In 1908, Das entered a prestigious military school in Norwich, Vermont, but was forbidden to enroll in advanced coursework or to join the Vermont National Guard as most alumni did. Aside from his foreign nationality, his political history also worked against him. Despite his popularity among the students and his “great interest in everything pertaining to military matters,” he refused yet again to tone down the hostility to Britain that he had been warned against expressing “on all occasions, appropriate and otherwise.”54 He moved on instead to earn advanced degrees in political science at the Universities of Washington and California, during which period a British Foreign office Memorandum on Indian revolutionaries abroad identified him as a West Coast “ringleader.”55 (Given his skill in negotiating mainstream American society, he had become something of an advocate and representative of the Indian community.)
In 1910 he helped set up the United India House in Seattle, where he and other Bengali students lectured to gatherings of around twenty-five laborers every Saturday.56 Das gave frequent lectures to the “students and settlers” on the Pacific coast, mainly on the theme of the economic exploitation of India. In addition to such efforts at public education, Das modeled some of his secret society methods of organization on the Bengali groups, with whom he remained in contact. They were kind enough to pass on their notorious bomb manual, which Das later shared with his San Francisco counterparts when invited down to address a meeting in 1914.57
This activity must have eluded the knowledge of the immigration and naturalization authorities, who permitted him to attain U.S. citizenship in 1914. In the 1920s he married a white American woman named Mary Keatinge Morse, a noted women’s suffragist and founding member of the NAACP. He later became a professor of political science at Columbia University, and remained prominent in Indian politics in North America until his death in 1958, though his path would diverge from the Ghadarite lineage as he turned toward a more conservative form of nationalism and fell out with the leaders of the reborn Ghadar Party in the early 1920s.
Pandurang Khankhoje
While Kumar and Das were most associated with Vancouver and Seattle, Pandurang Khankhoje could claim much credit for starting up the Indian Independence League in Portland and Astoria, which formed the seed of the Ghadar Party.58 Khankhoje’s inspiration was Tilak, who had first encouraged the young man to seek military training outside of India. Like many others, he too had first tried Japan, but found that the Anglo-Japanese Alliance forbade his study of the “modern methods of warfare” there. He proceeded to California in 1905 and enrolled first in agricultural science at the University of California and then in 1908 at the Tamalpais Military Academy. He hoped to continue his training at West Point but was rebuffed as a non-U.S. citizen; his application for citizenship was also turned down. Nevertheless, he had already learned enough to drastically readjust his thinking on the possibilities of Indian military resistance, as he realized that modern weaponry and chemicals based in advanced technology were not within feasible reach of most Indians, although, says Emily Brown, “he did find the books on discipline, quick action, and secrecy to be of some value.”59
Early on, he had tried to use his school holidays not only to work—building roads, lumbering, and picking hops, grapes, and strawberries—but to talk with the laborers alongside him about the evils of British rule and encourage them to join the Indian Independence League. As of yet these efforts proved premature, but not for long. After graduation he drifted for a time, looking for work. In Portland he made the significant acquaintance of Pandit Kanshiram, an “old revolutionary and disciple of Sufi Amba Prasad.” Kanshiram was now a prosperous lumber-mill owner who oft en provided financial support to both students and workers. Khankhoje proposed that they start a new Indian Independence League in Portland, “similar to the ones we had in Japan and San Francisco.” He recalled: “The sight of so many Indians in one place had inspired me. I had to find some way to organize a movement with the Indian workers in America and spread the word right up to India.” 60
But Kanshiram had reservations, based largely on the persistent mistrust of the workers for the educated youngsters, whom they felt liable to deceive, cheat, or condescend to them. But Khankhoje worked hard to dispel this perception, with Kanshiram’s help, gradually earning trust through his integrity and good faith as he made himself “indispensable” when translation, medicine buying, or letter writing was needed. Finally the establishment was successful; though Sohan Singh Bhakna proved a tough nut to crack, as one of the most vocal in reluctance to trust a babu. Bhakna worked at the timber factory in Astoria while also serving as the local granthi and striving to represent the rights of Indian workers on both sides of the border. As a gesture of good faith Khankhoje proposed Bhakna as founding president, and Kanshiram as treasurer, of what workers would call the Azad-e-Hind (Freedom of India) Party.
As Kanshiram recognized the need to delegate, he assigned Khankhoje to local leadership of the Astoria branch. A Punjabi-owned lumber mill there welcomed him with open arms, thanks to his letters of introduction from Kanshiram and Bhakna, who had now come around to be a staunch ally. Astoria then became the hub of the North American movement and the birthplace of what would become the Ghadar Party. There were also branches of the movement now in Sacramento, San Francisco, and Portland.61
Once things seemed to be running smoothly, Khankhoje returned to his studies at the Agricultural College in Corvallis, and later Washington State College, still nursing his dream of “training an army of farmer revolutionaries” and torn as he would be for much of his life between, quite literally, the sword and the plowshare.62 This conflict is a recurring theme in his biography; as his daughter puts it, “He was now simultaneously engaged in two fields: agriculture and revolution.” 63 It was in agriculture that his life’s work would be celebrated. Diego Rivera immortalized Khankhoje in a mural for his contribution to the nourishment of the Mexican people through development of special strains of maize, and the Mukta Gram project that he established de cades later in independent India, as a model for village self-sufficiency in food production and cottage industries, was inspired by his visit to Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute around 1912. For the moment, however, he used all his spare moments outside of soil and crop genetics research conducting military trainings and touring the region with his old roommate and longtime comrade Bishan Das Kochar, armed with lectures, magic lantern slides, and a cutting-edge cinematograph machine, raising funds and awareness.64
Vishnu Ganesh Pingle
Another important figure in this circle was Vishnu Ganesh Pingle, at the time an engineering student at the University of Oregon. He also studied for a time at Berkeley, despite having been initially refused entry; this had, as usual, stimulated further agitations against the immigration laws. After meeting Khankhoje, a like-minded fellow Maharashtrian, Pingle began to neglect his studies and became preoccupied with the prospect of building a revolutionary army. He eventually took on leadership roles in the Portland and Astoria organizations, but his primary interest was Indian national liberation rather than American immigration woes, though the two matters were always linked. Thus, as the Portland group got more enmeshed in legal immigration issues on behalf of both Canada and United States entrants, Pingle was drawn back down to the Ghadarite stronghold of the San Francisco Bay Area, where the concern for national liberation was ascendant.
The Pacific Coast Hindi Association (PCHA)
Thanks to the work of these early activists, the building blocks of the movement were all in place by 1913. At that time, leading organizers, supported by those farmers and agricultural workers whose discontentment was acute, started looking for someone who could consolidate the existing nodes of activity, unite the students and the workers, channel the pervasive and building unrest, and beef up the political content of cultural and social reform projects. This person turned out to be Har Dayal.
Accounts vary as to who actually suggested that Har Dayal take the helm of a