LITMIR.BIZ

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      “The Air of Freedom”

       Ghadar in America

      IMMIGRANTS

      There had been a smattering of Indian sailors in New England ports since the late eighteenth century, and the odd celebrity religious philosopher since the late nineteenth, starting with Vivekananda’s star turn at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1892, which garnered a cult following of theosophists and countercultural practitioners among a northeastern elite. Meanwhile, the flow of indentured labor to the Caribbean islands and the north coast of South America began in the 1830s, to fill the vacuum left by the abolition of the slave trade. ¹ But the first South Asian immigrant population of significant size in mainland North America were the Punjabi Sikhs who began arriving on the West Coast around 1903.²

      The leap from tens to thousands arriving per year was rather abrupt.³ Even so, according to an official count, only 6,656 South Asians entered the United States (legally) between 1899 and 1913. Hundreds more waited in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Manila, and other East Asian ports for trans-Pacific passage, hoping for a little help from friends who had already made the crossing. By the eve of the war in 1914 there was an estimated total of 10,000 South Asians in North America.⁴

      Most of the Punjabi laborers came from relatively prosperous families of small independent landholders, overwhelmingly concentrated in the Doab region. About half of them were veterans of the British army or military police. After their service, having seen a bit of the world, many of these men of cosmopolitan experience if little formal education now had a taste for further adventures rather than settling back down in the sleepy villages of their birth. Lured by the opportunity to make some good money, and offered incentives by steamship companies looking to fill in their dwindling manifests of Chinese working-class passengers (the Chinese Exclusion Act had been signed into U.S. law in 1882), the Punjabis came to work in lumber mills or laying railroads, a few in canneries or construction. But overwhelmingly they filtered into the migratory agricultural labor force. Disciplined and adaptable, they were much in demand, claimed the Immigration Department’s official translator Dady Burjor, to the point where big landowners from the Sacramento Valley sometimes went directly to Angel Island to hire new arrivals. (The noncombatants who came directly from the village, usually as a result of a collective economic decision by an extended family, were in Dady Burjor’s opinion a lesser quality of crude yokel.)⁵

      This positive desire to emigrate was compounded by straitened economic circumstances brought about by colonial agricultural policies at home. The 1901 Alienation of Land Act, by restricting the transfer of land from traditionally landowning groups, had been designed to prevent the loss of rural control to urban (usually Hindu) moneylenders. But it also had the effect of institutionalizing existing inequities of access for some Sikh and low-caste populations. Then the 1906 Colonization Bill and Bari Doab canal scheme led to a sharp rise in water rates and micromanagement of its use, which aimed at maximizing the region’s rich agricultural output for the British commodity market, thereby rerouting it away from local control and subsistence needs.

      This had sparked a wave of agitation in 1907, led by the brothers Ajit Singh and Kishan Singh, future Ghadar collaborators and the respective uncle and father of Bhagat Singh. Notably during the course of the unrest, Ajit Singh had spoken not just for reform of the offending legislation but for the unequivocal expulsion of the British from India, by violent means if necessary. He also founded the Indian Patriots’ Association, the Bharat Mata Society, and a newspaper, the Peshwa. For his activities he was sent to jail in Mandalay until 1909, when he decamped to Persia along with his Peshwa collaborator Sufi Amba Parishad. Here they set up a revolutionary center from which they facilitated contacts among revolutionaries throughout Europe and North America for many years. By 1914 Ajit Singh was living in Paris, under the faux Persian identity of Hassan Khan, and supporting himself by giving English lessons. His travels during the war later took him as far as Brazil and Argentina. As fate would have it, he died literally on the eve of independence, 15 August 1947.⁶

      But the general Punjabi population was not yet connecting their grievances to a larger, secular and/or national context. Much of the political consciousness-raising at that time was occurring rather through the religiously defined Arya Samaj and Sikh Sabha, while the British army remained a strong focus of collective identity and allegiance.⁷ In theory these veterans had the right to settle in Canada as subjects of the dominion, taking pride in the community’s sterling record of military service to the empire and the status it supposedly conferred. In practice they encountered worsening racism, both popular and legislative. Why such antipathy? After all, notes Harish Puri, the Indian threat could not have been simply about racial purity, since there were far more Chinese and Japanese entrants at the time. But politically the Indians were a special case, bearing on the delicate stability of colonial rule. Among the fears of the Secretary of State for India about what might happen if emigration to Canada were allowed to continue were the following:

      i. That the terms of close familiarity which competition with white labour brings about do not make for British prestige; and it is by prestige alone that India is held not by force;

      ii. that there is a socialist propaganda in Vancouver, and the consequent danger of the East Indians being imbued with socialist doctrines;

      iii. labour rivalry is sure to result in occasional outbreaks of feelings on the part of the whites and any dissatisfaction at unfair treatment of Indians in Vancouver is certain to be exploited for the purpose of agitation in India; (and)

      iv. East Indian affairs are sometimes made use of by unscrupulous partisans to serve the cause of their political party.⁸

      On none of these points was he necessarily wrong, as time would show.

      In the same vein Brigadier General E. J. Swayne warned in a confidential memorandum that Indians who came as free laborers to Canada were “politically inexpedient” due to the risk that “these men [might] go back to India and preach ideas of emancipation which would upset the machinery of law and order.”⁹ The fresh air of freedom, it seemed, was a dangerous gas.

      Ghadar narratives (both contemporary and retrospective) repeated the notion that in America the “settlers” now breathed the air of modernity, freedom, and equality. And yet a gap remained between this stated American ideal and their own American experience. Once they reached California, they could obtain a daily wage of up to $2–$3 for harvesting asparagus, celery, potatoes, beans, lemons, and oranges.¹⁰ It is interesting that chroniclers of the community seem to find a source of pride in some of the very factors used as pretexts for racial discrimination against them: the white laborers were jealous and resentful of the immigrants’ strength, endurance, industriousness, and ability to live with such astounding frugality. To help in doing so Indian laborers developed mutual support networks for living and work situations, oft en rooming, cooking, and eating collectively, and forming work teams represented by an Anglophone spokesman with the task of procuring work and negotiating terms, or dealing with lawyers as necessary. Some teams even divided their wages equally at the end of the week.¹¹ The young network of gurdwaras (Sikh temples serving as community centers) also served as a important sites of mobilization, resistance, and solidarity, furthering a tradition of Sikh granthis as community leaders, representatives, intermediaries, and mobilizers around the Pacific Rim.

      For example, one of the most important

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