among the next generation of Punjabi radical movements, although its returned veterans moved into both formations. Indeed, the Ghadar veterans were credited with injecting a more radical social justice and anti-imperial orientation into the Akali movement, which otherwise pointed the way toward a narrower Sikh nationalism.
Any attempt to validate or disqualify an activity as a Ghadarite enterprise based on whether it was conceived, authorized, and directed by a central guiding committee in California is to misrepresent the formality of its party structure. The reality was far more decentralized, as autonomous branches sprang up in various places among those who received the Ghadar, without any direct coordination regarding their activities or decisions. Any influence attributable to a core group stemmed from the stirring content of the published materials flowing from the San Francisco fountainhead, and the inspiration provided by the Ghadarites’ manifest willingness to act upon these ideals.
Similarly, when I argue that the movement functioned to provide connecting links and switching points to other related anticolonial movements, I do not mean that an official unified party line had necessarily endorsed or established formal links with any of them, but that numerous individuals wore multiple hats without conflict. Many activists who had been associated with California Ghadar, and were closely tied to its Yugantar Ashram headquarters in San Francisco, also participated in or supported other formations. There were Ghadarites or Ghadar supporters active in networks of revolutionary (Hindu) nationalism (Taraknath Das, Har Dayal), Marxism (Rattan Singh, Santokh Singh), Pan-Islamism (Muhammad Barakatullah, Obeidullah Sindhi), and various combinations thereof. Thus tracking relationships and connections is less a question of “Ghadar” than of Ghadarites. So we might speak of a party, referring to a distinct organization of particular people at a certain place and time; and a movement, referring to an idea, a sensibility and a set of ideological commitments that took wing—or rather, took ship—exuberantly outrunning their originators’ control.
Both ideologically and tactically, the Indian revolutionaries drew from a variety of sources, combining them without concern for the constraints of any existing orthodoxy; this very richness of ingredients, of facets, of splice-able threads, is what provided so many different opportunities for collaboration. “In the literature of unrest,” commented Valentine Chirol, then foreign bureau chief of the (London) Times and inveterate demonizer of revolutionists, “one frequently comes across the strangest juxtaposition of names, Hindu deities, and Cromwell and Washington, and celebrated anarchists all being invoked in the same breath.”7 Yet I do not think the links were casual or contingent, and though many observers and historians have tended to dismiss Ghadar’s political orientation as an untheorized hodgepodge, I believe we can perceive within Ghadarite words and deeds an eclectic and evolving, yet consistent radical program. A. C. Bose sums up a range of influences, as well as a range of target audiences: “Just as their sources of inspiration ranged from Rana Pratap and Victor Emanuel II to Sivaji and Garibaldi, and from Mazzini and Guru Govind Singh to the daring terrorists among the Carbonnari [sic], the Nihilists and the Fenians, their appeals for co-operation too were directed at the educated youth of their country and the near-illiterate soldiers as well as at conservative businessmen and the reactionary Indian princes.”8 Indeed, the Ghadar propagandists were far from insensitive to the knack of tailoring material to audience.
Elsewhere Bose quotes a Bengal official’s observation that in their practices the “Indian revolutionists imitate the Irish Fenians and the Russian anarchists. Their literature is replete with references to both. Tilak took his ‘no rent’ campaign from Ireland, and the Bengalees learnt the utility of boycott from Irish history. Kanai Dutt was compared to Patrick O’Donnell, who killed James Cary. political dacoity to collect money they have learnt from the Russians.”9 Of course, these were not instances of slavish imitation but of active selection, adaptation, and application, or the recognition of analogies. Elements picked up as “influences” or “borrowings” were those with which the borrowers already felt resonance, or which they deemed most relevant to their situation. For example, egalitarianism was a Sikh value long before contact with American democratic discourse—hence the receptive recognition of that particular element rather than another of many available varieties of Western political philosophy.
Moreover, their encounter with an ideal in the founding values of French and American political liberalism, combined with disgust at the distance between this ideal and the reality they encountered, was an important impetus of the emergent Ghadarite thinking, which gravitated toward the politically libertarian aspects rather than the classical economic elements of Enlightenment thinking as it invoked the touchstones of freedom and democracy. This was especially true of texts intended for potential sympathizers among American audiences:10 Ghadar editor Ram Chandra wrote to the Boston Daily Advertiser in October 1916, in response to accusations of a conspiracy “to stir up trouble against British rule in India” through the publication of seditious literature and fomentation of an uprising. Ram Chandra met these accusations with aplomb, saying: “We very cheerfully admit all this, but we wish to emphasize the fact that all we are doing is to preach Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, the birthright of every human being, and to awaken the world to a realization of the enslaved condition of India, where these great principles are denied to all.”11
Another audience to whom Ghadarites soon began making “passionate appeals” was “the labour unions of the world.”12 These appeals elaborated on the familiar economic drain theory and exhorted the people of the world to make common cause against systems of imperialism.13 Such a blending of political libertarianism and economic socialism, along with a per sis tent tendency toward romantic revolutionism, and within their specific context a marked antigovernment bent, is why one may argue that the Ghadar movement’s alleged incoherence is actually quite legible through a logic of anarchism—which thereby provides a somewhat ironic bridge between rival nationalist and Communist readings of the Ghadar story. In short, not only did Ghadar manage to join the impulses toward class struggle and civil rights with anticolonialism, it also managed to combine commitments to both liberty and equality. Initially drawing sustenance from both utopian socialism and libertarian thought, their critique of capitalism and of liberalism’s racial double standard gained increasingly systematic articulation in the course of the war and the world political shift s in its aftermath.
As to the blending of tactical models, since this was a definitively action-oriented movement, the method was no less important than the motive. this required balancing instrumentality with integrity, strategic with idealistic thinking. Ghadar is often positioned as a transitional phase between two modes of revolutionary struggle, namely, the conspiratorial secret society model and the mass organization model, which is also to say the voluntarist and structuralist theories of precipitating change. However, Ghadar’s should be seen not just as a temporary or intermediate half mea sure, but as a relatively stable mode distinct from other more unequivocal tendencies (in both directions) during both the prewar and the interwar periods.14
To sum up a distinct ideological and tactical profile, an internal logic and a common denominator of identifiable core values and approaches that remained consistent across periods, contexts, and idioms, a proper Ghadarite was
anticolonialist (which should go without saying);
passionately patriotic;
internationalist, pledging figurative kinship and active solidarity wherever people struggled against tyranny and oppression anywhere in the world;
secularist, emphatically opposed to communalism and the politicization of institutional religion, although not necessarily atheist or irreligious;
modernist, critical of tradition’s weight of fatalism and “slave mentality”;
radically democratic, and egalitarian in the face of class and caste differences;
republican, favoring a decentralized federation of Indian states;
anticapitalist
