Meanwhile the PCHA officers and members of the Working Committee, consisting mostly of farmworkers along with a few big contractors or independent farmers, also considered themselves to be the true Ghadar Party. Both nuclei were making decisions and doing work on the ground, thereby leaving the door open from the start for a parallel leadership situation, and thus for confusion and potential conflict. For example, when Har Dayal left, some seemed to be under the impression that Santokh Singh was his designated successor, and others that Ram Chandra was. This may have reflected a tension between Hindu/intellectual-and Sikh/worker-dominated sectors, and historical narratives. However, setting these two groups up as polarities misses the point that the movement emerged, and could only have emerged as it did, from the synthesis between the two.
The Yugantar Ashram
As usual, Kartar Singh illustrated the ideal: folklorist Ved Prakash Vatuk described the youthful chemistry student at Berkeley, fresh off the boat in 1913, as being “at ease in the company of peasants as well as among intellectuals,” and embodying the link between them. He worked as hard in the fields as at his engineering and aviation studies, or as at the Ghadar office, where he wrote articles and poems as well as running the printing press.
In the introductory Ghadar, Har Dayal declared of the new party headquarters: “This is not an Ashram but a fort from which a Cannonade on the English raj will be started.”8 It also offered a kind of home to many who were far from theirs, which, according to Gobind Behari Lal, “a great many laborers and Hindus migratory in the United States and in Canada … generally use … as an address so that they can get their mail.”9
As Har Dayal conceived it, at the nucleus of the movement would be a disciplined, secretive, and exclusive group based at the Ashram and structured similarly to London’s Abhinava Bharat, which had drawn its recruits from the larger and more public-faced Free India Society. He also drew upon some of the rules used by the secret societies of Calcutta and London. To join, an activist had to be recommended by two members of the Ghadar staff; to be taken into confidence on important decisions he had to have worked at the Ashram for six months. Telling secrets or misappropriating funds could get him killed. Insiders used cipher codes for exchanging messages, and only the secretary or editor was authorized to open the mail. Cellular propagation was encouraged: “Let us form a secret society of those who prefer death and make the foundation firm by opening branches elsewhere.”10 Within a few months, membership had swelled to five thousand, with seventy-two North American branches, including Berkeley, Portland, Astoria, St. John, Sacramento, Stockton, and Bridal Veil.11 Among them organization was relatively informal, sans official hierarchy but with active leaders selected by consultation among core participants. Division of labor, too, seemed to emerge more or less spontaneously.12
Though not their only activity, the most time-consuming and resource-intensive must have been the newspaper. And if there is anything available to us by which to anchor the identity and principles of a sprawling and slippery formation, it is the body of publications produced by the Hindustan Ghadar Press. Soon after the Astoria meeting, Kartar Singh, Harnam Singh, and others entered into discussion with Har Dayal as to what sort of paper they should produce. He “insisted on a straight fighting newspaper—which will be carrying forward the revolutionary nationalist work which had been started in London, Paris, Calcutta, other Indian cities, but had been almost entirely suppressed by the British.”13
The first number was dated 1 November 1913. It came out in an Urdu print run of six thousand, with a comparable Gurmukhi edition starting a month later, and a smaller Gujarati edition in May 1914.14 Behari Lal said that in accordance with the custom of Indian nationalist journalism of the time, only Har Dayal’s name appeared as editor-publisher, for security reasons. As in India, “when the authorities eventually put him away in jail, another stepped forward—just ONE MORE…. The succession was to be maintained … one by one.”15 Nevertheless, Har Dayal was adamant that “no man was ever to usurp all power, all responsibility,” and that although “the Editor was to be at the front, facing the public, and the opponents, … he must deal on terms of democratic, constitutional equality with the men of the Council.”16
The writing, translating, lettering, and printing were a true collective effort. About twenty-five volunteers lived and worked full-time at the Ashram in exchange for food, clothing, and “two dollars a month pocket money,”17 while everybody else available on the premises chipped in. According to Vatuk (who may be harboring a romantic bias, though since the core Ghadar workers were themselves consumed with this kind of idealism, maybe it isn’t inappropriate), “People lived there in a democratic way in a life style based on equality and devoid of any casteism, racism, religious bigotry and sectarianism of any kind. All who lived there were just Indian. They cooked, ate, and lived together like a family. They were the followers of one path.”18 This is quite a telling statement; however, rather than limiting the significance of the observation that they were all “just Indian” to nationalism per se, I find the inference of egalitarian participatory democracy equally suggestive. Moreover, this prefigurative practice implies that they were more clearly conscious of what their desired postrevolutionary society should look like than the Ghadar movement is oft en given credit for.
Important staffers among this utopian family included Ram Chandra, Amar Singh,19 Kartar Singh, Munshi Ram, and Hari Singh Usman.20 Godha Ram Channon was the chief Urdu calligrapher, among other tasks. Behari Lal described his good friend as a quiet man who never pushed himself forward but “served with devotion” throughout the editorial regimes of both Har Dayal and Ram Chandra, and on into the 1920s incarnation. Behari Lal himself was kept busy as main liaison to the Anglophone world, in charge of maintaining contacts with the network of Bay Area intellectuals who regarded him as “Har Dayal’s younger brother … a Horatio to that Hamlet.” For their benefit he wrote pieces in English in addition to those he was contributing to the Ghadar almost daily. It became “a matter of principle” for him to write Urdu and Hindi articles on history and natural and social science, passing on the content of his own postgraduate studies at the University of California to those who would otherwise have no access to such information. To that end, he said: “I gave my books to the growing Gadar Office library. Now and then I would discuss for hours some new scientific or historical or ethical concepts with the boys.”21
The Ghadar
The paper’s purpose, in a nutshell, was stated in the first issue: “It conveys the message of a rebellion to the nation once a week. It is brave, outspoken, unbridled, soft footed and given to the use of strong language. It is lightning, a storm and a flame of fire…. We are the harbinger of freedom.” It was also, according to the masthead, the “Enemy of the British Race.”22 The lead article, “Our Name and Our Work,” declared the two to be identical: in a word, mutiny. A rising would be inevitable within perhaps a decade, and in the meantime all must prepare for it.
The paper’s task, the editor continued, would be to nurture the mental and spiritual growth necessary to future mutineers, offering the right type of nourishment and edification to “purg[e] the soul of avarice, greed, pride, fear and ignorance” while exhorting young men to embrace the ideals of sacrifice, revenge, and unity in taking action. Recalling the stages of “Hardayalism,” this was the first stage of moral preparation. But stage two was coming soon, at which “rifle and blood will be used for pen and ink.”23 (Yet at the same time, the editor noted, in the pages of the Ghadar “the pen has done the work of a cannon, shaken the foundation of the tyrannous government.”)24 In accordance with Sohan Singh Bhakna’s earlier advice, Har Dayal extolled the value of vernacular materials in movement building among the people and (although the label fit much of the staff) accused English-educated Indians of selfish hypocrisy: “No movement can grow strong till books, pamphlets and newspapers written in easy vernacular are brought out. No great work has ever been accomplished with the aid of a foreign tongue.”25
Har Dayal’s introductory editorial stressed the need for an accurate