Immigrants, rebels, freedom fighters

New Indian Express

07-06-2025

Should one write history just for academic study, or should it be written with common people in mind? For author Rana Preet Gill, the aim of writing The Ghadar Movement: A Forgotten Struggle (Penguin) was to make a larger Indian audience, and not just Punjabis, understand the Ghadar Party's history and the importance of what they did more than 100 years ago. 'I wanted more and more people from across the nation to connect with this important chapter of Indian history. Hence, I wrote a narrative history, rather than an academic history, and emphasised storytelling. Many Ghadarites from places such as Hoshiarpur and Jalandhar joined the movement. Not many of today's generation are aware of them, at the most they are shadowy figures,' she says.
Origin story
Divided into 38 chapters, the book traces the party's origin and the conditions that led to its birth. 'In search of a better future, many poor Punjabis from peasant families moved to places like Canada and London. They also came into close contact with several Indian revolutionaries there; it was also their first brush with political ideas such as Liberalism and Marxism. Educated Punjabis such as Lala Har Dayal met revolutionaries like Shyamji Krishnavarma and VD Savarkar. Savarkar inducted Har Dayal in his group Abhinav Bharat,' she adds.
The party & a newspaper
It was in 1912 that Punjabi peasants, exiled revolutionaries, and students joined hands to form the Hindi Association of the Pacific Coast (what the Ghadar Party was first called) in Portland, United States. Sohan Singh Bhakna was its first president, GD Kumar was the secretary, and Kanshi Ram, the treasurer. The organisation advocated armed resistance. Lala Har Dayal and his close aide Bhai Paramanand joined the organisation a year later. The organisation not only focused on bringing an end to British rule on the Indian subcontinent, but also worked towards the abolition of casteism. Religion for them was a private matter, and any show of religious symbols was discouraged among its members.
To spread its ideas among the masses, the organisation brought out a newspaper, The Ghadar (in Urdu and Punjabi in Gurumukhi script). 'It became extremely popular, and it gave a call to Indians living in the US to join the anti-British movement,' says Gill.
Rise and decline
May 23, 1914, is a landmark date in Ghadarite history. Gurdit Singh, an Indian businessman, chartered the Komagata Maru, a Japanese ship, to transport 376 Indian passengers (predominantly Sikhs) to Canada, hoping to circumvent Canada's restrictive immigration policies. The ship was denied permission and the aftermath was brutal. Many Indian immigrants, working as informers in the Canadian immigration department, were murdered, says Gill. Hopkins, an Anglo-Indian working for the immigration department, was assassinated by Mewa Singh, a Ghadar activist in Vancouver.
Party members eventually headed towards India to initiate a full-fledged struggle against the British, but many were arrested.
'The Gharadites did not make secrecy a part of revolutionary tactics, and hence, it was easy for the British to take them down,' says the author. 'Its senior leaders were arrested. Besides, a section of activists in India also started dacoity in Punjab, which made them unpopular.'
Can the Ghadar movement be seen as a 'failure' when it stirred the revolutionary spirit among many Indians, questions Gill. Bhagat Singh was one of the revolutionaries it inspired. 'Singh was inspired by Kartar Singh Sarabha, an important member of the Ghadar Party. He used to keep Sarabha's picture in his pocket,' she says.