you have been looking for has arrived.” The prodigal children of Hindustan were summoned to return home and fight, for the battle of liberation was at hand.
The message of the paper’s Ailan-e-Jang (Declaration of War) was stirring and simple:
Arise, brave ones! Quickly … We want all brave and self-sacrificing warriors who can raise revolt …
Salary: death
Reward: martyrdom
Pension: freedom
Field of battle: Hindustan.1
From the expatriate intellectual circles in London, Paris, Berlin, and San Francisco to Gandhi’s early career in South Africa to the passage of subcontinental natives throughout the realms mapped out by the Pan-Islamic Khilafat or the Communist International, much of the power of the independence struggle was incubated outside the territory of British India. Any dramatic events visible upon the lighted proscenium of the subcontinent were profoundly affected by a multitude of actors busy in the shadows off stage, including students, soldiers, pilgrims, traders, and laborers originating from a variety of distinct regional, linguistic, class, religious, and political backgrounds. And no small portion of this power was routed, sooner or later, along the channels of a circulatory system with its heart in California, headquarters for the diasporic Ghadar movement. Its name, it declared, was its work: the word meant “mutiny” or “revolt.”
As restrictions tightened on what activities counted as legal inside British India, prewar anticolonial activists in the throes of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal and the Canal colony unrest in Punjab had either to go underground or to go abroad, where they might “function in an atmosphere of greater liberty.”2 Har Dayal, later one of the Ghadar movement’s key intellectual shapers, wrote from Paris in the March 1910 Bande Mataram: “We must … try to strengthen all groups of workers outside India. The centre of gravity of political work has been shifted from Calcutta, Poona, and Lahore to Paris, Geneva, Berlin, London, and New York.”3 Indeed, these foreign bases became increasingly important as staging grounds and logistical support points as “revolutionary movements at home and abroad gained momentum and world events evolved in their favour.” 4 The irresistible opportunity arose not only because Britain was at war, leaving its precious colony vulnerable and depleted of troops, but also because its archenemy, Germany, was offering support to those with their own interest in undermining the strength of the empire, such as the Indian and Irish national revolutionists and pro-Ottoman Pan-Islamists.5 It was largely through the German connection that the movement impinged upon the United States’ historical record, as the Ghadarites were put on sensational trial in San Francisco for conspiracy, sedition, and espionage during World War I, almost three years after their most spectacular thwarted attempt at mutiny in February 1915.
By the summer of 1915, when the Lieutenant General of Punjab Sir Michael O’Dwyer announced that the movement inside India had been crushed, the Ghadarites and their larger network had lost a major battle, but not a war. Revolutionary activities, sporadic fighting, and invasion plans continued to unfold beyond the northeastern and northwestern frontiers, while those jailed carried on the struggle through hunger strikes and other forms of resistance.6 Some veterans reemerged in time to take part in the next generation of militance, which they themselves had inspired, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In this way the Ghadar movement served as a missing link, a source of hidden continuity between the Bengali “anarchist” conspiracies, “national revolutionary terrorism” and Punjabi agitations of the early twentieth century; and the radical Left and revolutionist movements of the 1920s. Far more than an abstract inspiration, however, Ghadar’s printed materials and personnel served quite concretely as connective tissue or switching circuit, capable of linking various elements among the Indian radicals abroad, linking Indian radicals to other networks, and linking pre-to postwar revolutionary movements inside the country. In fact it could be hazarded that the movement’s wider network overlapped at some point, at no more than a degree of separation, with every radical tendency of its time. Of course this is a large claim, and so requires some careful qualification; we must distinguish relationality from identicality, while recognizing both where appropriate.
Why was Ghadar able to serve this function? One factor was its geographical reach. Another was the unique experience of its founding members, located as they were at a conjuncture of contexts enabling them powerfully to articulate American class and race relations to the economics and geopolitics of empire, by linking the grievances of discrimination against a low-wage immigrant labor force to the colonized status of their home country. Furthermore, amid the ambient dynamism of prewar social ferment, they managed to forge an eclectic ideological synthesis that in turn created possible points of contact with a variety of potential partners. Thus, to fully unravel the story of the movement we must examine its complex interfaces with other international radical networks in order to reveal at what nodes, through which actors, and based on which common threads of ideological principles, methods and tactics, instrumental goals, or political aspirations the radical networks were woven together; or, to put it another way, to reveal which molecular particles in this incendiary chemistry were being shared or exchanged at each covalent bonding site.
GHADAR AND ITS CORE PRINCIPLES
Ghadar is most often portrayed as a nationalist movement, pure and simple. Its members were indubitably patriotic, and their goal of a homecoming to liberate territory from foreign occupation is easily intelligible to a nationalist logic. Yet in both geographical and ideological terms they overspilled the purview of mainstream nationalism. Their indictment of tyranny and oppression was on principle globally applicable, even while generated by a historically specific situation and inflected in culturally specific terms; moreover, they increasingly envisioned a comprehensive social and economic restructuring for postcolonial India rather than a mere handover of the existing governmental institutions.
Ghadar is also often identified as a Sikh movement, exclusively and by definition, with the Komagata Maru incident triggering a burst of heroic activity to redeem the community from the lingering shame of loyalism in 1857. The Komagata Maru was a ship bearing several hundred South Asian immigrants to Vancouver in the summer of 1914. Conceived by its organizer, Gurdit Singh, as a deliberate challenge to new immigration restrictions, the voyage proved a catalyst for radicalization on both sides of the Pacific after the passengers were refused entry to Canada. The voyage culminated in a violent standoff in the harbor before the ship turned back to sea, and in a shoot-out on arrival in Calcutta in which more than twenty passengers were killed. This narrative reflected the tensions present within the coalition out of which the original movement itself was formed, by rejecting the original non-Sikh elements as no more than a superficial accretion of blowhard intellectuals speechifying about side issues, while the movement’s true heart was to be found among the salt-of-the-earth soldier-farmer-poets who went off to get things done. And without doubt these men were at the heart of the movement; particularly in the second phase, during the 1920s, the movement could be thoroughly identified with this community.
But the uniqueness of Ghadar’s radicalism was born of its combinations: of contexts, populations, issues, frames, scales. There was no hermetic seal between the Bengalis and Punjabis, the students and laborers; between activities initiated in California, or elsewhere in the Indian political network abroad; between schemes underwritten only by subscription among the farmers, or aided by German funds. None of its components in isolation could have produced the same phenomenon. Furthermore, to portray Ghadar as a Sikh organization by design would be to disregard its members’ own expansive universalist principles. Their minds were not narrow, and I believe that they themselves would have wanted to be defined not by ascriptive ethno-religious identity but by their ideological affinities and commitments. In this sense we could consider the Kirti Communists (regional rivals to the M. N. Roy-dominated Communist Party of India infrastructure), rather than the Akali Dal (aimed at regaining control of Sikh holy places, and later associated with the Sikh separatist movement),
