Haj to Utopia. Maia Ramnath

Hindi Association was Teja Singh, a respected preacher who had been studying at Columbia University when he received an invitation in 1908 to represent his community on the West Coast. Although more a scholar and cleric than a rabble-rouser, he began addressing meetings in the gurdwaras to mobilize defense against the threat of deportation, all the while framing his actions as a sacred mission guided by Guru Nanak, and phrasing his speeches in the idiom of spirituality.

      But although the gurdwaras did remain convenient organizing bases for Ghadarite activities, offering an ideal infrastructure for communicating and assembling people, their original mission was oriented toward defensive self-purification in line with the work of the Sikh Sabha in Punjab, preserving community identity against the danger of its erosion in a foreign country. These efforts, carried out though the leaders of the Khalsa Diwan Society, were concerned with counteracting deviations in orthodox dress and food habits among the Sikh laborers through evangelization and the foundation of new gurdwaras (and if necessary the boycott and ostracism of apostates).¹² However, Puri attributes this attitude, as well as the attachment to martial-caste loyalism to Britain, to elites among the immigrants. The Ghadar Party, when it emerged, represented quite a different stance.

      Meanwhile, Indian students began trickling into the United States around 1906 seeking technical training or degrees in fields emblematic of modernity, such as engineering and chemistry; or if they had followed Har Dayal’s recommendations, economics and sociology. Many had first tried Japan only to find that the Anglo-Japanese agreement prevented their access to the specific types of training they sought. The majority of students were Bengali, and their most immediate context of political radicalization had been the Swadeshi movement and the connected revolutionist centers in London and Paris.

      In 1912, Jawala Singh, a prosperous potato farmer and agricultural entrepreneur near Stockton, approached Har Dayal with a proposal to endow a scholarship with the goal of bringing students from all over India to study in the United States, preferably at the University of California, where most were enrolled.¹³ Along with important future Ghadarites Wasakha Singh and Santokh Singh (whom Behari Lal described as “exceptionally patriotic and pious men”),¹⁴ he had formed a society in 1912 whose members pledged “one hundred per cent dedication” to their country’s liberation. The first competition for the Guru Gobind Singh scholarships was to be judged by a selection committee consisting of Har Dayal, Teja Singh, Taraknath Das, and Arthur Pope, a sympathetic philosophy professor of the University of California. The scholarship was supposed to cover tuition, textbooks, lab fees, room and board, second-class return passage to India, and a $50 monthly stipend. Eligibility was in theory to be unrestricted by caste, religion, race, or gender. Out of six hundred applicants, six were selected for the 1912–13 academic year, including Gobind Behari Lal.¹⁵ But by the time they arrived, Jawala Singh’s harvest had proven significantly less lucrative than expected due to a drop in potato prices that year, and the promised funds were not forthcoming. The scholarship winners decided to stay and enroll anyway, using their own resources.

      Together the six scholars rented a house near the campus. Among the six, Nand Singh was the designated mediator to the scholarship committee, ensuring their material needs were supplied. They took turns cooking “Indian food of a very simple kind, rice, dal, milk, vegetable or meat” and also got a small weekly allowance for pocket money. By the end of 1912, however, the funds dried up completely. The notion of “self-supporting,” said Behari Lal, was “a peculiar American system” quite new to them.¹⁶ Now, like the rest of the students, they earned their living by working in the mornings or afternoons, or during holidays, waiting tables in boarding houses, washing dishes in restaurants, selling newspapers, or even working in canneries. During the summers, they oft en worked in “the fields and orchards where, almost always in the company of Indian farm workers—Sikhs, Moslems, Hindus, Pathans—they picked fruit from the trees or planted celeray [sic] or potatoes or did some thing or other.”¹⁷ On a 25¢ to 30¢ hourly wage, or by selling Indian handicraft s such as shawls (was it assumed they would bring the stock of goods with them?), one could live comfortably for a year on $250 and like a king for $350.¹⁸

      In 1911, Calcutta’s English-language magazine Modern Review printed a series of articles offering advice to Indian students on how to deal with arrival and life in America, such as how to find housing and employment. One should bring identification papers from a sponsoring organization and then get a recommendation letter from the American consul general in Seattle. (Students also were advised to just say no if the immigration inspector asked if they believed in polygamy. Such a traditional form of Oriental deviance was certainly no less controversial than the very modern Western practice of free love, advocacy of which was to get Har Dayal into trouble the following year.) Someone would then meet and escort them to G. D. Kumar’s new India House. From there they could write to Berkeley, and someone else would come up to meet them. The recommended course was to arrive in the spring, work over the summer, and enroll in the fall, either at the university straightaway or at a free Berkeley high school for a year first.

      Har Dayal also published a series of articles in Modern Review, praising the United States as the ideal place in all the world “from which a solitary wandering Hindu can send a message of hope and encouragement to his countrymen.” As the future-oriented nation par excellence, the United States was the perfect foil for India, whose ancient culture it was thus eager to embrace. Indeed, such a rapprochement would be mutually beneficial: Vedantic philosophy would do wonders for the superficial, “restless, noisy,” “overfed, self-complacent” Americans, while modernity would stimulate and inspire the Indians mired in tradition, stunted by colonial chains, and hampered by current repression. He thought the social and political climate of the United States would be very salubrious for Indian students, virtually “an ethical sanitarium.” Here they could openly explore “the value of unity, the lessons to be learned from Japan, the importance of industrial progress, the greatness of the American people, the blessings of democracy, the honourableness of manual labour, the meanness of Theodore Roosevelt and the necessity for education, liberal and technical, for the uplifting of the people of India.” As they were in Har Dayal’s opinion “endowed with energy and brains but little money,” they would benefit in practical terms not only from technical training but from the moral effects of supporting themselves for the first time through manual labor, thereby “learning self-reliance and resourcefulness of mind.”¹⁹

      In a similar vein Harnam Singh Chima published “Why India Sends Students to America” in 1907. He asserted that the real purpose for him and his fellow students was “that we may deserve the title educated in the fullest and practical sense of the word. We came here to imbibe free thoughts from free people and teach the same when we go back to our country and to get rid of the tyranny of the rule of the universal oppressor (the British).”²⁰

      No less than the workers, the students experienced racism. Boarding houses and restaurants often declined to serve them, and they were ineligible for membership in most campus clubs. This, along with the need for them to do menial labor, may to some degree have neutralized the class privilege they had enjoyed in India. In any case the Ghadarites and their immediate predecessors deliberately fostered secularism, tolerance, and fraternization across religious and caste lines. Of course it would be disingenuous to suggest that all differences of class, caste, religion, and regional origin were erased in the New World. However, it does seem that these differences faded into lower relief in comparison to their mutual interests and experiences in the North American context. Even if these and other differences were not completely erased—only temporarily deemphasized to reemerge later—by 1912 the Ghadar community’s two main ingredients were present. The movement’s “outstanding characteristic,” in participant Gobind Behari Lal’s opinion, was the “combination of university-bred scholar and the cultural leader and of the pre-educated Indians, workers, farmers and small shopkeepers etc. of the Pacific Coast.”²¹ But the ensuing emphasis on education for workers and manual labor for students closed the distance between them and encouraged the merging of each group’s concerns with those of the other—a volatile fusion that illuminated and ignited both of them.

      Neither students nor laborers as a group were overwhelmingly political upon arrival, as the majority were focused on their own personal advancement.