The Gadar Syndrome: Ethnic Anger and Nationalist Pride
By: Professor Mark Juergensmeyer
( Social Science, University of California, Santa Barbara)[Used with permission]
In the first decades of this century, California provided the scene for one of the most bizarre and memorable incidents undertaken by any ethnic community in the United States: the attempt by a group of India's expatriate nationals to create a revolutionary army, invade India by sea, and liberate her from the clutches of British rule. A quixotic hope, and a tragic missions, as it turned out. The Punjabis who organized it called their movement Gadar (alternately spelled Ghadar, or Ghadr). The name means "mutiny" or "revolt," and their mounting publicity actually led to such an attempt in 1915. Five boats, loaded with weapons and propaganda, set sail from various ports in California, financed by the German war effort. Alas, most were soon intercepted by the British. Those that landed were met by British authorities, and many leaders were hanged. Others were put on trial by the American government and many of them were deported. Curiously, the members of the movement were more militant than most of their nationalist compatriots back in India at the time. Theirs was an independent movement, existing almost solely in America, and its ties to India were remarkably weak. The poignancy of their endeavor is highlighted by their isolation: a stalwart band of rebels who maintained a lonely mutiny against British India, half a world away. Then why did they do it? The answers to that question have ramifications beyond the Gadar incident, for as peculiar as Gadar may seem, it fits into a pattern of militant nationalism within expatriate communities that includes Irish nationalists, Chinese and Korean revolutionaries, and in our time, Iranian militants. Within the Gadar case, then, is a syndrome of ethnic anger and nationalist pride, and the link between them begs to be understood. Our explorations lead us in both directions from the Pacific: the American context and the Indian one. The Punjab context helps us understand why the immigrants came to America in the first place: the economic, social and political turmoil early in this century. The American context provides a hypothesis to explain how the frustrations of the new immigrant community were experienced as a double jeopardy, and turned into Gadar militancy. The hostility toward the prejudice of North American whites had identified itself with the nationalist struggle against the oppression in India. In America, the new immigrant community was trying to maintain its self-understanding, and developing its new identity as an ethnic working class, all in a climate of fear and suspicion. The struggle against the oppression in America and in India became fused into one struggle: Gadar. The Gadar identity, then, was a compound of the nationalism and communalism which they brought from India, and the class consciousness and ethnic identity which they discovered in America. The former was a response to unjust British policies and tensions among Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs in the Punjab, and the latter a response to economic and racial oppression in America. These elements comprised the mixed motives of the Gadar movement; they were reflected in the tensions within the organization, and echoed even in the composition of its membership. The Mixed Constituency of the Movement The Indians who came to the west coast of Canada and the United States around the turn of the century were mostly Punjabis, illiterate farmers and laborers, students, and priests. The Gadar movement was an amalgam of these; and their social concerns were as varied as their occupations. The movement included political refugees who found North America a congenial place to speak out against colonial rule. Har Dayal, the most visible and outspoken Gadar leader, came to the United States as a visiting scholar; but he also came because of the greater political freedom which he perceived America to offer. Ram Chandra, editor of the Gadar newspaper, and Barkatullah, an important strategist and liaison, were also involved in nationalist movements before they came to America. The Gadar movement could not have existed without their intellectual and political leadership, but their role should not be exaggerated. Har Dayal, for all his brilliance and charismatic authority, was an erratic leader, who left the movement and the United States in 1914, before the most critical years of the movement's history. Immigrant laborers, farmers, and students provided the bulk of the movement's support. Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna, who is considered by some to be the founder of the Gadar movement, had been a laborer in a lumber mill in Oregon. Jawala Singh, a potato farmer near Stockton, California, helped finance the movement; and Bhawgan Singh, who took over the Gadar party after the divisions within the party in 1917, was closely linked with the immigrant workers community as a gyani (priest). Kartar Singh Sarabha, the young martyred leader of the cadres who returned to foment an uprising in the Punjab in 1914-1915, had come to the United States to be a student at the University of California, Berkeley. One would think that the immigrant workers and students had put India behind them. Even though their ties to their homeland may have been strong, one would have expected them to be emotionally detached from colonial oppression, and interested only in their own personal economic and scholarly achievements. Thus, the intense involvement of students and worker sin the movement - their commitment unto death for a nationalist cause - can only be explained by the infusion of other, more personal, concerns. Many of these personal concerns were linked with a universal problem of those in immigrant communities: that of being a stranger in a strange land. In the case of the immigrant Punjabis early in this century, that sense of strangeness was compounded by the experience of economic hardship and racial oppression. This may explain some of the Gadar intensity - the desire to turn tables, and "drive the foreigners out of India" even as they in North America were the foreigners being driven out by the whites. Formative Stages in Gadar Party In reviewing the development of the Gadar party, one notices a sort of rebound effect between acts of racial hostility against the immigrant Punjabis and new developments within the movement. There is also an interaction between events in the Punjab and the activities of the immigrant Punjabis. The two sets of relationships provide an incendiary crossfire. The sequence of events was as follows: Oppressive British policies and communal tensions in the Punjab helped encourage migration to Canada and the United States, where those same issues were exacerbated by new racial tensions and oppressive policies of the Canadian and American governments. Thus, an irony of history emerges: the escape from colonialism to communalism leads to new forms of oppression and a sharper sense of ethnic identity and national pride. The chart on the following page indicates events occurring in four contexts: the Punjab, the immigrant community, and anti-immigrant North Americans, and the Gadar movement. Some patterns emerge across these four columns which suggest that links may be hidden beneath them. One such sequence of events may be traced from 1907 through 1913. In the Punjab context, a series of disturbances over British land rights legislation erupted in 1907. The problem had been developing since 1900, when the Alienation of Land Act in India prohibited certain non-farming castes from owning agricultural lands. The Act had the laudatory effect of preventing moneylenders from taking over farmland, but it irritated many middle-income non-agricultural Punjabis who had aspired to develop land. When new canal areas opened in the Punjab, government legislation prevented the settlers of these newly irrigated areas from full ownership. Added to these issues were the problems of nature - severe famine, and an epidemic of bubonic plague which allegedly took millions of lives. The climate of hardship and government oppression resulted in a series of riots in the district towns of Punjab in the summer of 1907. Shifting to the immigrant context, we find that the years 1907 and 1908 were those of the largest number of immigrants to Canada and the United States. The immigrants did not all come from the areas of riots, and I have no hard evidence to indicate a direct relationship between the events in the Punjab and the immigration patterns. Nonetheless, the fact of unrest in the Punjab means that the emigrants, like everyone else, perceived the times to be in a state of flux, of political and social change, a signal for individuals to seek new opportunities and greater security. Almost all of the immigrants were from Hoshiaour, Jullundur, and Ludhiana districts of central Punjab - an area dominated by peasant proprietors. The early 1900s was a time of varied mobility for them: many of them: many had migrated within Punjab to the new canal-irrigated colonies in southwestern Punjab. Eventually, in the United States, the Punjab immigrants also would be working in newly-irrigated farmlands in the San Joaquin Valley of California, which is geographically much like that area of the Punjab. But initially, in 1907 and 1908, the main destinations of the immigrants were the lumber camps of Oregon, Washington state, and British Columbia in Canada. Many of the immigrants had come to North America via service in the British army. Most were Sikhs, and by the middle of 1908 they had begun building their own place of worship, a Gurdwara, in British Columbia, and establishing an investment company of their own, the Nanak Trust Co. On arrival of new immigrants from Punjab were met with hostility from some of the white residents of Canada and the United States. In most cases, the difficulties were in the competition for scarce jobs: the new immigrants were willing to do demanding for lass pay. In 1907 there were anti-Asian riots in British Columbia, in which Punjabis were targeted along with Chinese and Japanese; the same year, the Punjabis were the specific cause for riots in the lumber camps in Bellingham, Washington. In 1908 and later, the riots had moved south to the state of Oregon, and in California, the Exclusion Movement against other Asians also included hostility against the Punjabis. And in 1908, British Columbia effectively ended all new Asian immigrations. These events in India, Canada and the United States were the immediate antecedents tot he founding of the Hindustan Association in British Columbia in 1909, a precursor to the Gadar Movement, which advocated self-rule in India. The Association did not directly respond to the labor problems and the racial prejudice encountered by the new immigrants, but clearly those economic and social tensions were in the background and gave fervor to its proclamations. During the busy years of 1907-1909, with so much traffic from India to North America, the events in Punjab and the events abroad could not remain separate in the minds of the immigrants activists. In 1910 through 1913, two other sequences of events appear. Restrictive legislation and racial disturbances had turned the focus on Punjabi emigration away from Canada and towards America: 1910 was the largest year of migration tot he United States (until recent times). It was also a year of racial disturbances in both Oregon and California. The same year, Tarak Nath Das began agitating for Indian nationalism in Seattle, Washington, and Har Dayal did the same in California after his arrival in February 1911. Another group, calling itself the Hindustan Association, this one also a nationalist organization, was founded in Oregon in 1912. By 1912, the immigrant community of Sikhs in California was sufficiently established to begin building its own Gurdwara, in Stockton. The Punjabis (and other Asians) were also sufficiently established as landowners in the rich developing San Joaquin Valley farmland to threaten the resident American landowners. In 1913, an Alien Land Law was passed, which limited land ownership for most Asians to three-year issues. 1913 was also a critical year for the Gadar movement: in May, the Hindi Association was formed in Oregon by Har Dayal, Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna, and others. In October, Har Dayal had established the Yuguntar Ashram as a political headquarters of the movement in San Francisco; and in November, 1913, the newspaper Ghadr began publications. One of the most violent actions against the new Punjabi immigrants occurred in 1914, in Wheatland, California, where European and immigrant Asian laborers went on strike in the hop fields. The Asians, especially the Punjabis, received the brunt of the attacks from strikebreakers and anti-labor gangs. According to Professor Bruce LaBrack, members of the Punjabi immigrant community remember that event even today, and claim that it had much to do with the raising of their political consciousness. These feelings of outrage were transferred to hatred against the British, for they felt they if they controlled their own country, this sort of abuse would not have happened. The date of the riot is significant: in the same year, 1914, the Gadar party had its greatest expansion, and garnered widespread financial organizational support from the immigrant community. The juxtaposition of events, of course, does not prove that there is a causative relationship. The political and demographic events in the Punjab may or may not have been the formative cause for the migrations; the life histories of many immigrants would have to be surveyed for that assertion to be proven. Moreover, one cannot prove that the legislation and racial riots had a direct effect on the developments of the Gadar party, although there are some evidences of a correlation. According to G.B. Lal, an early member of the Ghadar movement interviewed by Professor Emily Brown, it was the task of the radical nationalist intellectuals, such as Kartar Singh Sarabha and Har Dayal, to make that link, and re-direct the interests of the immigrant community: We told him [the immigrant farmers] that it was no use to talk about the Asiatic Exclusion Act, immigration, and citizenship. They had to strike at the British because they were responsible for the way Indians were being treated in America. There was some response. They made donations. They wanted to know what they could do. So we suggested that they start a newspaper and that they call it Ghadr. The sequence of events, while not conclusive, are tantalizing. In addition to the correlations we have mentioned above, later in Gadar's development there are even more correlative events: restrictive immigration laws and the German liaisons of World War I are coincident with such incidents as the Komagata Maru affair, and the abortive Gadar uprising of 1915. In the 1920s, the Third Case in 1923 (in which an Indian immigrant attempted to escape restrictive clauses by arguing that Indians are Caucasian) and the infamous "Asiatic Exclusion Act of 1924" occur at the same time as the Gadar party's renewal and expansion into an international network. Although the sequential pattern of these events - in the Punjab, in the immigrant community, in the American response, and in the Gadar activity - is only suggestive, it does indicate that the experiences of the immigrant community in America were linked with Gadar events. The Gadar movement was undoubtedly genuine in expressing nationalist support for a free India; but at the same time it offered something more: a locus of identity for an angry and confused immigrant community. The Gadar Identity The identity that Gadar provided was a compound of several elements, one of the most basic of which was economic. In the early days of the formation of the movement, from 1907 to 1912, when embryonic organizational meetings of the movement was held in British Columbia, Washington state, and Oregon, most of the immigrants were laborers in the lumber camps. There were issues of economic exploitation and class differentiation were prevalent. Sohan Singh Bkahna, a key figure in the early pre-Gadar party meetings in Astoria, Oregon, who later returned to the Punjab to be a leader of the new communist party there, recalls that his socialist concerns had their origins in those early labor problems among the immigrant Punjabi lumber workers in Oregon. It is clear that the Oregon meetings in 1912 and 1913 were concerned as much as labor issues as with nationalism. When the center of Gadar activity shifted to California, however, the matter became more complicated. The movement which crystallized in San Francisco in 1913 was a mixture of intellectuals, political refugees, and farmers. The farmers were of several economic classes: some owned land (which they technically were supposed to abandon after American government legislation in 1913), others leased land, and others were landless laborers. There is no indication that there was any tension among these different kinds of Indian participants in the movement; and there was no strong indication, in California, of the class identities and labor concerns that characterized the Oregon immigrant community. Nonetheless, even in California the ingredients existed for class consciousness; and for some Gadarites that later blossomed into socialist ideology. The Gadar ideology before 1918 was almost exclusively nationalist, with a touch of utopian socialism brought tot he movement by visionary ideas of Har Dayal. His idiosyncratic vision, however, made very little impress upon the rest of the followers of the movement. After the Russian revolution, experienced first-hand by some of the Gadarites returning to India between 1916 and 1919, Gadar ideology turned decisively to the left. In the 1920s, one wing of the old Gadar party was actively involved in international communism, and helped to formulate the communist party in the Punjab. The Marxism of some of the later Gadarites is a mark of the apparent secularity of the movement. Yet if one looks closely at the character of the immigrant community supporting Gadar, one finds a strikingly religious strand. On the movement's publications one finds the names "Ram, Allah and Nanak" on the masthead, an invitation of membership to all those who revere those three divine names. And the movement did, in fact, include members of the differing faiths: Har Dayal and Ram Chandra were both Hindus: Bhagwan Singh and Kartar Singh Sarabha, Sikhs; and Barkatullah, Muslim. Yet the overwhelming numbers of supporters of the movement were Sikh, and their militant religious history also became a part of the Gadar identity. Among the immigrant farmers who supplied money and labor, Sikhs predominated, and provided the movement's mass base. After Har Dayal had left the United States for Europe in 1915, and Ram Chandra was shot during the 1918 San Francisco trial, the Sikhs under the leadership of Bhagwan Singh had the movement almost to themselves. Sikh institutions and organizations also played an important role in the movement. The first Indian nationalist organization in British Columbia was closely related tot he Khalsa Diwan Society of the Sikh Gurdwara there, and the later Gadar movement had a symbiotic relationship tot he Khalsa Diwan Society and the Sikh Gurdwara in Stockton - sometimes mutually supportive, sometimes competitive. After 1920, the wing of the movement in the San Joaquin Valley of California was, for all practical purposes, a Sikh organization. There was even some Sikhs who regarded members of the Gadar movement as Sant Sapahis, warriors in faith. This identification of Gadar with Sikhs does not mean, however, that the movement was ever overtly religious; the movement's ideology was always political, untainted with the language of faith. Yet, like much else in India, the religious and the social aspects were frequently intertwined, and neither element is without some trace of the other. Perhaps, then, it would be better to describe Gadar's religious character as a communal identity for many of the Sikhs who supported the movement and found in it the fulfillment of some of their cultural and social needs. Again, there was an American echo to a situation of stress in India: in Punjab, during the first decades of this century, the Sikh community was going through a period of self-definition, in response to the communalism of urban Hindus and Muslims. Within the Gadar movement in America, that awareness of identity was fused with an immigrant community's own attempt to define and understand itself in a strange land. Gadar as Ethnic Identity Gadar was the expression of an immigrant community, and beneath its intense nationalism there is the awkward self-image of a group of people who were no longer in India, but not quite yet within North America. The syndrome was beginning to emerge: a native nationalism that they felt when they were within the boundaries of other countries, in part because of the strangeness of their new surroundings, and in part because of the inability of the new country to accept them. These were some of the dynamics in the nationalism of Gandhi in South Africa a few years before, and they became part of the motivation of those who founded Gadar. One may view the Gadar nationalism as a form of escape, or as an escape, or as an attempt at accommodation. In the hostile environment of North American prejudice, the Indian nationalism gave the immigrant community the illusion that they were a part of India, and therefore free from the racial problems of North America. At the same time, Gadar's nationalism provided the immigrant community with an ethnic identity, a sense of pride, which enabled them to stand up to the difficulties of their hostile North American environment. Both views are apt, but initially it was the former interpretation - nationalism as a link between the immigrant community and its homeland - that characterized the founding spirit. By remaining nationalistically Indian through the Gadar movement, the founders distanced themselves from the pejorative image of being part of a minority community in a foreign society. By keeping their Indian identities, they also kept alive the possibility that they might return to India. But as the immigrant community became more settled, and the Gadar movement became more integrated with the life of the community, the Gadar nationalism became fused with their identity as ethnic Indian-Americans. This appears to be the case especially after 1920. In the early 1920s, when the movement fragmented, one section of the Gadar movement became a platform for local politics and immigrant community organization. There were hints of this role even earlier. The movement had helped to identify and train leaders and had given them a basis of support. Having had a certain concentration of money and influence, Gadar became an arena of power within the immigrant community. In 1915 through 1917, when it was torn apart by two rival factions, the issue was as much a struggle for dominance as it was a difference of ideology. The shocking death of Ram Chandra, and the succession of Gyani Bhagwan Singh tot he mantle of Gadar leadership in 1918 was a dramatic indication of the importance attached to the internal power of the party. The movement continued as a source of ethnic identity and nationalist pride through the 1930s and formally came to a demise only at the time of India's independence. In the later years it was more and more an element of the immigrant community identity. When a U.S. citizen of Punjabi descent ran for the American House of Representatives in the 1950s, his tenuous link with the Gadar party became a serious campaign issue, since Gadar had become linked with international communism. During the McCarthy era of the 1950s, the entire Punjabi immigrant community in California feared the revenge of a paranoid America against them. Only recently has academic research into the immigrant community and Gadar been possible again, now that the red scare of the 1950s has subsided. Once again, the movement can only be discussed by the community, and has again become a symbol of its nationalist pride. That symbol has recently taken shape in the form of a building. In 1975, the government of India constructed a handsome redwood library and meeting hall at 5 Wood Street, San Francisco, on the site of the original headquarters of the Gadar party. Most of the funds to construct the Ghadar Memorial Library came from Punjabis living in California. In addition to serving as a museum and library, the building is used as a meeting hall for the local community. Thus, the name of the Gadar continues to be identified with the ethnic pride of the children and grandchildren of the original Gadar rebels. The Gadar Syndrome In brief, then, the "Gadar syndrome" may be described as follows: A militant nationalist movement is created abroad by expatriates, for whom the movement is also an outlet for their economic and social frustrations, and a vehicle for their ethnic identities. It is the fusion and the mutual interaction of ethnic anger and nationalist pride. Viewed as a general type, a syndrome, Gadar does not stand alone. There were other ethnic communities in the United States for whom ethnicity and nationalist pride came together in a revolutionary movement. The immigrant Irish laborers, for example, were waging their own struggle against the British at the time of Gadar movement, and the members of the Irish community in California became Gadar's close allies. The Gadar party, in turn, printed tracts in favor of Irish independence. After the death of Ram Chandra, members of the Irish independence movement befriended the family and supported other members of the movement. Among other Asian communities one finds further instances of the Gadar syndrome. The 1911 revolution led by Sun Yat Sen occurred during a time when the Chinese immigrants in the United States were the subjects of social prejudice and restrictive legislation, similar to that experienced by the Punjabi immigrants, and the active support of the Sun Yat Sen revolution by immigrant Chinese was not altogether unlike the revolutionary activities of the Gadarites. In 1910, Sun Yat Sen came to America to organize chapters of his revolutionary organization, the Tongmenghui, which in alliance with local organizations "emerged as a significant political force in Chinese communities in the U.S. and Canada." Korean nationalist activities in the United States also paralleled those of the Gadar syndrome. Thus, even though the Gadar movement may hold a peculiar place in the history of India's struggle for independence, it is not an isolated incident in the pattern of ethnic communities in the United States. Viewed from the perspective of India, the Gadar revolutionaries' earnest but unsuccessful contribution tot he task of independence is something of an enigma. But viewed from the perspective of the North America, the activities of the Gadar rebels appear quite different. In the American context, the movement is, in part, the expression of an oppressed minority community. The anger and humiliation was reversed into pride - a nationalist pride - which sharpened into the militant potency of Gadar, and its futile revolution. Footnotes are not included. Please refer to original copy. Sources: Juergensmeyer, Mark. "The Gadar Syndrome: Ethnic Anger and Nationalist Pride." Population Review 25:1-2 (1981): 48-58. An earlier form of this paper was presented at 1976 Sikh Studies Conference at Berekeley: Juergensmeyer, Mark; Barrier, Gerald N. Sikh Studies: a comparative perspectives on a changing tradition: working papers from the Berkeley conference on Sikh studies. Berkeley: Graduate Theological Union, 1979, (pg. 173-190) Notes for:
"The Ghadar Syndrome: Nationalism in an Immigrant Community," by Mark Juergensmeyer
Published in "Punjab Journal of Politics" Vol. 1, No. 1, October 1977