of so many Indians in one place had inspired me. I had to find some way to organize a movement with the Indian workers in America and spread the word right up to India.” 60
But Kanshiram had reservations, based largely on the persistent mistrust of the workers for the educated youngsters, whom they felt liable to deceive, cheat, or condescend to them. But Khankhoje worked hard to dispel this perception, with Kanshiram’s help, gradually earning trust through his integrity and good faith as he made himself “indispensable” when translation, medicine buying, or letter writing was needed. Finally the establishment was successful; though Sohan Singh Bhakna proved a tough nut to crack, as one of the most vocal in reluctance to trust a babu. Bhakna worked at the timber factory in Astoria while also serving as the local granthi and striving to represent the rights of Indian workers on both sides of the border. As a gesture of good faith Khankhoje proposed Bhakna as founding president, and Kanshiram as treasurer, of what workers would call the Azad-e-Hind (Freedom of India) Party.
As Kanshiram recognized the need to delegate, he assigned Khankhoje to local leadership of the Astoria branch. A Punjabi-owned lumber mill there welcomed him with open arms, thanks to his letters of introduction from Kanshiram and Bhakna, who had now come around to be a staunch ally. Astoria then became the hub of the North American movement and the birthplace of what would become the Ghadar Party. There were also branches of the movement now in Sacramento, San Francisco, and Portland.61
Once things seemed to be running smoothly, Khankhoje returned to his studies at the Agricultural College in Corvallis, and later Washington State College, still nursing his dream of “training an army of farmer revolutionaries” and torn as he would be for much of his life between, quite literally, the sword and the plowshare.62 This conflict is a recurring theme in his biography; as his daughter puts it, “He was now simultaneously engaged in two fields: agriculture and revolution.” 63 It was in agriculture that his life’s work would be celebrated. Diego Rivera immortalized Khankhoje in a mural for his contribution to the nourishment of the Mexican people through development of special strains of maize, and the Mukta Gram project that he established de cades later in independent India, as a model for village self-sufficiency in food production and cottage industries, was inspired by his visit to Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute around 1912. For the moment, however, he used all his spare moments outside of soil and crop genetics research conducting military trainings and touring the region with his old roommate and longtime comrade Bishan Das Kochar, armed with lectures, magic lantern slides, and a cutting-edge cinematograph machine, raising funds and awareness.64
Vishnu Ganesh Pingle
Another important figure in this circle was Vishnu Ganesh Pingle, at the time an engineering student at the University of Oregon. He also studied for a time at Berkeley, despite having been initially refused entry; this had, as usual, stimulated further agitations against the immigration laws. After meeting Khankhoje, a like-minded fellow Maharashtrian, Pingle began to neglect his studies and became preoccupied with the prospect of building a revolutionary army. He eventually took on leadership roles in the Portland and Astoria organizations, but his primary interest was Indian national liberation rather than American immigration woes, though the two matters were always linked. Thus, as the Portland group got more enmeshed in legal immigration issues on behalf of both Canada and United States entrants, Pingle was drawn back down to the Ghadarite stronghold of the San Francisco Bay Area, where the concern for national liberation was ascendant.
The Pacific Coast Hindi Association (PCHA)
Thanks to the work of these early activists, the building blocks of the movement were all in place by 1913. At that time, leading organizers, supported by those farmers and agricultural workers whose discontentment was acute, started looking for someone who could consolidate the existing nodes of activity, unite the students and the workers, channel the pervasive and building unrest, and beef up the political content of cultural and social reform projects. This person turned out to be Har Dayal.
Accounts vary as to who actually suggested that Har Dayal take the helm of a unified organization of the West Coast Indian community.65 It may have been Thakur Das, who had been active for some years in Iran under the name of Ghulam Hussain, working with Ajit Singh—himself an initial suggestion for California leadership—and Sufi Amba Prasad. Hussain/Das had then worked among Cama and Rana’s Paris circle until they sent him to Portland in 1912 as “a skilled agitator … with a specific mission to stir up disaffection among the Sikhs.” 66 Initially Har Dayal asked if this mission could wait; his schedule was booked with activities in San Francisco progressive circles, including projects such as his Radical Club, the utopian Fraternity of the Red Flag, and the IWW branch secretaryship.67 All this was soon to change, however.
There had already been a series of meetings in the Pacific Northwest throughout the spring of 1913 (the largest attended by 120 workers) by the time Har Dayal arrived for the fateful gathering in Astoria in early June.68 Also present were Hussain/Das, Sohan Singh Bhakna, Ram Chandra, Kanshi Ram, and Nawab Khan. “Two electric tram cars and two motor cars are said to have been hired for the occasion,” reported Isemonger and Slattery, “and the cars were decorated with placards bearing the words ‘India’ and ‘Freedom.’ Har Dayal was hailed with the words ‘Bande Mataram,’ but declined to be garlanded.” 69
Reconfirming the leadership of Khankhoje’s group, Sohan Singh Bhakna was elected president and Kanshiram treasurer.70 Har Dayal was named secretary. Now all the main components of the organizational infrastructure were in place, under the new name of the Pacific Coast Hindi Association (PCHA). In addition to a committee for collecting funds and a fifteen-member working committee (soon swelling to twenty-four) of annually elected representatives of local branches, there would be a general association comprising representatives from all the local communities up and down the coast, including both students and workers. The group then selected San Francisco as the publishing and propaganda hub because that was where Har Dayal’s influence was strongest.71
Nawab Khan provided a lengthy transcription of Har Dayal’s speech: “You have come to America and seen with your own eyes the prosperity of this country. What is the cause of this prosperity? Why nothing more than this, that America is ruled by its own people. In India, on the other hand, the people have no voice in the administration of the country.” Deploring the situation in which a rich agricultural land was wracked by famine as its crops were exported, he urged his audience: “Desist … from your petty religious dissensions and turn your thoughts toward the salvation of your country. What you earn, earn for your country. What work you do, do it for your country…. Collect money and get the youth educated in America in order that they may become equipped to serve…. Prepare now to sacrifice yourselves.”72 He then rhetorically reframed their immigrant status as an explicit function of Indian liberation. It was useless to keep struggling for American civil rights without the backing of an independent government, he said, arguing that “as long as the Indians remained in subjection to the British they would not be treated as equals by Americans or any other nation.”73
Ghadar was the fruit of a very particular synthesis: of populations, of issues, of contextual frames, and of ideological elements. It is precisely the richness of this combination that enabled it to play the role of missing link in the genealogy of Indian radicalism, and of medium of translation among coexisting movement discourses. Still, to a degree unprecedented within the revolutionary movement abroad, Ghadar was overwhelmingly a workers’ movement, in which, moreover, the line between workers and intellectuals had become rather smudged. The impact of racial discrimination and its crucial intersection with class cannot be underestimated as a catalyst for the radicalization of South Asians in North America. Yet only when this frame was overlaid on the geopolitical reality of India’s colonized status would American discontent transmute into Indian mutiny.
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