a discourse in its totality only with the most dominant or authoritative statement it has been used to make (or with one’s preferred interpretation, dominant or not). The same tendency is also behind many orthodox exponents’ refusal to admit any possibility of rapprochement or compatibility with other discourses, or even with dissenters claiming to be part of their own. If X and Y may be defined as X and Y only in their most purified and homogenized form, then indeed there is no common ground, no possible overlap; the meanings of X and Y are polarized. But more often than not, I would guess, the strands that can most successfully interweave across categoric boundaries are likely to be the heterodox or counterdominant ones on both sides, the threads straggling from the fringes beyond the reach of doctrinal enforcement, though still recognizably part of the fabric.20
A caveat, however: I am not therefore suggesting that all discourses were interchangeable, or even that the parameters of each spectrum were isomorphic. The threads they shared were nevertheless woven into fabrics of different shades and patterns. Moreover, every language imposes its own limitations and tendencies regarding what it is equipped to express most directly in its available vocabulary or repertory of concepts, and what requires more complex circumlocutions. And while each language is versatile, there may be points at which it becomes expedient to borrow words or even switch to another tongue better suited to the concept or construction one is trying to express.
Nevertheless, if the emphasis is on connections and alliances, the interface between different ideological networks, and the points of translatability between their idioms, then we might ask not what a nationalist says and does, but what is being said in the idiom and done according to the logic of nationalism; not what a socialist or Pan-Islamist stipulates, but what kind of socialism and what kind of Pan-Islamism are operative. In that regard, the question then became with what kind of nationalists, leftists and Islamists, in what contexts, and at what points of each network, via interfaces based on which shared traits or common elements, were the Ghadarites engaged in meaningful interactions; and how, precisely, were these Indian anticolonialists situated in the context of the international radicalism of the time.
Praxis
Finally, notwithstanding all this talk of ideology and discourse, this work is not intended to be an abstract philosophical exercise. Rather, my approach to intellectual history is much like that described by Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski in the preface to their 1986 book on Egyptian nationalism. Combining the “internal” and “external” approaches, the authors explain: “This work proceeds on the basis of several assumptions about historical inquiry. Perhaps the most basic of these is that there are crucial interrelationships between the intellectual life of a society and its political development. An adequate understanding … demands that attention be given to the complex connections between ideas of the world and behavior in the world.”21 Like theirs in this way, my work here is concerned with praxis; that is, not with theory in isolation, but with the way that ideas are generated within historical context and play a substantive role in bringing about historical change.
Moreover, this work is a narrative about people who felt the same way. The Ghadarites were pragmatists, not dogmatists; activists above all, not systematic armchair theorists. Above all, as Rattan Singh recalled, “Every step taken by the Ghadr Party … has been practical and has meant action. Its resolutions have never remained on paper; they have always been put into action.”22 Indeed, radicalism itself resides as much in the commitment to acting on ideals, making them effective in reality, and translating them into social form, as it does in the actual content of the ideas. In selecting their allies, the Ghadarites allotted more weight to shared goals and common sensibilities (notably their appreciation for fierce and total commitment to one’s objectives) than to niceties of doctrine. Yet neither were they ideologically vacant. Far more than an inchoate burst of quickly dispersed revolutionary energy, they created an important missing link in the genealogy of South Asian radicalism, as well as a bridge between contemporaneous radical movements. Therein lies not the least of their contributions to history.
Overview
Chapter 1 concerns the birth of the Ghadar movement on the Pacific coast in 1913, its activities in California, and the content and spread of its propaganda, culminating in its homeward journey of intended liberation launched at the outbreak of World War I. Although the attempted uprising of February 1915 was crushed by means of the First Lahore Conspiracy trials, the ideas it had reimported lingered significantly: when the would-be freedom fighters of 1914–1915 set out upon their return to India “to inform their kinsmen of the unequal treatment that was meted out to them” overseas, they did so by “preach[ing] the doctrines of revolution that they had learned from the Ghadr and the crude socialism that they had picked up in the towns of western Canada and the United States.”23 Crucially, the radicalization of South Asians in North America in the early twentieth century was defined by labor relations as refracted by race, which facilitated their affinity with the IWW’s American form of syndicalism, as shown in chapter 2.
Chapters 3 and 4 together mark a turning point in the narrative, in which the nationalist aspect comes to the fore. Here I focus on the period of strategic anti-British partnerships in the context of World War I, through which a number of elaborate covert operations were carried out with German/Ottoman patronage, in contrast to the 1915 outbreak that the California Ghadarites had initiated autonomously. Nationalism also mediated the collaborations among Indian, Irish, and Egyptian revolutionists active in Europe and North America, and the analogies in sensibility and situation that they recognized among themselves. This period was shut down with another legal case in 1918, the sensational Hindu-German Conspiracy trial in San Francisco.
But the Ghadar Party appeared in a second distinct incarnation, this time Communist in the more orthodox Marxist-Leninist sense, in contrast to its prewar leanings toward the less systematic (though perhaps more holistic) utopian socialism associated with Har Dayal. This is the matter of chapter 5. Following the exhilarating success of the Bolshevik revolution, and given the Comintern’s strategic commitment to supporting Asian national liberation struggles, Ghadarites turned to Moscow as their new self-described mecca for political training, theoretical guidance, and moral and material support. During the 1920s, Ghadar sent batches of trainees to Moscow while establishing new organs and organizing centers in China and Punjab.24 At the same time it helped seed the growth of civil rights and antideportation campaigns in the United States through the Friends of Freedom for India (FFI). In India meanwhile it helped seed the growth of the next generation of militant anticolonial struggle through Bhagat Singh, the Kirti group, the Naujavan Bharat Sabha, and the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army.
In the final two chapters I back up in time to pick up the parallel thread of Pan-Islamism, which had been continuously intertwined with Ghadar’s activities starting from the latter’s prewar overtures to Muslim soldiers identified as potential mutineers in the British Indian army. The interaction became even more significant through the German/Ottoman-backed schemes in west and central Asia during the war, reflecting the goals and preoccupations of this alliance. After the war, when Moscow displaced Berlin as center of patronage, this pattern of relationships did not change. It culminated in a rapprochement with the Khilafat movement of the early 1920s and its subset, the Hijrat movement. Theoretical links were elaborated by Obeidullah Sindhi and Mohammed Barakatullah, both of whom had complex Ghadar ties.
A Word for the Journey
Har Dayal commented in the Bande Mataram in 1910: “Exile has its privileges. It is the price paid for the right of preaching the truth as it appears to us. We do not deal in political casuistry mingled with erroneous philosophy. … We may pay homage only to our
