Two revolutions: The Ghadar movement and India's radical diaspora, 1913-1918

Radical History Review

Volumn 92, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 7-30

  Ramnath, Maia ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 70450112729     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: 15341453     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2005-92-7     Document Type: Article

References (49)

1. For the American context, see S. Chandrasekhar, ed, From India to America: A Brief History of Immigration; Problems of Discrimination, Admission, and Assimilation (La Jolla, CA: Population Review Publications, 1982);
2. Joan M. Jensen, A Passage from India (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988);
3. Karen Isaksen Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California's Punjabi Mexican Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992);
4. H. Brett Melendy, Asians in America: Filipinos, Koreans, and East Indians (Boston: Twayne, 1977);
5. Malini Sood, "Expatriate Nationalism and Ethnic Radicalism" (PhD diss., State University of New York at Stonybrook, 1995). For the Indian Left context, see Leonard Gordon, Bengal: The Nationalist Movement, 1816-1940 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974);
6. Sohan Singh Josh, Hindustan Cadar Party, 2 vols. (New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1977-78);
7. Sohan Singh Josh, Baba SoJian Singh Bhakna: Life of the Founder of the Ghadar Party (New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1975);
8. R. C. Majumdar, History of the Freedom Movement in India, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Mukhopadhyay, 1963);
9. Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal (New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1973). For the transnational political context, see Don Dignan, The Indian Revolutionary Problem in British Diplomacy 1914-19 (New Delhi: Allied, 1983);
10. T. R. Sareen, Indian Revolutionary Movement Abroad (New Delhi: Sterling, 1979). For invaluable Ghadar-specific material, see Emily Brown, Har Daijal: Hindu Revolutionist and Rationalist (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975);
11. Frederick Isemonger and James Slattery, An Account of the Ghadar Conspiracy, 1913-1915 (1919;
12. Berkeley, CA: Folklore Institute, 1998);
13. Robert G. Lee, "The Hidden World of Asian Immigrant Radicalism," in The Immigrant Left in the United States, ed. Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996): 270-73.
14. Janice and Stephen MacKinnon, Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970);
15. Harish K. Puri, Ghadar Movement: Ideology, Organization, and Strategy (Amritsar, India: Guru Nanak Dev University Press, 1983)
16. Puri, Ghadar Movement, 6.
17. See Dhan Gopal Mukerji's autobiographical Caste and Outcast (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 133. Curzon is quoted in Sareen, Indian Revolutionary Movement Abroad, 145.
18. Sareen, Indian Revolutionary Movement Abroad, 37.
19. 5. Darisi Chenchiah, "History of the Freedom Movement in India: the Ghadar Movement, 1913-1918." Unpublished manuscript. Gadar Collection, South and Southeast Asia Library Special Collection, University of California at Berkeley.
20. This and other oft-quoted Ghadar excerpts appear in most secondary sources, with slight variations in wording. The United States Department of War did English translations of Ghadar, culled specifically for use as incriminating evidence. These can be found in the National Archive Research Library at College Park, Maryland (NARA), along with extensive court transcripts and documentation of surveyed activities. For obvious reasons, given the government's bias and motivation, it is prudent to take these very selectively focused archival sources with a grain of salt. On the other hand, the Special Gadar Collection housed at UC Berkeley's South and Southeast Asia Library contains a trove of personal memoirs and political writings by Ghadar members. See www.lib.berkeley. edu/SSEALS (last accessed November 22, 2004). While interpretation may valorize or incriminate, the facts remain consistent. Personal letters of Har Dayal are contained in the Van Wyck Brooks Papers, Van Pelt Library Rare Manuscripts Collection, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; and the David Starr Jordan Papers, Hoover Library, Stanford University, Stanford, California. See also Har Dayal, Writings of Lala Hardayal (Benares, India: Swaraj Publishing House, 1923);
21. Har Dayal, ed., Dharmavira: Letters of Lala Har Dayal (Ambala Cantt, India: Indian Book Agency, 1970);
22. Har Dayal, Forty-Four Months in Germany and Turkey, February 1915 to October 1918 (London: P. S. King and Son, 1920).
23. Quoted in Brown, Har Dayal, 176-77.
24. "Report on the Ghadr," excerpted in NARA, State Department fdes, record group 60, box 51, section 7. Also quoted in Brown, Har Dayal, 149.
25. See Christopher Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
26. Richard J. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire, 1904-1924 (London: Frank Cass, 1995).
27. Vuri, Ghadar Movement, 108, 196.
28. G. B. Lai, "The Ghadar Movement-its Personal Reminiscences." Unpublished manuscript. Papers of Kesar Singh, Dilip Singh Saund. Quoted in Harish K. Puri, Ghadar Movement, 104.
29. NARA, State Department files, record group 60, box 51, section 4, "Benefits in the Ghadar of 1857," in special anniversary issue on the insurrection of that year.
30. NARA, State Department files, Record group 60, box 52, section 8, "Extract from Yugantar of Bhagwan Singh for July, 1917."
31. This tendency to spiritualize political extremism has had chilling implications in independent India, fueling the rise of volatile right-wing Hindu fundamentalism in recent years. This form of radical politics also depends on a diasporic network in order to function inside India, drawing most of its funding from expatriate Indians with a heavy concentration in Silicon Valley, thus reflecting Ghadar's geographic though not its ideological profile.
32. Steven G. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 31-33;
33. Peter Heehs, The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India, 19oo-191o (London: Oxford University Press, 1993).
34. See Adi Doctor, Anarchist Thought in India (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1964);
35. M. K. Gandhi, "Hind Swaraj," in The Penguin Gandhi Reader, trans. Rudrangshu Mukherjee (New York: Penguin, 1993), 1-66.
36. Quoted in Brown, Har Dayal, 75-76.
37. Dignan, Indian Revolutionary Problem, 36.
38. Puri, Ghadar Movement, 76.
39. Brown, liar Dayal, 85.
40. Puri, Ghadar Movement, 80.
41. See Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999);
42. Laura S. Tabili, "We Ask for British Justice": Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
43. See Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich, eds., Labor Immigration under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States before World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
44. Ghadar, May 10 and April 29, 1917, excerpted in NARA, State Department files, record group 60, box 52, section 8.
45. Puri, Ghadar Movement, 75.
46. Sally Miller, ed., Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Early Twentieth-Century American Socialism (New York: Garland, 1996), 175-220.
47. Sucheta Mazumdar, "Colonial Impact and Punjabi Emigration to the United States," in Cheng and Bonacich, Labor Immigration under Capitalism, 574;
48. Mark Juergensmeyer, "The Gadar Syndrome: Ethnic Anger and Nationalist Pride," in Chandrasekhar, From India to America, 51.
49. Ghadar: A Publication of the Forum of Inquilabi Leftists, available at ghadar.insaf.net. See also wwv.foil.org; www.samarmagazine.org; www.proxsa.org (the Progressive South Asia Network); and www.cgpi.org (the Communist Gadar Party of India) (last accessed November 22, 2004).