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
