to the complex connections between ideas of the world and behavior in the world.”21 Like theirs in this way, my work here is concerned with praxis; that is, not with theory in isolation, but with the way that ideas are generated within historical context and play a substantive role in bringing about historical change.
Moreover, this work is a narrative about people who felt the same way. The Ghadarites were pragmatists, not dogmatists; activists above all, not systematic armchair theorists. Above all, as Rattan Singh recalled, “Every step taken by the Ghadr Party … has been practical and has meant action. Its resolutions have never remained on paper; they have always been put into action.”22 Indeed, radicalism itself resides as much in the commitment to acting on ideals, making them effective in reality, and translating them into social form, as it does in the actual content of the ideas. In selecting their allies, the Ghadarites allotted more weight to shared goals and common sensibilities (notably their appreciation for fierce and total commitment to one’s objectives) than to niceties of doctrine. Yet neither were they ideologically vacant. Far more than an inchoate burst of quickly dispersed revolutionary energy, they created an important missing link in the genealogy of South Asian radicalism, as well as a bridge between contemporaneous radical movements. Therein lies not the least of their contributions to history.
Overview
Chapter 1 concerns the birth of the Ghadar movement on the Pacific coast in 1913, its activities in California, and the content and spread of its propaganda, culminating in its homeward journey of intended liberation launched at the outbreak of World War I. Although the attempted uprising of February 1915 was crushed by means of the First Lahore Conspiracy trials, the ideas it had reimported lingered significantly: when the would-be freedom fighters of 1914–1915 set out upon their return to India “to inform their kinsmen of the unequal treatment that was meted out to them” overseas, they did so by “preach[ing] the doctrines of revolution that they had learned from the Ghadr and the crude socialism that they had picked up in the towns of western Canada and the United States.”23 Crucially, the radicalization of South Asians in North America in the early twentieth century was defined by labor relations as refracted by race, which facilitated their affinity with the IWW’s American form of syndicalism, as shown in chapter 2.
Chapters 3 and 4 together mark a turning point in the narrative, in which the nationalist aspect comes to the fore. Here I focus on the period of strategic anti-British partnerships in the context of World War I, through which a number of elaborate covert operations were carried out with German/Ottoman patronage, in contrast to the 1915 outbreak that the California Ghadarites had initiated autonomously. Nationalism also mediated the collaborations among Indian, Irish, and Egyptian revolutionists active in Europe and North America, and the analogies in sensibility and situation that they recognized among themselves. This period was shut down with another legal case in 1918, the sensational Hindu-German Conspiracy trial in San Francisco.
But the Ghadar Party appeared in a second distinct incarnation, this time Communist in the more orthodox Marxist-Leninist sense, in contrast to its prewar leanings toward the less systematic (though perhaps more holistic) utopian socialism associated with Har Dayal. This is the matter of chapter 5. Following the exhilarating success of the Bolshevik revolution, and given the Comintern’s strategic commitment to supporting Asian national liberation struggles, Ghadarites turned to Moscow as their new self-described mecca for political training, theoretical guidance, and moral and material support. During the 1920s, Ghadar sent batches of trainees to Moscow while establishing new organs and organizing centers in China and Punjab.24 At the same time it helped seed the growth of civil rights and antideportation campaigns in the United States through the Friends of Freedom for India (FFI). In India meanwhile it helped seed the growth of the next generation of militant anticolonial struggle through Bhagat Singh, the Kirti group, the Naujavan Bharat Sabha, and the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army.
In the final two chapters I back up in time to pick up the parallel thread of Pan-Islamism, which had been continuously intertwined with Ghadar’s activities starting from the latter’s prewar overtures to Muslim soldiers identified as potential mutineers in the British Indian army. The interaction became even more significant through the German/Ottoman-backed schemes in west and central Asia during the war, reflecting the goals and preoccupations of this alliance. After the war, when Moscow displaced Berlin as center of patronage, this pattern of relationships did not change. It culminated in a rapprochement with the Khilafat movement of the early 1920s and its subset, the Hijrat movement. Theoretical links were elaborated by Obeidullah Sindhi and Mohammed Barakatullah, both of whom had complex Ghadar ties.
A Word for the Journey
Har Dayal commented in the Bande Mataram in 1910: “Exile has its privileges. It is the price paid for the right of preaching the truth as it appears to us. We do not deal in political casuistry mingled with erroneous philosophy. … We may pay homage only to our conscience and defy all the governments of the world to make us deviate a hair’s breadth from the path of Duty and Righ teousness.”25
The Revolutionary Movement Abroad was a phenomenon of travelers; it could not have occurred otherwise. As perspectives opened out for economic migrants encountering new contexts, and as political trajectories became literal journeys of enforced exile and clandestine organizing, the leading edge of radicalism passed literally and figuratively beyond the bounds of the territorial nation-state. Yet in all these journeys, whether the world traveler’s face was set toward a home as a free Indian citizen or a free American or Soviet one, the destination was always a dream of utopia.
Kim Stanley Robinson has one of the transplanetary nomads in his speculative Mars trilogy declare that “history is the haj to utopia.”26 In simplest terms, Robinson’s book is about the colonization and terraforming of Mars. But more deeply, it is about the process of designing a society, initially far beyond the reach of the old earth’s interstate relations and corporate economics, though these interests of course are pulled closer as breakthroughs in transport and communications occur, and as the immigrant population increases. Nevertheless, as the new society develops, the Martians have an unprecedented opportunity to define new categories of identity within social units based rather in affinity and ideology than in ethnic or national affiliation; and to negotiate a framework of principles for accommodating difference, by which the autonomy of communities who use different social blueprints can be maintained within a larger federation, in which ecological survival rather than political power forms the baseline for collective control. Aside from the anachronistic ecological aspect, this seems to me quite applicable to the vision of a Ghadarite India.
Lamin Sanneh has described the functions of ritual pilgrimage in spatially marking off an identity, purified and confirmed by certain practices carried out along the way and especially on reaching the destination—where, upon arrival, the traveler experiences the intensity of a sense of identification with a transnational community or “brotherhood” of spiritual kindred, resulting in a recommitment to an ideological program.27 I am certainly not suggesting that the future Ghadarites set sail for America with any such conscious sense of ritual significance. Their journey began not as an intentional pilgrimage but a pragmatic journey of economic or educational opportunity. However, I suspect that they would recognize the effect that Sanneh describes. And the revolutionaries did begin to speak in the language of pilgrimage. For the Ghadarites “Moscow became Mecca.” Meanwhile, hajis bound for the real Mecca and muhajirin bound for the heart of the caliphate at Istanbul became literal fellow travelers. There was a mission to be fulfilled across the sea, and if they could not make it to the other shore, they were ready to immolate themselves so that others could. They spoke of an altar, and a sacrifice; they spoke of moths to the flame. But the Swadeshi activists’ Bharat Mata had been replaced as deity on the blood-spattered dais by inqilab (revolution) or azadi (freedom).