world to make us deviate a hair’s breadth from the path of Duty and Righ teousness.”25
The Revolutionary Movement Abroad was a phenomenon of travelers; it could not have occurred otherwise. As perspectives opened out for economic migrants encountering new contexts, and as political trajectories became literal journeys of enforced exile and clandestine organizing, the leading edge of radicalism passed literally and figuratively beyond the bounds of the territorial nation-state. Yet in all these journeys, whether the world traveler’s face was set toward a home as a free Indian citizen or a free American or Soviet one, the destination was always a dream of utopia.
Kim Stanley Robinson has one of the transplanetary nomads in his speculative Mars trilogy declare that “history is the haj to utopia.”26 In simplest terms, Robinson’s book is about the colonization and terraforming of Mars. But more deeply, it is about the process of designing a society, initially far beyond the reach of the old earth’s interstate relations and corporate economics, though these interests of course are pulled closer as breakthroughs in transport and communications occur, and as the immigrant population increases. Nevertheless, as the new society develops, the Martians have an unprecedented opportunity to define new categories of identity within social units based rather in affinity and ideology than in ethnic or national affiliation; and to negotiate a framework of principles for accommodating difference, by which the autonomy of communities who use different social blueprints can be maintained within a larger federation, in which ecological survival rather than political power forms the baseline for collective control. Aside from the anachronistic ecological aspect, this seems to me quite applicable to the vision of a Ghadarite India.
Lamin Sanneh has described the functions of ritual pilgrimage in spatially marking off an identity, purified and confirmed by certain practices carried out along the way and especially on reaching the destination—where, upon arrival, the traveler experiences the intensity of a sense of identification with a transnational community or “brotherhood” of spiritual kindred, resulting in a recommitment to an ideological program.27 I am certainly not suggesting that the future Ghadarites set sail for America with any such conscious sense of ritual significance. Their journey began not as an intentional pilgrimage but a pragmatic journey of economic or educational opportunity. However, I suspect that they would recognize the effect that Sanneh describes. And the revolutionaries did begin to speak in the language of pilgrimage. For the Ghadarites “Moscow became Mecca.” Meanwhile, hajis bound for the real Mecca and muhajirin bound for the heart of the caliphate at Istanbul became literal fellow travelers. There was a mission to be fulfilled across the sea, and if they could not make it to the other shore, they were ready to immolate themselves so that others could. They spoke of an altar, and a sacrifice; they spoke of moths to the flame. But the Swadeshi activists’ Bharat Mata had been replaced as deity on the blood-spattered dais by inqilab (revolution) or azadi (freedom).
MAP 1. Ghadar’s global range
And after the revolution, upon reaching the odyssey’s end, would they dwell within the kingdom of god, the dictatorship of the proletariat, or the federated United States of India? For those who preached liberty, equality, and fraternity, would it make a difference whether their foundational logic and social ethic had been derived from transcendent or divine sources, natural law, or human reason? Would it matter by what map or method they had traced their path? Around what polestar they had oriented their voyage? Whether they had been steered by God’s plan, a Hegelian world spirit, a Marxian structural dialectic, or their own fiery wills?
1
“The Air of Freedom”
Ghadar in America
IMMIGRANTS
There had been a smattering of Indian sailors in New England ports since the late eighteenth century, and the odd celebrity religious philosopher since the late nineteenth, starting with Vivekananda’s star turn at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1892, which garnered a cult following of theosophists and countercultural practitioners among a northeastern elite. Meanwhile, the flow of indentured labor to the Caribbean islands and the north coast of South America began in the 1830s, to fill the vacuum left by the abolition of the slave trade. 1 But the first South Asian immigrant population of significant size in mainland North America were the Punjabi Sikhs who began arriving on the West Coast around 1903.2
The leap from tens to thousands arriving per year was rather abrupt.3 Even so, according to an official count, only 6,656 South Asians entered the United States (legally) between 1899 and 1913. Hundreds more waited in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Manila, and other East Asian ports for trans-Pacific passage, hoping for a little help from friends who had already made the crossing. By the eve of the war in 1914 there was an estimated total of 10,000 South Asians in North America.4
Most of the Punjabi laborers came from relatively prosperous families of small independent landholders, overwhelmingly concentrated in the Doab region. About half of them were veterans of the British army or military police. After their service, having seen a bit of the world, many of these men of cosmopolitan experience if little formal education now had a taste for further adventures rather than settling back down in the sleepy villages of their birth. Lured by the opportunity to make some good money, and offered incentives by steamship companies looking to fill in their dwindling manifests of Chinese working-class passengers (the Chinese Exclusion Act had been signed into U.S. law in 1882), the Punjabis came to work in lumber mills or laying railroads, a few in canneries or construction. But overwhelmingly they filtered into the migratory agricultural labor force. Disciplined and adaptable, they were much in demand, claimed the Immigration Department’s official translator Dady Burjor, to the point where big landowners from the Sacramento Valley sometimes went directly to Angel Island to hire new arrivals. (The noncombatants who came directly from the village, usually as a result of a collective economic decision by an extended family, were in Dady Burjor’s opinion a lesser quality of crude yokel.)5
This positive desire to emigrate was compounded by straitened economic circumstances brought about by colonial agricultural policies at home. The 1901 Alienation of Land Act, by restricting the transfer of land from traditionally landowning groups, had been designed to prevent the loss of rural control to urban (usually Hindu) moneylenders. But it also had the effect of institutionalizing existing inequities of access for some Sikh and low-caste populations. Then the 1906 Colonization Bill and Bari Doab canal scheme led to a sharp rise in water rates and micromanagement of its use, which aimed at maximizing the region’s rich agricultural output for the British commodity market, thereby rerouting it away from local control and subsistence needs.
This had sparked a wave of agitation in 1907, led by the brothers Ajit Singh and Kishan Singh, future Ghadar collaborators and the respective uncle and father of Bhagat Singh. Notably during the course of the unrest, Ajit Singh had spoken not just for reform of the offending legislation but for the unequivocal expulsion of the British from India, by violent means if necessary. He also founded the Indian Patriots’ Association, the Bharat Mata Society, and a newspaper, the Peshwa. For his activities he was sent to jail in Mandalay until 1909, when he decamped to Persia along with his Peshwa collaborator Sufi Amba Parishad. Here they set up a revolutionary center from which they facilitated contacts among revolutionaries throughout Europe and North America for many years. By 1914 Ajit Singh was living in Paris, under the faux Persian identity of Hassan Khan, and supporting himself by giving English lessons. His travels during the war later took him as far as Brazil and Argentina. As fate would have it, he died literally on the eve of independence, 15 August 1947.6
But the general Punjabi population was not yet connecting their grievances to a larger, secular and/or national context. Much of the political
