Essays

IV. PUNJABI GHADAR

The farmers who emigrated from rural Punjab experienced diaspora through a different entry point than the Bengalis, and accordingly they had a different framework for describing what their movement toward national liberation stood for. Their motivating ideologies layered several influences: the intellectual leadership of progressive Sikh priests, the claims to justice articulated by Sikh army veterans, and finally the political awareness generated directly from the lived experiences of Punjabi immigrant laborers. These were the organic intellectuals whose version of Ghadar I argue bestowed a more lasting legacy than that of the Bengali professional elites.

Priests and soldiers: Unlike the Bengalis, many of the Punjabi emigres did not share the militant political stance they developed abroad with the kin they had left behind. Aside from occasional periods of unrest, Punjab up to this point had largely remained a bastion of loyalism, due first to influential Sikh granthis who viewed the British empire as a benefactor and preached loyalty to the sovereign as a religious duty; and second to the heavy representation of troops from this region, resulting in networks of veterans whose loyalist warrior ethic had been conditioned by such preaching. Yet both these groups, who had taken such pride in their loyalty back home, became lightning rods for anti-colonial agitation in North America. Initially, the British had secured Sikh loyalty through co-opting the cultural discourses of fidelity and honor in battle, which the Sikhs themselves understood as the expression of orthodox religious precept. It was a relatively simple matter to transfer the object of loyalty from clan or Khalsa to the British ruler. Hence the significance of Taraknath Das's Free Hindusthan masthead, which turned this precept upside down by declaring that "Resistance to Tyranny is Obedience to God."¹ After all, an equally valid way of interpretating Sikh tradition has emphasized the values of liberty, equality and fraternity over that of loyalism.

Decorated army veterans arrived in Canada with the assumption that their natural rights as subjects of the empire would be recognized. But the expectation of reward for military service was followed by disillusionment when they were not accepted as equals. Had they not proven themselves to be capable of defending and by extension of governing their own country? Had they not fought alongside British brothers-in-arms? The implication of such civic participation was that they had attained the maturity which the tutelary discourse of liberal imperialism projected endlessly into the future. Thus their initial demands for political autonomy focused on their rights as British citizens, loyal subjects of the King-Emperor who were entitled to British standards of justice, rather than on a more radical demand either for national independence outside the empire, or for a more comprehensive social and economic transformation. In short, rather than demanding the right to withdraw from the British institutional and epistemic regime, they were demanding that it to be applied to them. Thereby they called attention to the discrepancies in, or exceptions to, the liberal political philosophy used to justify colonialism. In reality, the rhetorical values of equality, fair play and democracy in which they had been indoctrinated conflicted with the requirements of colonial economic extraction.²

Organic intellectuals and colonial labor: Punjabi emigration in the early twentieth century illustrated perfectly the global movement of labor within the colonial economy. The same local conditions which stimulated recruitment into overseas military service, also generated the pressures behind the movement of labor. Inflexible colonial policies exacerbated recurrent famines by commandeering food production for commercial export, while efforts to restructure land tenure systems in a direction more conducive to capitalist agriculture forced many small landholders into mortgage and wage labor. This economic destabilization also contributed to a wave of popular uprisings in 1907, which in turn produced a vicious circle of repressive legislation, including the new Criminal Sedition Act of 1908.³

The Indians entering the United States and Canada prior to 1946 were almost exclusively male. Partly this is because of the high number of emigrants who came by way of the military, a thoroughly homosocial environment. As for those men who arrived straight from their villages, most entered as ostensibly temporary laborers to send money back to extended families squeezed by colonial economic policies in Punjab, not to stay and naturalize. Many of these were younger sons sent by the family's collective decision; some left wives and children behind. When any did attempt to bring wives and children to join them in North America, the families were barred entry. This situation led many Punjabi men to marry Mexican women who shared their socio-economic position and according to miscegenation law, their racial classification. Nevertheless, upon arrival as single men, many of them lived in what might be described as labor and living co-ops, in which groups often based on village or kin relationships found lodging and work, split wages, shared expenses, made joint investments, cooked and ate together. For each work gang, one who was able to speak English might be designated the "boss man," meaning that he took responsibility for finding jobs for the group, negotiating contracts and terms, transmitting instructions, and so on.

Students also served some of these mediating functions for the laborers, particularly where legal matters were concerned. In organizing for Ghadar activity, many students took for granted their intellectual superiority as the motivating force for an inert mass. After all, the assumption of functional specialization had been entrenched in Indian society and reinforced by the British codification of caste/ethnic character. However, among the North American immigrants there was movement across these lines in both directions. Most students paid their tuition by working as dishwashers or seasonal agricultural laborers. Meanwhile, the Ghadar newspaper empowered many previously illiterate and inarticulate workers to express their grievances in the form of political statements. So the conscious became workers and the workers conscious. According to Josh's biography of Sohan Singh Bhakna, the Ghadar journal inspired a cultural flowering among the Punjabis. This meant that issues of the paper might include the poignant lyrics of Punjabi freedom songs as well as more academic commentaries arguing statistically-based cases against British rule. As an example of this tonal range, compare these excerpts from Ghadar, allowing for the poor rendering of translated verse in the latter: "Within the last sixteen years eight million have died from plague; it is estimated that the mortality per thousand has risen from twenty-four to thirty-four. In the native states great pains are taken to spread dissatisfaction and to inculcate the doctrine of loyalty to the British Government." And, "A plant which is touched by the British, how can water and manure make it green? Where people look anxiously to learn speaking, how can freedom appear there?"⁴

Yet peasants who like Sohan Singh Bhakna had arrived in the U.S. from Punjab following the unrest of 1906 and 1907, did possess an incipient political awareness. Even so, it was in the U.S. that Bhakna had the opportunity to further develop his vision of the overthrow of the British government, to be followed by, in Puri's words, the "establishment in India of a [secular] democratic republic based on liberty and equality."⁵ As I suggested above, these principles were quite compatible with Sikh tradition, as well as having been transmitted within the British colonial military milieu. The very appeal of the United States for immigrants had stemmed largely from its image as the cradle of resistance to British colonization, and its reputation as the prototypical liberal democracy.

The question then would be not how Punjabi laborers adopted liberal ideas, but how their ideas evolved toward communism. Aside from the contributions of the students, perhaps at least a partial explanation lies in the Sikhs' imminent discovery of the fallacy within U.S. liberalism, as the U.S. began to emerge upon the colonial stage. This fallacy echoed the discrepancy in application which underlay the British imperial project: race. Race was a highly politicized and always slippery categorization where Indians were concerned, as the U.S. government vigorously discouraged Indian naturalization. All South Asians were designated as "Hindus" regardless of religion in order to distinguish them from Native Americans, and their racial status was debated in several court cases to determine their eligibility for citizenship or to own land, culminating in the landmark case of U.S. vs. Bhagat Singh Thind in 1923. The judge ruled that while "Hindus" might plausibly make a legitimate claim to be Caucasian, as Thind did, they were indisputably not white, and their unassimilability therefore self-evident. The case thus established that Indians were ineligible for citizenship; now Indians who had held land for many years had to forfeit their property retroactively. Moreover, sanctioned vigilantism compounded legal exclusion. In the anti-Indian riot of 1907, several hundred Punjabis were beaten and driven out of Bellingham, Washington. Union organizers had instigated the lynching as the finale to a Labor Day parade, with calls to drive out the cheap labor.

Thereafter, Asian Exclusion League agitations drove Indians out of most urban areas. Whether dealing with immigration office bureaucrats, seeking work or purchasing land, they faced harassment and discrimination. But unlike the Japanese and Chinese immigrants who shared similar experiences, the Indians found that they had no home government willing to defend their rights as citizens, and were thus denied dignity as free people and free laborers. Thus, significantly, rather than reacting to the local white citizenry who were the immediate cause of their legal and extralegal oppression, they transferred their anger to the British colonial government . In contrast , the North American mainstream labor movement's chronic attacks on immigrants indicated the opposite state of awareness: namely the inability to locate domestic race/labor relations within a transnational economic structure, with the corresponding failure to link capitalism to colonialism. I am convinced that this failure lurks behind the shortsighted racist protectionism endemic to organized labor's agenda throughout the twentieth century; I am also convinced that this blindspot lies at the root of the analytical fallacies of Euro-centric leftist discourse.

Despite its habitual paeans to the international proletariat, the left wing of labor organizers in the United States was as staunchly hostile to Asian immigration as was the AF of L. At the international Socialist Party congresses of 1907 to 1912, American delegates engaged in heated debate over whether Asian immigrants on the West Coast functioned in collusion with capitalist interests in the attempt to extract cheaper labor; and thus whether, since the Asians' arrival had been coerced by said capitalists, they should be simply shipped back to their primitive homeland. The crux of the matter hinged on whether the Asians were organizable as part of the American labor movement, or whether they constituted a hopeless drag on the forward progress of labor's march toward its advanced goals.⁶

But what organized labor missed-- and what it continues to miss-- was the question of why the immigrants had arrived; namely, that their migration was conditioned by the global structural inequities of a colonial economy. It was no accident that the acquisition of overseas colonies by the United States coincided with growing anxieties about an influx of brown and yellow immigrants at home. Furthermore, racial anxieties on the domestic front harmonized easily with fear of destabilizing ideas that might threaten imperialist/capitalist goals overseas. The passage of newly exclusionary immigration policies between 1917 and 1924 corresponded precisely with the timing of legislation repressing political dissent. Simultaneous with the Hindu-German Conspiracy Trial, hundreds of assorted socialists, pacifists and anarcho-syndicalists were also undergoing persecution for their anti-capitalist and anti-war agitation. Some IWW members, after their own 1918 mass trials in Fresno and Sacramento, formed bonds with prominent Ghadarites while in jail.

The Industrial Workers of the World, unique within the labor movement for its policy of racial inclusion, provided the exception to the anti-Asian line. Moreover, the IWW's prime sites of activity coincided with the geographical and occupational location of the Punjabis. But althouth it is possible to glean some documentation of the relationship of Har Dayal and other Bengali students with the IWW, did the Punjabi laborers have such a relationship? The familiarity which Berkeley student Dhan Gopal Mukherjee evinced with the Wobblies circa 1911 to 1912 suggests that the English-speaking, politically radical student-laborers were more likely to be involved with IWW activities than were the relatively insulated, non-English speaking full-time workers. But although the Punjabis were in all the right places at all the right times to coincide with the peak of IWW activity, their tendency to live together in separate enclaves perhaps made them less likely to be part of any mass multi-ethnic labor mobilizations. Still, although seldom mentioned in accounts of IWW-instigated agitations, a few sources mention that Indians were singled out to bear the brunt of repression during the Wheatlands strike of 1913. Indians also participated in the Tacoma railroad strike of 1907, where their quarters were especially targeted for searches.⁷

Thus, at this point I can only speculate about the Punjabis' degree of participation in the left-radical labor movement in the United States. Nevertheless, these organic intellectuals managed to independently identify, via their own immigrant experience of racialized labor exploitation, some of the same links between colonization and the global division of labor which Comintern strategy regarding Asia would later echo and elaborate. Thus the trajectory from Ghadar's first radical incarnation to its second as a communist movement seems quite logical; as do the personal trajectories of the survivors from the wartime Ghadar party to the Communist Party of India.

CONCLUSION

Was Ghadar a nationalist movement? Not by the conventional definition. I argue that while it gathered the forces of transnational radicalism toward the immediate goal of national liberation, it also envisioned that project as part of a larger cultural and economic transformation. Thus, while certainly an anti-colonial movement, Ghadar included other ingredients which were at least as important as nationalism in flavoring its resistance.

Was Ghadar even a single, unified movement? I argue that it was at least two, and that these currents of resistance converged out of the distinctive experiences of two specific groups that entered the diaspora. Although one was pressed into migration by economic exigencies, while the other was afforded the privilege of cosmopolitan education, nevertheless both achieved by means of such movement an experience and a perspective which were not available to those who had remained behind within the borders of British India.

Ghadar crystallized at a moment of zenith for political and cultural radicalism in the United States. At the same time, the North American immigrant work force was beginning to link its grievances of labor exploitation compounded by racial discrimination to its position within a global political-economic structure. Within these contradictions, the Ghadarites parlayed the experiences of peripatetic intellectuals and immigrant laborers in early twentieth century California into a revolutionary anti-colonial movement. Ghadar's first incarnation, romantically brief, did not survive the war years and the accompanying legal repression. With the group's resurgence after the war, anarcho-Hindu ascetics yielded the stage to ascendant communists, many of whom were to play foundational roles in the peasant, Dalit, and worker movements of India, as well as the ongoing struggle for colonial liberation.

Postscript: In recent years, Ghadar is being rediscovered and reclaimed by progressive South Asians in the United States and Europe, as part of a heritage of political radicalism and a commitment to social and economic justice. For example, the South Asian Magazine of Action and Reflection (SAMAR collective), and the Forum of Indian Leftists (FOIL), both of which are self-consciously diasporic, have a sophisticated approach to locating oppressions of race, gender and class within the political and economic conditions of global capitalism, as well as within the entrenched religious, caste and ethnic tensions specific to South Asia. Both acknowledge the history of the word ghadar, which is once again, thanks to FOIL, the title of a publication distributed to a radical diaspora.⁸ "Our name is identical with our work," said Har Dayal in 1913. Neither the name nor the work has ended.

______________

Puri, p. 80.

See Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (University of Chicago Press:1999); Laura Tabili, "We Ask For British Justice": Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

See Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich, eds. Labor Immigration Under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States Before World War II (University of California Press: 1984).

Ghadar, May 10 and April 29, 1917.

Puri, p. 75.

Sally Miller, ed., Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Early Twentieth-Century American Socialism (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), pp. 175-220.

Sucheta Mazumdar, "Colonial Impact and Punjabi Emigration to the United States" in Cheng and Bonacich, p. 574; Mark Juergensmeyer, "The Gadar Syndrome: Ethnic Anger and Nationalist Pride" in Chandrasekhar, p. 51.

See www.foil.org; www.samarmagazine.org; www.proxsa.org; www.cgpi.org.

back
back to top
back to Essays