prioritized worker education and the social welfare of the immigrant community. A few examples of the organizers follow.
Ram Nath Puri
Ram Nath Puri was a bank clerk in Lahore when he first drew the attention of the British authorities for a few “objectionable pamphlets”and a “seditious cartoon” he had published in 1905.34 In 1906 he left for America. There he worked first as a hospital watchman and then as an interpreter for the Sikh laborers who were then beginning to arrive in larger numbers. It was also reported that he “employed his talents in cheating them at every opportunity” and was “regarded by the Indians as a swindler and by Americans as a loafer.” He enrolled in a mining college, and later worked in the fields picking fruit, as a “waiter in the house of an American lady,” and as an unsuccessful entrepreneur. Both his Eastern Employment Agency and his Indo-American General Trading Company failed.
But Puri also started a Hindustan Association and a dormitory called the Magnolia Street Union, which provided Punjabi laborers with room and board for 10¢ a night.35 He also published a short-lived Urdu paper called the Circular-i-Azadi (Circular of Freedom), which appeared in June, July, and August 1907 in San Francisco and Oakland. One of the first significant pieces of anticolonial propaganda literature circulated on the West Coast, it was prohibited from shipment to India due to its “seditious” content. According to the report of the director of criminal intelligence for January 1908, its “object … is to organise an Indian national party among the Indians who go to America for employment…. It seems to owe its existence to the collision which has occurred between the white and coloured labour at Vancouver and at places in California, the state of Washington and elsewhere in the west of America.”36
Puri’s paper was allegedly connected to an “Indian Association” based in San Francisco, and with branches in Astoria and Vancouver, the purpose of which was “to impart instructions to Indians on national lines, to teach gunfiring, Japanese exercises, and the use of spear, sword and other weapons in self-defence, and to foster American sympathy with India.”37 Although copies of the original paper are now impossible to find, the Director of Criminal Intelligence (DCI) reports inform us that the August issue included an article advocating a boycott of government service; and that both the July and the August issues contained extracts from the anti-British Gaelic American (of which we have not heard the last) and from other Indian newspapers—presumably the Bande Mataram and Indian Sociologist, since they shared material with the Gaelic American.
Puri acquired a modest bit of land in Oakland around 1910 and considered settling in the United States, since he was still afraid to return to India. But he apparently changed his mind, reaching Tokyo in time to make a “very objectionable” (which presumably meant militantly seditious) speech at a farewell dinner for Muhammed Barakatullah, who was leaving his teaching post there in summer 1910. Puri then “turned up unexpectedly” in Bijnor (his hometown) in 1911 and advised the youth at the Arya Samaj gurukul (religious school) there that they should “go to America where they would learn how a man could achieve liberty.” The report is silent as to what happened to him later, whether he stayed in Bijnor, and whether he reconnected with the Ghadarites when they returned in 1914–15.
Guru Dutt Kumar
Guru Dutt Kumar arrived in British Columbia around 1907 and opened a grocery store in Victoria.38 Born in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), he was exposed to the revolutionary movement in Calcutta, where he had studied at the National College, briefly taught Urdu and Hindi, and apprenticed at a photographer’s studio. In Calcutta he also met Taraknath Das, who assisted him in coming to North America, along with Harnam Singh Sahri, a veteran of the Fourth Cavalry.39
In 1909 Kumar became the secretary of a new Hindustan Association in Vancouver—the same association linked to Puri’s Circular of Freedom. Its ultimate goal was “complete self-government” for the “Hindustani Nation,” which for him would entail not only the elimination of foreign exploitation but the promotion of domestic education, industry, trade, and agriculture.40 The organization boasted some 250 members and ministered most to “students and educated men.” F. C. Isemonger and James Slattery’s official report claimed that it functioned chiefly to entice Indian students to America, where they could be “instructed in nationalist, revolutionary, and even anarchical doctrines.” 41 Initially working closely with the Khalsa Diwan Society, Kumar emphasized social reform, moral uplift, teetotaling, and caste and religious harmony. While agitating against entry bans on new immigrants, including families attempting to join their loved ones who were already there, an anticolonial strain was becoming increasingly overt.42
Kumar and his colleagues also opened the Swadesh Sevak Home in Vancouver, modeled on Krishnavarma’s London India House. It offered a school for immigrants’ children (although with families barred from entry, surely there could not have been many of them) and evening English classes for the immigrants themselves. Its corresponding organ was the Swadesh Sevak, started in 1910 as the Gurmukhi counterpart to Taraknath Das’s Free Hindustan. Both papers reprinted articles from the Bande Mataram and Indian Sociologist,
