through the religiously defined Arya Samaj and Sikh Sabha, while the British army remained a strong focus of collective identity and allegiance.7 In theory these veterans had the right to settle in Canada as subjects of the dominion, taking pride in the community’s sterling record of military service to the empire and the status it supposedly conferred. In practice they encountered worsening racism, both popular and legislative. Why such antipathy? After all, notes Harish Puri, the Indian threat could not have been simply about racial purity, since there were far more Chinese and Japanese entrants at the time. But politically the Indians were a special case, bearing on the delicate stability of colonial rule. Among the fears of the Secretary of State for India about what might happen if emigration to Canada were allowed to continue were the following:
i. That the terms of close familiarity which competition with white labour brings about do not make for British prestige; and it is by prestige alone that India is held not by force;
ii. that there is a socialist propaganda in Vancouver, and the consequent danger of the East Indians being imbued with socialist doctrines;
iii. labour rivalry is sure to result in occasional outbreaks of feelings on the part of the whites and any dissatisfaction at unfair treatment of Indians in Vancouver is certain to be exploited for the purpose of agitation in India; (and)
iv. East Indian affairs are sometimes made use of by unscrupulous partisans to serve the cause of their political party.8
On none of these points was he necessarily wrong, as time would show.
In the same vein Brigadier General E. J. Swayne warned in a confidential memorandum that Indians who came as free laborers to Canada were “politically inexpedient” due to the risk that “these men [might] go back to India and preach ideas of emancipation which would upset the machinery of law and order.”9 The fresh air of freedom, it seemed, was a dangerous gas.
Ghadar narratives (both contemporary and retrospective) repeated the notion that in America the “settlers” now breathed the air of modernity, freedom, and equality. And yet a gap remained between this stated American ideal and their own American experience. Once they reached California, they could obtain a daily wage of up to $2–$3 for harvesting asparagus, celery, potatoes, beans, lemons, and oranges.10 It is interesting that chroniclers of the community seem to find a source of pride in some of the very factors used as pretexts for racial discrimination against them: the white laborers were jealous and resentful of the immigrants’ strength, endurance, industriousness, and ability to live with such astounding frugality. To help in doing so Indian laborers developed mutual support networks for living and work situations, oft en rooming, cooking, and eating collectively, and forming work teams represented by an Anglophone spokesman with the task of procuring work and negotiating terms, or dealing with lawyers as necessary. Some teams even divided their wages equally at the end of the week.11 The young network of gurdwaras (Sikh temples serving as community centers) also served as a important sites of mobilization, resistance, and solidarity, furthering a tradition of Sikh granthis as community leaders, representatives, intermediaries, and mobilizers around the Pacific Rim.
For example, one of the most important political spokesmen for the British Columbia Sikhs prior to the formation of the Pacific Coast Hindi Association was Teja Singh, a respected preacher who had been studying at Columbia University when he received an invitation in 1908 to represent his community on the West Coast. Although more a scholar and cleric than a rabble-rouser, he began addressing meetings in the gurdwaras to mobilize defense against the threat of deportation, all the while framing his actions as a sacred mission guided by Guru Nanak, and phrasing his speeches in the idiom of spirituality.
But although the gurdwaras did remain convenient organizing bases for Ghadarite activities, offering an ideal infrastructure for communicating and assembling people, their original mission was oriented toward defensive self-purification in line with the work of the Sikh Sabha in Punjab, preserving community identity against the danger of its erosion in a foreign country. These efforts, carried out though the leaders of the Khalsa Diwan Society, were concerned with counteracting deviations in orthodox dress and food habits among the Sikh laborers through evangelization and the foundation of new gurdwaras (and if necessary the boycott and ostracism of apostates).12 However, Puri attributes this attitude, as well as the attachment to martial-caste loyalism to Britain, to elites among the immigrants. The Ghadar Party, when it emerged, represented quite a different stance.
Meanwhile, Indian students began trickling into the United States around 1906 seeking technical training or degrees in fields emblematic of modernity, such as engineering and chemistry; or if they had followed Har Dayal’s recommendations, economics and sociology. Many had first tried Japan only to find that the Anglo-Japanese agreement prevented their access to the specific types of training they sought. The majority of students were Bengali, and their most immediate context of political radicalization had been the Swadeshi movement and the connected revolutionist centers in London and Paris.
In 1912, Jawala Singh, a prosperous potato farmer and agricultural entrepreneur near Stockton, approached Har Dayal with a proposal to endow a scholarship with the goal of bringing students from all over India to study in the United States, preferably at the University of California, where most were enrolled.13 Along with important future Ghadarites Wasakha Singh and Santokh Singh (whom Behari Lal described as “exceptionally patriotic and pious men”),14 he had formed a society in 1912 whose members pledged “one hundred per cent dedication” to their country’s liberation. The first competition for the Guru Gobind Singh scholarships was to be judged by a selection committee consisting of Har Dayal, Teja Singh, Taraknath Das, and Arthur Pope, a sympathetic philosophy professor of the University of California. The scholarship was supposed to cover tuition, textbooks, lab fees, room and board, second-class return passage to India, and a $50 monthly stipend. Eligibility was in theory to be unrestricted by caste, religion, race, or gender. Out of six hundred applicants, six were selected for the 1912–13 academic year, including Gobind Behari Lal.15 But by the time they arrived, Jawala Singh’s harvest had proven significantly less lucrative than expected due to a drop in potato prices that year, and the promised funds were not forthcoming. The scholarship winners decided to stay and enroll anyway, using their own resources.
Together the six scholars rented a house near the campus. Among the six, Nand Singh was the designated mediator to the scholarship committee, ensuring their material needs were supplied. They took turns cooking “Indian food of a very simple kind, rice, dal, milk, vegetable or meat” and also got a small weekly allowance for pocket money. By the end of 1912, however, the funds dried up completely. The notion of “self-supporting,” said Behari Lal, was “a peculiar American system” quite new to them.16 Now, like the rest of the students, they earned their living by working in the mornings or afternoons, or during holidays, waiting tables in boarding houses, washing dishes in restaurants, selling newspapers, or even working in canneries. During the summers, they oft en worked in “the fields and orchards where, almost always in the company of Indian farm workers—Sikhs, Moslems, Hindus, Pathans—they picked fruit from the trees or planted celeray [sic] or potatoes or did some thing or other.”17 On a 25¢ to 30¢ hourly wage, or by selling Indian handicraft s such as shawls (was it assumed they would bring the stock of goods with them?), one could live comfortably for a year on $250 and like a king for $350.18
In 1911, Calcutta’s English-language magazine Modern Review printed a series of articles offering advice to Indian students on how to deal with arrival and life in America, such as how to find housing and employment. One should bring identification papers from a sponsoring organization and then get a recommendation letter from the American consul general in Seattle. (Students also were advised to just say no if the immigration inspector asked if they believed in polygamy. Such a traditional form of Oriental deviance was certainly no less controversial than the very modern Western practice of free love, advocacy of which was to get Har Dayal
