Elsewhere Bose quotes a Bengal official’s observation that in their practices the “Indian revolutionists imitate the Irish Fenians and the Russian anarchists. Their literature is replete with references to both. Tilak took his ‘no rent’ campaign from Ireland, and the Bengalees learnt the utility of boycott from Irish history. Kanai Dutt was compared to Patrick O’Donnell, who killed James Cary. political dacoity to collect money they have learnt from the Russians.”9 Of course, these were not instances of slavish imitation but of active selection, adaptation, and application, or the recognition of analogies. Elements picked up as “influences” or “borrowings” were those with which the borrowers already felt resonance, or which they deemed most relevant to their situation. For example, egalitarianism was a Sikh value long before contact with American democratic discourse—hence the receptive recognition of that particular element rather than another of many available varieties of Western political philosophy.
Moreover, their encounter with an ideal in the founding values of French and American political liberalism, combined with disgust at the distance between this ideal and the reality they encountered, was an important impetus of the emergent Ghadarite thinking, which gravitated toward the politically libertarian aspects rather than the classical economic elements of Enlightenment thinking as it invoked the touchstones of freedom and democracy. This was especially true of texts intended for potential sympathizers among American audiences:10 Ghadar editor Ram Chandra wrote to the Boston Daily Advertiser in October 1916, in response to accusations of a conspiracy “to stir up trouble against British rule in India” through the publication of seditious literature and fomentation of an uprising. Ram Chandra met these accusations with aplomb, saying: “We very cheerfully admit all this, but we wish to emphasize the fact that all we are doing is to preach Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, the birthright of every human being, and to awaken the world to a realization of the enslaved condition of India, where these great principles are denied to all.”11
Another audience to whom Ghadarites soon began making “passionate appeals” was “the labour unions of the world.”12 These appeals elaborated on the familiar economic drain theory and exhorted the people of the world to make common cause against systems of imperialism.13 Such a blending of political libertarianism and economic socialism, along with a per sis tent tendency toward romantic revolutionism, and within their specific context a marked antigovernment bent, is why one may argue that the Ghadar movement’s alleged incoherence is actually quite legible through a logic of anarchism—which thereby provides a somewhat ironic bridge between rival nationalist and Communist readings of the Ghadar story. In short, not only did Ghadar manage to join the impulses toward class struggle and civil rights with anticolonialism, it also managed to combine commitments to both liberty and equality. Initially drawing sustenance from both utopian socialism and libertarian thought, their critique of capitalism and of liberalism’s racial double standard gained increasingly systematic articulation in the course of the war and the world political shift s in its aftermath.
As to the blending of tactical models, since this was a definitively action-oriented movement, the method was no less important than the motive. this required balancing instrumentality with integrity, strategic with idealistic thinking. Ghadar is often positioned as a transitional phase between two modes of revolutionary struggle, namely, the conspiratorial secret society model and the mass organization model, which is also to say the voluntarist and structuralist theories of precipitating change. However, Ghadar’s should be seen not just as a temporary or intermediate half mea sure, but as a relatively stable mode distinct from other more unequivocal tendencies (in both directions) during both the prewar and the interwar periods.14
To sum up a distinct ideological and tactical profile, an internal logic and a common denominator of identifiable core values and approaches that remained consistent across periods, contexts, and idioms, a proper Ghadarite was
anticolonialist (which should go without saying);
passionately patriotic;
internationalist, pledging figurative kinship and active solidarity wherever people struggled against tyranny and oppression anywhere in the world;
secularist, emphatically opposed to communalism and the politicization of institutional religion, although not necessarily atheist or irreligious;
modernist, critical of tradition’s weight of fatalism and “slave mentality”;
radically democratic, and egalitarian in the face of class and caste differences;
republican, favoring a decentralized federation of Indian states;
anticapitalist (some by implicit moral terms, others, especially after 1920, by explicit Marxian analysis);
militantly revolutionist, opposed to constitutional methods or any compromise with the existing system;
in temperament audacious, dedicated, courageous unto death; in aesthetic romantically capable of gestures such as declaiming a bold slogan, witticism, or verse of farewell poetry at the foot of the gallows (the exemplary Ghadarite in this sense was the prototypical figure of Kartar Singh Sarabha, executed at the age of nineteen or twenty for his role in the attempted uprising of 1915, on whom Bhagat Singh later consciously modeled himself).
As for the Ghadarite goal, it grew increasingly sharper of outline and ambitious of scope over the years: from dignity and respect as Hindustanis at home and abroad
to a free Hindustan
to a free Hindustan, along with a free Ireland, Egypt, and China,
to a free Indian democratic-republican federation, plus a free Ireland, Egypt, and China,
to a free Indian democratic-republican socialist federation, plus a free Ireland, Egypt, and China,
to a free Indian democratic-republican socialist federation, and an end to all forms of economic or imperial slavery anywhere in the world.
The juxtaposition that was so incomprehensible to Chirol, who deemed it clear evidence of the muddleheaded irrationality of the insurgents, is exactly what I want to explore here, by seeking to understand the logic by which the insurgents selected, combined, adapted, and applied tactical and ideological content into a form that continued to develop, dynamically and yet consistently, throughout the trajectory of the revolutionaries abroad.
TRANSPOSITIONS
Beyond Nationalism
Ghadar’s definitive early theorist and propagandist, Har Dayal, in an October 1912 Nation Day speech to Indian students and select faculty at the University of California, declared himself an internationalist who did not believe in “narrow views of nationalism.” Perennial “seditionist” Taraknath Das, speaking at the same event on the “scope and aim of Indian nationalism,”