also started a Hindustan Association and a dormitory called the Magnolia Street Union, which provided Punjabi laborers with room and board for 10¢ a night.35 He also published a short-lived Urdu paper called the Circular-i-Azadi (Circular of Freedom), which appeared in June, July, and August 1907 in San Francisco and Oakland. One of the first significant pieces of anticolonial propaganda literature circulated on the West Coast, it was prohibited from shipment to India due to its “seditious” content. According to the report of the director of criminal intelligence for January 1908, its “object … is to organise an Indian national party among the Indians who go to America for employment…. It seems to owe its existence to the collision which has occurred between the white and coloured labour at Vancouver and at places in California, the state of Washington and elsewhere in the west of America.”36
Puri’s paper was allegedly connected to an “Indian Association” based in San Francisco, and with branches in Astoria and Vancouver, the purpose of which was “to impart instructions to Indians on national lines, to teach gunfiring, Japanese exercises, and the use of spear, sword and other weapons in self-defence, and to foster American sympathy with India.”37 Although copies of the original paper are now impossible to find, the Director of Criminal Intelligence (DCI) reports inform us that the August issue included an article advocating a boycott of government service; and that both the July and the August issues contained extracts from the anti-British Gaelic American (of which we have not heard the last) and from other Indian newspapers—presumably the Bande Mataram and Indian Sociologist, since they shared material with the Gaelic American.
Puri acquired a modest bit of land in Oakland around 1910 and considered settling in the United States, since he was still afraid to return to India. But he apparently changed his mind, reaching Tokyo in time to make a “very objectionable” (which presumably meant militantly seditious) speech at a farewell dinner for Muhammed Barakatullah, who was leaving his teaching post there in summer 1910. Puri then “turned up unexpectedly” in Bijnor (his hometown) in 1911 and advised the youth at the Arya Samaj gurukul (religious school) there that they should “go to America where they would learn how a man could achieve liberty.” The report is silent as to what happened to him later, whether he stayed in Bijnor, and whether he reconnected with the Ghadarites when they returned in 1914–15.
Guru Dutt Kumar
Guru Dutt Kumar arrived in British Columbia around 1907 and opened a grocery store in Victoria.38 Born in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), he was exposed to the revolutionary movement in Calcutta, where he had studied at the National College, briefly taught Urdu and Hindi, and apprenticed at a photographer’s studio. In Calcutta he also met Taraknath Das, who assisted him in coming to North America, along with Harnam Singh Sahri, a veteran of the Fourth Cavalry.39
In 1909 Kumar became the secretary of a new Hindustan Association in Vancouver—the same association linked to Puri’s Circular of Freedom. Its ultimate goal was “complete self-government” for the “Hindustani Nation,” which for him would entail not only the elimination of foreign exploitation but the promotion of domestic education, industry, trade, and agriculture.40 The organization boasted some 250 members and ministered most to “students and educated men.” F. C. Isemonger and James Slattery’s official report claimed that it functioned chiefly to entice Indian students to America, where they could be “instructed in nationalist, revolutionary, and even anarchical doctrines.” 41 Initially working closely with the Khalsa Diwan Society, Kumar emphasized social reform, moral uplift, teetotaling, and caste and religious harmony. While agitating against entry bans on new immigrants, including families attempting to join their loved ones who were already there, an anticolonial strain was becoming increasingly overt.42
Kumar and his colleagues also opened the Swadesh Sevak Home in Vancouver, modeled on Krishnavarma’s London India House. It offered a school for immigrants’ children (although with families barred from entry, surely there could not have been many of them) and evening English classes for the immigrants themselves. Its corresponding organ was the Swadesh Sevak, started in 1910 as the Gurmukhi counterpart to Taraknath Das’s Free Hindustan. Both papers reprinted articles from the Bande Mataram and Indian Sociologist, which were published by their radical movement counterparts in Europe, and advocated mutiny among the Sikh troops in the British Indian army. The paper was put on the list of “objectionable” literature prohibited from entering India under the Sea Customs Act, as of March 1911.43
Meanwhile, Kumar, Sahri, and others took up the practice of visiting groups of Indian laborers at their workplaces to talk with them about “social and political problems.” 44 In addition to circulating the paper, they held meetings and raised funds for combating the entry ban or reversing the arrests of confederates who had been threatened with deportation.45 Upon his arrest in October 1910, Kumar was found to be in contact with Das, and “in possession of the addresses of a number of Hindu [i.e., Indian] agitators in America, Africa, Switzerland, Egypt and France, and also had some notes on the manufacture of nitroglycerine.” The deportation case was decided in his favor, and he stayed on to become “a leader in the agitation against the immigration laws.” 46
Kumar and Sahri also focused (secretly) on recruiting new immigrants as potential anti-British revolutionaries, offering training in the procurement and use of arms and explosives. An association requiring an oath of secrecy for membership was formed in 1911, whose aim was “to establish liberty, equality and fraternity of the Hindustani nation in their relation with the rest of the nations of the world.” 47
The arrests on the pretext of illegal entry were symptoms of the suspicion and surveillance under which the British and Canadian authorities kept the Hindustan Association. In May 1911 the Vancouver Daily Province printed a story claiming that the “Vancouver Hindus” had sent thousands of dollars to “plotters in India” for the purchase of rifles. Kumar wrote scathingly to the editor, refuting the headline as slander, but nevertheless closed down the association soon afterward, along with the paper and the house, and left the country to join Taraknath Das in Seattle.48
Taraknath Das
Taraknath Das had been recruited to the original Bengali Anusilan Samiti in 1903 and helped to form its Dacca branch in 1905.49 The following year he took the familiar route through Japan to New York at age twenty-three. After earning a college degree in Seattle, he went to work as an interpreter in the U.S. immigration office in Vancouver. But he was fired in 1908 for his obtrusive habit of exhibiting scathing anti-British opinions.
In April, just before Das’s dismissal, the first issue of his eight-page English-language journal Free Hindustan had appeared. After two months he relocated printing to Seattle, where the Socialist paper Western Clarion provided the use of its press,50 and then to New York, aided by the press and the comradeship of George Freeman, editor of the Irish-American Fenian Brotherhood’s organ Gaelic American. In fact, the DCI noted in July 1908 that the first two issues of Free Hindustan had arrived enclosed inside a copy of the latter, even before the partnership officially began in August. The new paper was “similar in size and character to the Indian Sociologist,” and Das, its editor, also happened to be the treasurer of the Vancouver Indian Association. “The subject to which most attention is directed in these two numbers,” noted Sir Charles Cleveland, Director of Criminal Intelligence, “is naturally the immigration question and, in addition, the impoverishment of India by England, and a few other grievances are discussed with considerable bitterness.”51
Like the Indian Sociologist, whose tone it echoed, Free Hindustan took its masthead motto from Herbert Spencer: “Resistance to Tyranny is Obedience to God.” The paper’s claimed purpose was “political education of the masses for revolution.” A 1910 issue “advised political work among the Sikh soldiers for an ‘organised uprising’ ”;52 it noted that “considerable numbers [of Sikhs] were settled in Canada and the Western States, and … were already much irritated by the Canadian immigration restrictions.”53 The first issue contained an account of a mass meeting of Vancouver Indians outraged by such