Haj to Utopia. Maia Ramnath

saw the travelers off with hortatory farewells, along now-familiar lines: “Your duty is clear. Go to India and stir up rebellion in every corner of the country. Rob the wealthy and show mercy to the poor. In this way you will win universal sympathy. Arms will be provided for you on your arrival in India. Failing this you must ransack the police stations for rifles. Obey without hesitation the commands of your leaders.”⁸⁷ At each port of call they paused to gather recruits and contact soldiers.⁸⁸ At Yokohama they picked up extra weapons, and at Kobe they met another shipload of rebels coming from Vancouver. At Manila they were met by Hafiz Abdulla, president of the local Ghadar branch; Nawab Khan and Jagat Ram then addressed a meeting on the beach, at which “a quantity of seditious literature was also distributed.”⁸⁹ By the time they reached Hong Kong their numbers had swelled to three hundred. But there a telegram arrived from Nidhan Singh, who had left the Korea at Nagasaki and gone on ahead to Shanghai. He warned them that they would be searched on arrival in Hong Kong for weapons, ammunition, and seditious literature, so the leaders collected all such incriminating material and threw it overboard. They were also informed that no ship would be allowed to land with more than two hundred Indians on board, so they divided themselves up. Two hundred transferred to the Tosa Maru, the bulk of whom were interned on arrival in Calcutta on 29 October.⁹⁰ Indeed, the Sedition Committee Report deemed the Tosa Maru group “the most dangerous” of the shiploads, as it “contained malcontents who had divided themselves into sections each of which was to work under a leader in a particular area of the Punjab,” had the mass internment not “disorganized these elaborate arrangements.”⁹¹ After that they soon learned to travel in less conspicuous handfuls to avoid this problem. The jathas arrived throughout the fall and winter, often choosing Japanese vessels in order to avoid British shipping lanes; once ashore they proceeded individually to Punjab to regroup at a set date.⁹² For inconspicuous travel, one returnee also noted that he had “exchanged my small turban for a large one to avoid being detected as a returned emigrant.”⁹³

      From that fall to the spring of 1915, 579 “brave ones” embarked from North America, and 470 from East Asia.⁹⁴ During the first two years of the war, Rattan Singh estimated that 8,000 of his fellow Ghadarites made the return voyage, about two-thirds of the total overseas membership.⁹⁵ The government knew not yet how to gauge the new arrivals’ “relative inherent capacity for mischief,” but it did know that there was a hostile organization in America, and that the “abnormal number” of emigrants returning after absences of some years had risen enough to attract uneasy attention.⁹⁶ Further investigation hinted that scant few of the Indians in North America seemed to have “escaped contamination” from the “taint” of Ghadar ideas. Therefore, police authorities warned, “prima facie every Indian returning from America or Canada, whether labourer, artisan or student, must be regarded with the greatest suspicion as a probable active revolutionary, or at any rate a sympathiser with the revolutionary party.”⁹⁷ The disease was just as epidemic in Hong Kong and Manila, where Bhagwan Singh had returned from California to rouse and recruit, while others went to rouse the Malay States, Singapore, and Burma. Therefore “those returning from the Far East, other than Government servants and other persons vouched for by the Hong Kong and Shanghai authorities, must be regarded in the same light.”⁹⁸

      Many arrivals were promptly interned or confined to their villages on security.⁹⁹ But for those who did reach their destinations undetected, the next step was to divide up into what Rattan Singh called “guerrilla bands” of four to five people, and then into gangs of around sixteen, under different leaders, concealing themselves throughout the country until the moment came to unite for a campaign. The decentralization was intended to reduce the chances of movement decapitation should any one leader and his party be captured.¹⁰⁰ Unfortunately, scattered arrests, some leading to confessions, discombobulated the organization from the start. Moreover, there were no systematic communication channels between the groups nor any structure in place to receive new arrivals.¹⁰¹ A few early dates proposed for an uprising passed without event: a general mutiny to be sparked by an attack on the Mian Meer arsenal on 15 November, with some soldiers assisting; a declaration of rebellion to follow a mutiny in the Lahore cantonment on 26 November; a rebellion to follow an attack on the Ferozepur magazine soon after. By December the efforts at rebellion appeared quiescent. In the meantime the gangs gave up waiting for vague and conflicting instructions from Lahore, where Bhai Parmanand had established a base intended for political and press work, and instead “wandered about from village to village,” having taken the initiative “to meet other returned emigrants, organise gatherings and look for likely places to commit dacoities” for arms or funds, to “preach sedition” and “corrupt the Indian troops,” or to pursue secret contacts.¹⁰²

      Some looked beyond the imperative of resistance to take positive steps toward a postrevolutionary vision. A student in Ludhiana named Dalip Singh, who became an ardent Ghadar supporter after being “led astray by the anti-British and socialistic conversation of Nidhan Singh, Parmanand and others,” related:

      Every time I met these men, I questioned them as to how they could overthrow such a powerful Government; and their reply was that the mainstays of the Government were their own brethren…. The Government was much preoccupied by the European war, and the number of British soldiers in India was very small. Hence we should soon be able to turn them out and form our own Parliament. In each village we should appoint representatives and decide cases in “Parliament.” This would be a success as villagers knew best what was happening in their neighbourhood.¹⁰³

      Between 1913 and 1915, Balwant Singh, who hoped to win “converts” in the vicinity of his home village of Sangwal by reading to them the Ghadar newspaper that he received under multiple false addresses, created a village society that ran a school, a veterinary hospital, a library, and an on-the-ground criminal court—in effect, an autonomous community.¹⁰⁴ Piara Singh and some of his fellows established a school in Namana village with the aim of “educating their fellow countrymen and inspiring in them ideas of freedom and of their political rights,” a goal they had discussed while in Canada.¹⁰⁵ By 1915 the school had a gurdwara above and a schoolroom below and served as a meeting place for the revolutionaries. Overall, noted the comprehensive 1918 Sedition Committee Report, the returning rebels had been “indoctrinated with … ideas of equality and democracy in America and led to believe by Har Dayal … that India can be made into a Utopia in which all will be equal, and plague and famine cease to exist by the simple expedient of driving out the British.”¹⁰⁶

      Progress toward that goal resumed once the returnees started to establish better contact with the Bengali Yugantar group, an important sector of the national-revolutionist Swadeshi movement. The conduit was the branch based in Varanasi, led by Rash Behari Bose and Sachindranath Sanyal; the latter became one of the most important liaisons between the Bengali revolutionary network and the returned Punjabi militants. Upon first meeting with Ghadarites Kartar Singh, Amar Singh, Pirthi Singh, and Ram Saran Das, Sanyal inquired about the conspirators’ arrangements, numbers, and needs: they had ample personnel but were lacking in money, arms, and capable, well-coordinated leadership. Sanyal left them a revolver and some cartridges, plus instructions on how to contact him for another meeting. But the arrest of Pirthi Singh, who had the information, forestalled this.

      A month later Pingle, one of the architects of the Ghadar action wing back in California and Oregon, arrived as the next emissary tasked with making “definite arrangements for cooperation” between the Bengalis and the returned Punjabis, and building upon Sanyal’s initial contact. A Maharashtrian, he had returned to India in November 1914 with some Sikh Ghadarites but then joined with Rash Behari Bose’s “Bengal anarchist” circle and continued working to facilitate communication and organizational collaboration between the two groups.¹⁰⁷ Sanyal and Pingle then went through a round of secret meetings with revolutionaries throughout North India until Sanyal went to direct the eastern centers.¹⁰⁸

      Early in the year a tactical headquarters for the Ghadar activities was set up in Amritsar, coordinated by Mula Singh. To the empire’s secret eyes, Bose’s arrival in Amritsar opened up a period of “the most concerted and the most dangerous activity since the birth of the movement.”¹⁰⁹ When