The Gadar Movement

The Gadar Movement of 1913–1918 was one of the most audacious episodes in the history of anti-colonial resistance. Founded in Oregon and California by Punjabi Sikh immigrants to North America, the Gadar Party — its name from the Urdu/Punjabi gadar, meaning “mutiny” or “revolt” — aimed at nothing less than the overthrow of British rule in India by force. The party established a revolutionary network across the Pacific, raised a substantial sum of money from the Punjabi diaspora, organised the shipment of arms to the Punjab, and tried to coordinate a rising against the British in February 1915. The conspiracy failed, but the trial of the conspirators in San Francisco produced one of the most remarkable court cases in the history of the British Empire, and the movement has had a long afterlife in Indian nationalist memory.

The Origins

The Gadar Movement emerged from the experience of the Punjabi Sikh community in North America. By 1910 there were perhaps 50,000 Punjabi Sikhs and Hindus in the United States and Canada, mostly in California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. They had come to North America in search of economic opportunity, and they were often subject to discrimination — the Canadian government had restricted Indian immigration in 1908, and the American immigration authorities applied a “natives of India” classification that effectively barred most Indians from entering the country. Many of the Punjabi immigrants had experience of the British Indian Army, and many had served in the British military campaigns in China in 1900–1901 and elsewhere.

The political catalyst was the visit of Gopal Krishna Gokhale to North America in 1912. Gokhale was a leading moderate in the Indian National Congress, and his tour of the United States and Canada was an effort to recruit American support for Indian self-government. The Gadar leaders — Lala Hardayal, Sohan Singh Bhakna, Kartar Singh Sarabha, and others — were unimpressed by Gokhale’s moderate politics. They believed that the British would never concede Indian independence voluntarily, and they concluded that armed revolution was the only option.

The Founding of the Gadar Party

The Gadar Party was formally founded at a meeting in Portland, Oregon, in April 1913. The party adopted as its emblem a salutar (a type of Sikh dagger) and a rising sun, and it adopted a Manifesto — written principally by Lala Hardayal, the party’s most prominent intellectual — that called for the overthrow of British rule by force. The Manifesto, which circulated widely in the Indian diaspora, was a passionate document: “The British have no right to rule over us,” it declared. “We have no right to submit to their rule. We must take our freedom by force.”

The party’s headquarters were established in San Francisco, and the party opened branches in Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, and other centres of the Indian diaspora. The party raised a substantial sum of money from the Punjabi community — perhaps $200,000 in total — and it organised the shipment of arms to the Punjab. The party also established a newspaper, the Gadar, which was published in Urdu, Punjabi, and other languages and which became one of the most widely circulated revolutionary publications in the history of the Indian independence movement.

The Conspiracy of 1915

The Gadar leaders, having decided that armed revolution was the only option, began to plan a rising in India. The plan was to coincide with the First World War, in the hope that the British would be too distracted by the European conflict to respond effectively. The German government, which was at war with Britain, agreed to supply arms to the revolutionaries, and the German consular service in San Francisco and elsewhere was used as a channel for the conspiracy. The Indian revolutionary Rash Behari Bose, who was then operating in Japan, was a key figure in the coordination of the conspiracy.

The planned rising for February 1915 failed. The British Indian intelligence services, which had been watching the Gadar movement for some time, broke the conspiracy in November 1914, with the arrest of Kartar Singh Sarabha in Allahabad and the subsequent round-up of conspirators across the Punjab. The shipment of arms was largely intercepted, and the rising in India never materialised. The British authorities in India declared martial law in parts of the Punjab, and the Gadar conspirators were tried by special tribunals in Lahore and elsewhere. Several were hanged, and many more were transported for life.

The San Francisco Trial

The most prominent of the post-war trials was in San Francisco, where the US federal government prosecuted a number of Gadar leaders under the neutrality laws. The trial, which began in November 1917 and ran for several months, was one of the most extraordinary court cases in American legal history. The defendants were charged with violating American neutrality by conspiring to ship arms to the enemies of a country (Britain) with which the United States was not at war. The trial attracted enormous press attention, and the defendants used the opportunity to publicise the cause of Indian independence.

The defendants were represented by a distinguished team of lawyers, including the labour lawyer Max Radin, and they were supported by a number of prominent American intellectuals, including the journalist and socialist Fremont Older. The trial produced, in the words of the historian Maia Ramnath, “a remarkable exercise in revolutionary public relations”: the defendants used the courtroom as a platform for the Indian independence movement, and the transcripts of the trial became one of the most widely read accounts of British rule in India available in the United States.

The case was decided in the defendants’ favour in April 1918, on the grounds that the United States was not at war with Britain and that the defendants had not violated American neutrality. The verdict was a serious embarrassment to the British government, which had pressed the United States to prosecute the Gadar leaders. The trial, however, had already accomplished much of the Gadar leaders’ objective: it had publicised the cause of Indian independence, and it had embarrassed the British government on the world stage.

The Aftermath

The Gadar Movement collapsed as a serious revolutionary force after 1915, but its long-term consequences were substantial. The Gadar leaders, having failed in their immediate objective of overthrowing British rule, joined the broader Indian independence movement. Lala Hardayal, the party’s most prominent intellectual, spent the 1920s in Europe and became a major figure in the international revolutionary movement; he died in Philadelphia in 1938, having never returned to India. Rash Behari Bose, who had been a key figure in the conspiracy, fled to Japan and became a leading figure in the Indian independence movement in East Asia; he died in Berlin in 1945. Kartar Singh Sarabha, the young revolutionary who was hanged in Lahore in November 1915 at the age of 19, became a martyr of the Indian independence movement.

The Gadar Movement was, in this respect, a failure in its immediate objective and a success in its long-term consequences. The movement did not overthrow British rule. But it demonstrated that the Indian diaspora could be a serious force in the Indian independence movement, and it established a tradition of revolutionary anti-colonial politics that would later be developed by Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army. The Gadar Party, in the words of the historian Seema Sohi, “transformed the meaning of Indian diaspora politics” and laid the foundations for the more successful independence movements of the 1920s and 1930s.

The Gadar Legacy

The Gadar Party, and the trial of its members in San Francisco, has had a long afterlife in the political culture of the Indian diaspora. The Gadar newspaper, which continued to be published for several decades after the movement’s collapse, was one of the most widely circulated Punjabi-language publications in the world. The Gadar Memorial Hall in San Francisco, opened in 1968, has been a centre of the Indian diaspora community in California. The annual Gadar Memorial Day, observed on 29 April, commemorates the founding of the party and the deaths of the movement’s martyrs.

The historiography of the Gadar Movement, in that sense, has been substantially revised since the 1990s. The older nationalist tradition, of which the work of the Gadar Memorial Society and the early Indian historians is representative, treated the Gadar Party as a heroic episode in the Indian independence movement. The more recent scholarship, of which Seema Sohi’s Echoes of Mutiny (2007) and Maia Ramnath’s Haj to Utopia (2011) are the most distinguished representatives, has produced a more nuanced picture. The Gadar leaders were serious revolutionaries, but they were also a product of their particular social position — Punjabi Sikh men, often from military families, often with experience of the British Indian Army, often with experience of discrimination in North America. The movement’s ideology, which combined Sikh religious themes with anti-colonial politics, was a distinctive product of this particular moment.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the Gadar Movement has been, in many respects, a history of the Indian diaspora itself. The older Indian nationalist tradition, of which the work of the early Congress historians is representative, treated the Gadar Party as a heroic episode in the Indian independence movement. The work of the South Asian diaspora historians in North America, of which the contributions of Vijay Prashad, Sunil Amrith, and Seema Sohi are the most distinguished representatives, has produced a more nuanced picture. The Gadar leaders were serious revolutionaries whose activities were shaped by their experience of discrimination in North America and by the particular political culture of the Punjabi Sikh diaspora. The movement’s failure in 1915, on this more recent view, was not a foregone conclusion; it was the contingent result of British intelligence work, of the disruption of the war, and of the specific weaknesses of the movement’s organisation. The historiography of the Gadar Movement, in this context, is also a historiography of the early twentieth-century international revolutionary movement.

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