be clumsily direct in acknowledging the awkward two-tiered status of the dominions separating the white-settler colonies of Canada and Australia from His Majesty’s Asian and African possessions.
In April 1914, Gurdit Singh, a prosperous Singapore-based labor-transport contractor, chartered a ship to take a load of passengers to Canada from among the hundreds of his compatriots then awaiting passage in Hong Kong and other East Asian ports. Besides being a deliberate challenge to the statutes, it was also an act of altruistic self-interest, serving the community while also benefiting his own future shipping interest. After stops in Shanghai, Kobe, and Yokohama, the total manifest included 376 passengers, the majority adult male Sikhs, except for twenty-one Muslims.
When they reached Vancouver on 23 May 1914, however, they were refused entry. As they waited at anchor for weeks, provisions on the ship ran low and tempers ran high. A shore committee was formed consisting of Balwant Singh, Husain Rahim, and Sohan Lal Pathak; a support meeting in Vancouver in July was attended by “some 400 Indians and 150 white men. The latter were mainly socialists.”71 This was attributed to the fact that Husain Rahim, then editor of the Hindustani,72 was also the secretary of the local Socialist organization, one of whose more “rabid” members now “advised the Indians to return to India, raise the standard of revolution and become masters of their own country.”73
Despite the efforts of the shore committee, the climax of the standoff was an attempt to forcibly transfer the passengers to another liner to be sent back. While a militia guarded the food stores on the wharf, which were to be loaded onto the new ship, a tugboat approached, bearing 120 police along with the chief and four inspectors, plus forty special immigration officials. Among them was the hated William C. Hopkinson, at whom the defenders of the ship were aiming particular wrath. The Komagata Maru passengers took over their ship and beat off the approaching vessel, outmatching its grappling hooks and water hose by throwing coal, bricks, scrap metal, and concrete. They had armed themselves with stoking irons, axes, swords, lathis, clubs, and even some spears handmade on shipboard. (We are reminded that many of them were, after all, “battle-seasoned veterans” of the British army.)74 The wounded tug and three picketboats patrolled the harbor around them until a Canadian naval cruiser (one half of the national fleet at the time) came to support them, with orders to seize the ship. This time the furious passengers threatened to hold immigration official Malcolm Reid hostage until food and water were supplied to them for the return journey by the same vessel on which they had come. Eventually the Minister of Agriculture from Ottawa managed to talk them down to a tense compromise, agreeing that if the Indians relinquished control of the ship to its Japanese captain they might return across the Pacific in peace with full provisions.
On 23 July 1914, two months after arriving, they were escorted from the harbor by a cordon of navy vessels and an armed battle cruiser.75 But Hopkinson, bespoke spy for the West Coast “Hindus,” had been warning authorities that the Komagata Maru passengers’ stiff resistance was being instigated by “a conspiracy headed by educated Indians living in the U.S.” This was something of an exaggeration, although it wasn’t untrue that the Ghadarites had approached the Komagata Maru passengers, spotting a ripe opportunity for propagandizing among their primary demographic. Bhagwan Singh, Barakatullah, and Balwant Singh had been making speeches and distributing literature on the ship in its East Asian ports of call on the outward voyage.
Angry and frustrated, the travelers docked at Budge Budge near Calcutta in late September only to be met on shore by police who tried to herd them onto a train to Punjab, subject to the new Ingress of India Ordinance passed on 5 September. The law allowed potential subversives entering during war time to be immediately arrested and detained without trial. (Yes, as the ship steamed across the Pacific, there had been a shooting in Sarajevo.) Ironically, many of them hadn’t even wanted to come to India at all, preferring to return to Japan and coastal China, where they had been before the voyage, but none of their previous embarkation points would let them land. Now, refusing to board the train, the majority of the Sikh passengers marched en masse toward Calcutta. The panicked police then foolishly escalated the situation into another standoff and shoot-out in which eighteen passengers were killed, twenty-eight fled, and most of the others were arrested, all of which simply increased the appeal of the Ghadar Party still more.76
Meanwhile, news of the Komagata Maru’s fate lit a fuse for the already-primed West Coast community, speeding the escalation of demands for armed action to avenge such a grievous insult. Sohan Singh Bhakna caught up with the ship at Yokohama with a delivery of two hundred pistols and several hundred cartridges, before continuing on to India with another group from Shanghai. The first Ghadarite jatha (squad) reached Calcutta from Shanghai not long after. To the consternation of officials, many of the Sikhs apprehended at Budge Budge were found to be armed with American-made revolvers.77 (On one of the propaganda stops Bhagwan Singh had reportedly sold a pistol to Gurdit Singh, and it was suspected that there had been an attempt to smuggle arms aboard at Vancouver as well.)
Meanwhile Bhagwan Singh, Muhammed Barakatullah, and Ram Chandra addressed public meetings along the length of California, holding mass meetings in Sacramento, Fresno, Stockton, Portland, and all the smaller towns where there were Indian communities, at which they collected funds and gathered recruits, who then converged on San Francisco to board ships. The Ghadar reported on the massive Fresno and Sacramento meetings of 9 and 11 August, informing readers of the war, telling them to be on alert for the mutiny, and to make haste for India if they wanted to fight in a rising that would join with all the “enemies of the Empire” to overthrow the existing government and found a republic.78
Ram Chandra exhorted those gathered in Fresno: “The ghosts of our ancestors are branding us as a shameless progeny. They … will never know rest until we cut down every Englishman. Our Motherland is summoning us to come and free her from the clutches of these tyrants. If you claim to be sons of India deposit your belongings with the Yugantar Ashram and be ready to board the ship for India. Let each of my countrymen, who is prepared to undertake the work, come to the hotel and give me his name.”79 Between five and six thousand men were counted present, in addition to some new recruits who had accompanied Amar Singh from Oregon, and between $5000 and $6000 was collected for weapons and ship passage.80 Moreover, at all the gatherings “the speakers declared that India had received assurances from Germany that if they would revolt against England help would be received from the Germans,” and that although such a revolt was inevitable in time, “to strike now would mean victory for India.” The conspirators had not fully mastered the art of secrecy, it appears.
This article also hinted at how a mobilization of agricultural workers necessarily followed the rhythms of the harvest. Lecturers were fanning out from San Francisco “to different sections of the state where Hindus are employed in the fruit, and mass meetings are being held,” but “it is probable that no more meetings will be held in Fresno. The grape picking is almost finished and the Hindus in a few days will start to move. The next meetings will likely be held in Stockton and Sacramento.”81
MUTINEERS
After the declaration of war, things started moving very quickly. Kartar Singh set out almost immediately, at the beginning of August.82 Between sixty and eighty eager mutineers followed him on the SS Korea at the end of the month.83 Small autonomous jathas, or squads, of four or five began organizing themselves at mills and ranches, pooling money to book passage.84 The Stockton Khalsa Diwan was receiving numerous requests to handle the sale of land owned by Sikh immigrants to finance their return—thereby literally sacrificing an American territorial future for an Indian one.85
Chenchiah recalled in his memoir that upon the outbreak of the war Berkeley radical Jatindra Nath Lahiri had proposed, and Kartar Singh and Chenchiah concurred, that while the Punjabis should depart immediately, the students had more learning and preparation to do. Presumably the Punjabis had already received sufficient military training during their army stints. Since military training was impossible at the university, they decided to seek out other schools, some quite remote. Chenchiah was one such; when he returned a year later in 1915 to await orders, he said, he was taken aback “to find myself in the midst of strangers in the headquarters.”86