in the British Indian army. The paper was put on the list of “objectionable” literature prohibited from entering India under the Sea Customs Act, as of March 1911.43
Meanwhile, Kumar, Sahri, and others took up the practice of visiting groups of Indian laborers at their workplaces to talk with them about “social and political problems.” 44 In addition to circulating the paper, they held meetings and raised funds for combating the entry ban or reversing the arrests of confederates who had been threatened with deportation.45 Upon his arrest in October 1910, Kumar was found to be in contact with Das, and “in possession of the addresses of a number of Hindu [i.e., Indian] agitators in America, Africa, Switzerland, Egypt and France, and also had some notes on the manufacture of nitroglycerine.” The deportation case was decided in his favor, and he stayed on to become “a leader in the agitation against the immigration laws.” 46
Kumar and Sahri also focused (secretly) on recruiting new immigrants as potential anti-British revolutionaries, offering training in the procurement and use of arms and explosives. An association requiring an oath of secrecy for membership was formed in 1911, whose aim was “to establish liberty, equality and fraternity of the Hindustani nation in their relation with the rest of the nations of the world.” 47
The arrests on the pretext of illegal entry were symptoms of the suspicion and surveillance under which the British and Canadian authorities kept the Hindustan Association. In May 1911 the Vancouver Daily Province printed a story claiming that the “Vancouver Hindus” had sent thousands of dollars to “plotters in India” for the purchase of rifles. Kumar wrote scathingly to the editor, refuting the headline as slander, but nevertheless closed down the association soon afterward, along with the paper and the house, and left the country to join Taraknath Das in Seattle.48
Taraknath Das
Taraknath Das had been recruited to the original Bengali Anusilan Samiti in 1903 and helped to form its Dacca branch in 1905.49 The following year he took the familiar route through Japan to New York at age twenty-three. After earning a college degree in Seattle, he went to work as an interpreter in the U.S. immigration office in Vancouver. But he was fired in 1908 for his obtrusive habit of exhibiting scathing anti-British opinions.
In April, just before Das’s dismissal, the first issue of his eight-page English-language journal Free Hindustan had appeared. After two months he relocated printing to Seattle, where the Socialist paper Western Clarion provided the use of its press,50 and then to New York, aided by the press and the comradeship of George Freeman, editor of the Irish-American Fenian Brotherhood’s organ Gaelic American. In fact, the DCI noted in July 1908 that the first two issues of Free Hindustan had arrived enclosed inside a copy of the latter, even before the partnership officially began in August. The new paper was “similar in size and character to the Indian Sociologist,” and Das, its editor, also happened to be the treasurer of the Vancouver Indian Association. “The subject to which most attention is directed in these two numbers,” noted Sir Charles Cleveland, Director of Criminal Intelligence, “is naturally the immigration question and, in addition, the impoverishment of India by England, and a few other grievances are discussed with considerable bitterness.”51
Like the Indian Sociologist, whose tone it echoed, Free Hindustan took its masthead motto from Herbert Spencer: “Resistance to Tyranny is Obedience to God.” The paper’s claimed purpose was “political education of the masses for revolution.” A 1910 issue “advised political work among the Sikh soldiers for an ‘organised uprising’ ”;52 it noted that “considerable numbers [of Sikhs] were settled in Canada and the Western States, and … were already much irritated by the Canadian immigration restrictions.”53 The first issue contained an account of a mass meeting of Vancouver Indians outraged by such measures and protesting the threat of deportation. The meeting had sent a cablegram to the Secretary of State for India, Lord Morley, expressing as much. The paper also contained articles accusing Britain’s “murderous commercial policy” of wreaking catastrophic famine in India, and compared its “Measures of Oppression” to those of czarist Russia—a comparison the Swadeshi radicals had also made.
In 1908, Das entered a prestigious military school in Norwich, Vermont, but was forbidden to enroll in advanced coursework or to join the Vermont National Guard as most alumni did. Aside from his foreign nationality, his political history also worked against him. Despite his popularity among the students and his “great interest in everything pertaining to military matters,” he refused yet again to tone down the hostility to Britain that he had been warned against expressing “on all occasions, appropriate and otherwise.”54 He moved on instead to earn advanced degrees in political science at the Universities of Washington and California, during which period a British Foreign office Memorandum on Indian revolutionaries abroad identified him as a West Coast “ringleader.”55 (Given his skill in negotiating mainstream American society, he had become something of an advocate and representative of the Indian community.)
In 1910 he helped set up the United India House in Seattle, where he and other Bengali students lectured to gatherings of around twenty-five laborers every Saturday.56 Das gave frequent lectures to the “students and settlers” on the Pacific coast, mainly on the theme of the economic exploitation of India. In addition to such efforts at public education, Das modeled some of his secret society methods of organization on the Bengali groups, with whom he remained in contact. They were kind enough to pass on their notorious bomb manual, which Das later shared with his San Francisco counterparts when invited down to address a meeting in 1914.57
This activity must have eluded the knowledge of the immigration and naturalization authorities, who permitted him to attain U.S. citizenship in 1914. In the 1920s he married a white American woman named Mary Keatinge Morse, a noted women’s suffragist and founding member of the NAACP. He later became a professor of political science at Columbia University, and remained prominent in Indian politics in North America until his death in 1958, though his path would diverge from the Ghadarite lineage as he turned toward a more conservative form of nationalism and fell out with the leaders of the reborn Ghadar Party in the early 1920s.
Pandurang Khankhoje
While Kumar and Das were most associated with Vancouver and Seattle, Pandurang Khankhoje could claim much credit for starting up the Indian Independence League in Portland and Astoria, which formed the seed of the Ghadar Party.58 Khankhoje’s inspiration was Tilak, who had first encouraged the young man to seek military training outside of India. Like many others, he too had first tried Japan, but found that the Anglo-Japanese Alliance forbade his study of the “modern methods of warfare” there. He proceeded to California in 1905 and enrolled first in agricultural science at the University of California and then in 1908 at the Tamalpais Military Academy. He hoped to continue his training at West Point but was rebuffed as a non-U.S. citizen; his application for citizenship was also turned down. Nevertheless, he had already learned enough to drastically readjust his thinking on the possibilities of Indian military resistance, as he realized that modern weaponry and chemicals based in advanced technology were not within feasible reach of most Indians, although, says Emily Brown, “he did find the books on discipline, quick action, and secrecy to be of some value.”59
Early on, he had tried to use his school holidays not only to work—building roads, lumbering, and picking hops, grapes, and strawberries—but to talk with the laborers alongside him about the evils of British rule and encourage them to join the Indian Independence League. As of yet these efforts proved premature, but not for long. After graduation he drifted for a time, looking for work. In Portland he made the significant acquaintance of Pandit Kanshiram, an “old revolutionary and disciple of Sufi Amba Prasad.” Kanshiram was now a prosperous lumber-mill owner who oft en provided financial support to both students and workers. Khankhoje proposed that they start a new Indian Independence League in Portland,
