There had already been a series of meetings in the Pacific Northwest throughout the spring of 1913 (the largest attended by 120 workers) by the time Har Dayal arrived for the fateful gathering in Astoria in early June.68 Also present were Hussain/Das, Sohan Singh Bhakna, Ram Chandra, Kanshi Ram, and Nawab Khan. “Two electric tram cars and two motor cars are said to have been hired for the occasion,” reported Isemonger and Slattery, “and the cars were decorated with placards bearing the words ‘India’ and ‘Freedom.’ Har Dayal was hailed with the words ‘Bande Mataram,’ but declined to be garlanded.” 69
Reconfirming the leadership of Khankhoje’s group, Sohan Singh Bhakna was elected president and Kanshiram treasurer.70 Har Dayal was named secretary. Now all the main components of the organizational infrastructure were in place, under the new name of the Pacific Coast Hindi Association (PCHA). In addition to a committee for collecting funds and a fifteen-member working committee (soon swelling to twenty-four) of annually elected representatives of local branches, there would be a general association comprising representatives from all the local communities up and down the coast, including both students and workers. The group then selected San Francisco as the publishing and propaganda hub because that was where Har Dayal’s influence was strongest.71
Nawab Khan provided a lengthy transcription of Har Dayal’s speech: “You have come to America and seen with your own eyes the prosperity of this country. What is the cause of this prosperity? Why nothing more than this, that America is ruled by its own people. In India, on the other hand, the people have no voice in the administration of the country.” Deploring the situation in which a rich agricultural land was wracked by famine as its crops were exported, he urged his audience: “Desist … from your petty religious dissensions and turn your thoughts toward the salvation of your country. What you earn, earn for your country. What work you do, do it for your country…. Collect money and get the youth educated in America in order that they may become equipped to serve…. Prepare now to sacrifice yourselves.”72 He then rhetorically reframed their immigrant status as an explicit function of Indian liberation. It was useless to keep struggling for American civil rights without the backing of an independent government, he said, arguing that “as long as the Indians remained in subjection to the British they would not be treated as equals by Americans or any other nation.”73
Ghadar was the fruit of a very particular synthesis: of populations, of issues, of contextual frames, and of ideological elements. It is precisely the richness of this combination that enabled it to play the role of missing link in the genealogy of Indian radicalism, and of medium of translation among coexisting movement discourses. Still, to a degree unprecedented within the revolutionary movement abroad, Ghadar was overwhelmingly a workers’ movement, in which, moreover, the line between workers and intellectuals had become rather smudged. The impact of racial discrimination and its crucial intersection with class cannot be underestimated as a catalyst for the radicalization of South Asians in North America. Yet only when this frame was overlaid on the geopolitical reality of India’s colonized status would American discontent transmute into Indian mutiny.
2
Our Name Is Our Work
The Syndicalist Ghadar
RADICALS
Almost immediately the Ghadar propaganda tours hit the fields. Kartar Singh Sarabha was particularly inspired in generating publicity, said Behari Lal, arranging meetings such as the one in Yolo that he describes here: “A good number” of farm workers gathered around, sitting on the ground around him and his kinsman. “They sat quietly and I said a few things. Then Har Dayal talked about the position of the Indian people in India and abroad, the need of independence.” Unresponsive silence met his finish. But after a few minutes, “one or two men came forward awkwardly, saluted Har Dayal with reverence and placed a few dollar bills before him, as they used to do when offering their contributions in a temple.”1 Within a half an hour, they had collected a few hundred dollars in cash and checks. Har Dayal refused to take the money himself, insisting instead that it should be entrusted to a fully transparent and accountable committee. This went over brilliantly, setting him apart from “the other Babus,” whom Sohan Singh Bhakna had accused of cheating his constituency of hard-earned money under the guise of doing patriotic work.
An informant known as C later described the whirlwind West Coast “missionary tour” to his British handlers as follows:
Ram Chandra, Gobind Behari Lal, and others go out to the ranches, where poor labourers are working, on Saturdays and Sundays; they preach revolution to them until these poor and illiterate people think they must drive the English out of India or kill them. It becomes a fixed idea with them. The revolutionary songs which they sing have been committed to memory, and they sing them with great fervour. They do not know the meaning of what they are singing [!], but they almost treat it as a religion. Ram Chandra and the others who visit the ranches tell these people that the British are ruining them, and keeping them poor. The great danger lies among these poor people in America. The ordinary educated man soon commits himself and is arrested, but the labourer merely goes back to India and commences to sing these revolutionary songs in his native village, and in this way spreads the movement in India.2
The British ambassador to the United States, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, commented after the mutiny attempt: “The truth of these statements is abundantly illustrated by the long list of returned emigrants of the coolie class which figures in India judgments.”3 Aside from the astounding level of contempt with which Spring-Rice assumed that the Indian laborers, being poor and illiterate, could have had no understanding of the very matter that so inflamed them—as if their very enthusiasm was proof of naïveté, rather than conviction!—and that any catalyzing or leadership roles would have had to come from the educated elite, nevertheless he was plainly identifying the Ghadar mobilization as a class-based mass movement of racialized, low-wage migrant laborers—in a word, “coolies.”
The Ghadar Party
Building on the summer of touring, a November meeting in San Francisco consolidated and extended the PCHA infrastructure set forth in Astoria six months before. This time two new vice presidents, and two more organizing secretaries were elected, plus three coordinators—Kartar Singh Sarabha, Harnam Singh Tundilat, and Jagat Ram—assigned to “secret and political work.” 4 Bhai Parmanand made a proposal to institute scholarships, according to the logic that a free India once attained would require educated people. Har Dayal agreed, but some of the workers took offense. Bhakna and Tundilat made an alternate suggestion to prioritize “direct and effective” propaganda to the ripe constituency of Jat yeoman in their own language.5 This would be the Ghadar.
In his autobiography Bhakna identified the opening of the Yugantar Ashram in San Francisco and the activities based there as the real start of what can really be called the Ghadar movement.6 But the claim to the name was and is still contested: who were the real Ghadarites? Har Dayal’s use of the word in the first issue of the paper referred expansively to all of India’s patriotic revolutionaries to date, encompassing all the Bengalis, all the Punjabis, and the activists in the London and Paris circles.7 Yet at the same time he was stressing the need to form a party in the more specific sense: this would be comprised of the dedicated inner core of students and organic intellectuals who lived and worked at the Yugantar Ashram and put out the paper. It is perceptible from the account of Darisi Chenchiah, one of the Berkeley students, that class snobbery may have been difficult to eradicate completely, despite the Ashram’s egalitarian ideals.