By the summer of 1915, when the Lieutenant General of Punjab Sir Michael O’Dwyer announced that the movement inside India had been crushed, the Ghadarites and their larger network had lost a major battle, but not a war. Revolutionary activities, sporadic fighting, and invasion plans continued to unfold beyond the northeastern and northwestern frontiers, while those jailed carried on the struggle through hunger strikes and other forms of resistance.6 Some veterans reemerged in time to take part in the next generation of militance, which they themselves had inspired, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In this way the Ghadar movement served as a missing link, a source of hidden continuity between the Bengali “anarchist” conspiracies, “national revolutionary terrorism” and Punjabi agitations of the early twentieth century; and the radical Left and revolutionist movements of the 1920s. Far more than an abstract inspiration, however, Ghadar’s printed materials and personnel served quite concretely as connective tissue or switching circuit, capable of linking various elements among the Indian radicals abroad, linking Indian radicals to other networks, and linking pre-to postwar revolutionary movements inside the country. In fact it could be hazarded that the movement’s wider network overlapped at some point, at no more than a degree of separation, with every radical tendency of its time. Of course this is a large claim, and so requires some careful qualification; we must distinguish relationality from identicality, while recognizing both where appropriate.
Why was Ghadar able to serve this function? One factor was its geographical reach. Another was the unique experience of its founding members, located as they were at a conjuncture of contexts enabling them powerfully to articulate American class and race relations to the economics and geopolitics of empire, by linking the grievances of discrimination against a low-wage immigrant labor force to the colonized status of their home country. Furthermore, amid the ambient dynamism of prewar social ferment, they managed to forge an eclectic ideological synthesis that in turn created possible points of contact with a variety of potential partners. Thus, to fully unravel the story of the movement we must examine its complex interfaces with other international radical networks in order to reveal at what nodes, through which actors, and based on which common threads of ideological principles, methods and tactics, instrumental goals, or political aspirations the radical networks were woven together; or, to put it another way, to reveal which molecular particles in this incendiary chemistry were being shared or exchanged at each covalent bonding site.
GHADAR AND ITS CORE PRINCIPLES
Ghadar is most often portrayed as a nationalist movement, pure and simple. Its members were indubitably patriotic, and their goal of a homecoming to liberate territory from foreign occupation is easily intelligible to a nationalist logic. Yet in both geographical and ideological terms they overspilled the purview of mainstream nationalism. Their indictment of tyranny and oppression was on principle globally applicable, even while generated by a historically specific situation and inflected in culturally specific terms; moreover, they increasingly envisioned a comprehensive social and economic restructuring for postcolonial India rather than a mere handover of the existing governmental institutions.
Ghadar is also often identified as a Sikh movement, exclusively and by definition, with the Komagata Maru incident triggering a burst of heroic activity to redeem the community from the lingering shame of loyalism in 1857. The Komagata Maru was a ship bearing several hundred South Asian immigrants to Vancouver in the summer of 1914. Conceived by its organizer, Gurdit Singh, as a deliberate challenge to new immigration restrictions, the voyage proved a catalyst for radicalization on both sides of the Pacific after the passengers were refused entry to Canada. The voyage culminated in a violent standoff in the harbor before the ship turned back to sea, and in a shoot-out on arrival in Calcutta in which more than twenty passengers were killed. This narrative reflected the tensions present within the coalition out of which the original movement itself was formed, by rejecting the original non-Sikh elements as no more than a superficial accretion of blowhard intellectuals speechifying about side issues, while the movement’s true heart was to be found among the salt-of-the-earth soldier-farmer-poets who went off to get things done. And without doubt these men were at the heart of the movement; particularly in the second phase, during the 1920s, the movement could be thoroughly identified with this community.
But the uniqueness of Ghadar’s radicalism was born of its combinations: of contexts, populations, issues, frames, scales. There was no hermetic seal between the Bengalis and Punjabis, the students and laborers; between activities initiated in California, or elsewhere in the Indian political network abroad; between schemes underwritten only by subscription among the farmers, or aided by German funds. None of its components in isolation could have produced the same phenomenon. Furthermore, to portray Ghadar as a Sikh organization by design would be to disregard its members’ own expansive universalist principles. Their minds were not narrow, and I believe that they themselves would have wanted to be defined not by ascriptive ethno-religious identity but by their ideological affinities and commitments. In this sense we could consider the Kirti Communists (regional rivals to the M. N. Roy-dominated Communist Party of India infrastructure), rather than the Akali Dal (aimed at regaining control of Sikh holy places, and later associated with the Sikh separatist movement), as better representing the true spirit and intention of the Ghadar movement among the next generation of Punjabi radical movements, although its returned veterans moved into both formations. Indeed, the Ghadar veterans were credited with injecting a more radical social justice and anti-imperial orientation into the Akali movement, which otherwise pointed the way toward a narrower Sikh nationalism.
Any attempt to validate or disqualify an activity as a Ghadarite enterprise based on whether it was conceived, authorized, and directed by a central guiding committee in California is to misrepresent the formality of its party structure. The reality was far more decentralized, as autonomous branches sprang up in various places among those who received the Ghadar, without any direct coordination regarding their activities or decisions. Any influence attributable to a core group stemmed from the stirring content of the published materials flowing from the San Francisco fountainhead, and the inspiration provided by the Ghadarites’ manifest willingness to act upon these ideals.
Similarly, when I argue that the movement functioned to provide connecting links and switching points to other related anticolonial movements, I do not mean that an official unified party line had necessarily endorsed or established formal links with any of them, but that numerous individuals wore multiple hats without conflict. Many activists who had been associated with California Ghadar, and were closely tied to its Yugantar Ashram headquarters in San Francisco, also participated in or supported other formations. There were Ghadarites or Ghadar supporters active in networks of revolutionary (Hindu) nationalism (Taraknath Das, Har Dayal), Marxism (Rattan Singh, Santokh Singh), Pan-Islamism (Muhammad Barakatullah, Obeidullah Sindhi), and various combinations thereof. Thus tracking relationships and connections is less a question of “Ghadar” than of Ghadarites. So we might speak of a party, referring to a distinct organization of particular people at a certain place and time; and a movement, referring to an idea, a sensibility and a set of ideological commitments that took wing—or rather, took ship—exuberantly outrunning their originators’