Haj to Utopia - Maia Ramnath California World History Library

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thanks are due first to Terry Burke, Dilip Basu, Gene Irschick, Radhika Mongia, and Barbara Epstein, all advisors and mentors at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Berkeley, for equipping my sense of context and helping me to make so many connections, while also granting me your confidence and trust to go in unorthodox directions. (Barbara, you continued to insist that you knew nothing about my material, while I continued to insist that it was your way of thinking about any material that I found of such great value when applied to mine.) Thank you also to the following:

      The ACLS/Mellon Foundation and the Draper Program in Interdisciplinary Humanities and Social Thought at NYU for making possible the conditions of work and life necessary for intensive writing and thinking and to the many relatives, friends, comrades, and acquaintances I encountered during the many years over which this project developed, for providing me with hospitality, support, political and intellectual stimulus.

      The helpful and knowledgeable staffs of the Bancroft Library’s South and Southeast Asia collections, the Center for Contemporary History at JNU, the National Archive in Delhi, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, and the British Library.

      John Mock and all the wonderful teachers at the AIIS Urdu Language Program in Lucknow, especially Ahtesham Ahmad Khan for equipping me not just to read standard Urdu and Hindi but to decipher the Urdu scrawled in terrible handwriting jammed on scruffy 90-year-old clandestine newspapers.

      Harjit Singh Gill and Vijay Prashad for their generosity in sharing documents and for sharing my delight in these documents.

      Harish Puri and Chaman Lal for enlightened and enlightening scholarship guided by political integrity, and likewise for their kindness to me.

      Ben Zachariah, Franziska Roy, Michele Louro, Ali Raza, and Carolien Stolte for stimulating and very enjoyable cross-fertilization and for making me feel like part of a “transnational turn” rather than a marginal explorer wandering alone on the beach with a metal detector and my convictions—although that would be ok too.

      Kevin, Anjuli, Allie, Valerie, and Monet for keeping me sane and grounded by getting me off the ground while I completed the foundation—you witnessed the whole thing and I promised to say so!

      Above all, my humble gratitude to those of whom I write: The makers of Ghadar, for their undying inspiration and example. May we who come after prove worthy in keeping the flame lit—not only by remembering what they did but by continuing to contribute to the struggles for freedom and justice that they would be supporting if they were here today.

      ABBREVIATIONS

AA Auswertiges Amt (German Foreign Office)
BIC Berlin India Committee
CCP Chinese Communist Party
CID Criminal Investigation Department
CPGB Communist Party of Great Britain
CPI Communist Party of India
CPUSA Communist Party USA
CUP Committee of Union and Progress
DCI Director of Criminal Intelligence
FFI Friends of Freedom for India
GMD Guomindang
HGP Hindustan Ghadar Party
HRA Hindustan Republican Association
HSRA Hindustan Socialist Republican Association
INC Indian National Congress
INP Indian National Party
IOR India Office Records, British Library
IRB Irish Republican Brotherhood
IWW Industrial Workers of the World
KDP Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands
NAI National Archives of India
NARA United States National Archives and Records Administration
NBS Naujavan Bharat Sabha
NMML Nehru Memorial Museum and Library
NWFP North-West Frontier Province
PCHA Pacific Coast Hindi Association
PGI Provisional Government of India
PLM Partido Liberal Mexicano
SANA South Asians in North America Collection
UP United Provinces
WPP Worker Peasant Party

      _____

      Introduction

      History is the haj to utopia.

      KIM STANLEY ROBINSON,

      RED MARS

      A week after Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, a clarion call appeared in the Ghadar, an ardently revolutionary newspaper emanating from San Francisco to reach a readership of overseas Indians in East Asia, North and South America, Mesopotamia, and East Africa: “O Warriors! The opportunity you have been looking for has arrived.” The prodigal children of Hindustan were summoned to return home and fight, for the battle of liberation was at hand.

      The message of the paper’s Ailan-e-Jang (Declaration of War) was stirring and simple:

      Arise, brave ones! Quickly … We want all brave and self-sacrificing warriors who can raise revolt …

      Salary: death

      Reward: martyrdom

      Pension: freedom

      Field of battle: Hindustan.1

      From the expatriate intellectual circles in London, Paris, Berlin, and San Francisco to Gandhi’s early career in South Africa to the passage of subcontinental natives throughout the realms mapped out by the Pan-Islamic Khilafat or the Communist International, much of the power of the independence struggle was incubated outside the territory of British India. Any dramatic events visible upon the lighted proscenium of the subcontinent were profoundly affected by a multitude of actors busy in the shadows off stage, including students, soldiers, pilgrims, traders, and laborers originating from a variety of distinct regional, linguistic, class, religious, and political backgrounds. And no small portion of this power was routed, sooner or later, along the channels of a circulatory system with its heart in California, headquarters for the diasporic Ghadar movement. Its name, it declared, was its work: the word meant “mutiny” or “revolt.”

      As restrictions tightened on what activities counted as legal inside British India, prewar anticolonial activists in the throes of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal and the

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