Why the Ghadar movement is a neglected chapter in India and Punjab’s official histories

Upon her return, Gill started reading about the Mandalay conspiracy case and the Ghadar movement, of which it was a part. Growing up in Nakodar near Jalandhar, long considered a hub of Ghadar activism, Gill was unsettled by how little she had been taught about it. She spent the next five years dedicated to the study of the Ghadar movement, releasing a book, The Ghadar Movement: A Forgotten Struggle, on the subject earlier this year. In her preface to the book, Gill asks a rhetorical question: “Why is the Ghadar movement not taught in schools, in colleges, and in universities? How could I grow up and not know anything about these men, the majority of whom belonged to Punjab, my home state, who sacrificed their lives just on a whim?”

A revolution that crossed borders

Founded in 1913, the Ghadar movement is known to be the first organised transnational attempt to revolt against British rule. Although it was brutally suppressed by the British very quickly, it left an intellectual and ideological imprint on several later nationalist and revolutionary leaders across India, including Bhagat Singh, M N Roy, and Subhas Chandra Bose.

Scholars argue that the spirit of resilience and rebellion that defined the Ghadar movement continues to resonate in Punjab today. The memories of the Ghadarites endure in Punjabi folklore and reappear in moments of collective resistance, including the recent farmers’ protest. However, they agree with Gill: the movement has, in many ways, been overlooked in the broader project of writing modern India’s history, and also that of Punjab’s history.

Writings on Ghadar

Gill’s objective in writing a book on the Ghadar movement was simple — to raise awareness about the movement in Indian history. In an interview with indianexpress.com, she says that most of the writing about Ghadar is in Punjabi. The few detailed accounts of the movement she found in English included the writings of Harish K Puri, often regarded as the foremost historian of the movement, and those of the American historian Maia Ramnath.

Puri’s work situates the Ghadar movement within Punjab’s broader social and political history, tracing its influence on the emergence of later left-wing and peasant movements in the region. Meanwhile, Ramnath’s book, Haj to Utopia (2011), connects Ghadar to anti-colonial movements across the world. Other significant works on the movement, by scholars such as Mark Juergensmeyer and Seema Sohi, connect Ghadar to the intertwined histories of racial exclusion abroad and colonial resistance at home.

Gill’s book traces the period from 1913, when the party was born, to 1918, by which time the revolt had weakened. It begins with a brief account of the British colonial apparatus in India in the 18th and 19th centuries, and places Punjab within it. Until the middle of the 19th century, Punjab was outside the ambit of British rule, mainly due to the thriving rule of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. It was after his death that the region would come under the British, and Punjab, as Gill notes, “would be ripped off its sheen and glory”.

With sharply rising taxes, shrinking lands under their control, and the recurring onset of diseases among the population, Punjab’s peasantry was reduced to acute poverty. Author and journalist Amandeep Sandhu explains that with the onset of the Boer War in the 1890s, the British sent a large number of men from Punjab to Africa as soldiers. “This was the beginning of migration from Punjab,” he says. Thereon, the inhabitants of Punjab soon realised that migration was the best way to escape the harsh conditions they were living in and earn for their families.

Soon they landed on the South Pacific Coast Islands, in Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, China, Iran, Egypt, and East Africa, where they worked as watchmen and guards, earning a lot more than what they would have at home. Over time, as new opportunities emerged in Canada and North America, Punjab’s peasantry began migrating to these distant lands. Between 1903 and 1913, as noted by Puri in his 1993 book The Ghadar Movement, about 10,000 South Asian emigres had entered North America, the majority being from the rural region of Punjab.

Gill explains that apart from the peasants who migrated from better prospects, there were also students, like Kartar Singh Sarabha and Vishnu Ganesh Pingle, who travelled abroad for higher education. Then there were revolutionaries like Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Madam Bhikaji Cama, who were exiled and were in Europe. These three factions, says Gill, “were brought together by Lala Har Dayal, who was in the United States, to form the Ghadar Party.”

Poster of Ghadar Party heroes (Wikimedia Commons)

On July 15, 1913, they formed the Hindi Association of the Pacific Coast in San Francisco, which would later become the Ghadar Party. The definite objective of the party, they laid out, was the end of British rule.

Call for freedom

Puri recounts his interaction with the former president of the Ghadar Party, Sohan Singh Bhakna, in 1966. When asked what prompted him to start the Ghadar Party, Bhakna told Puri that they witnessed a lot more freedom and development in America. The contrast with India left them puzzled. “They concluded that the situation in America was different on account of them having fought a war of Independence against the British in 1776,” Puri tells indianexpress.com. “Once they gained independence, they were masters of their own fate.”

There was also the experience of racism and miscegenation laws outside of India that shaped the Ghadar movement. The 1914 Komagata Maru incident, when a ship carrying Indian migrants was turned away from Canada and then fired upon by British police on their return to Calcutta, stirred deep resentment among Punjabis across the world. It became a rallying cry for the Ghadar movement, convincing many that armed revolt was the only path to liberation from racism and colonial oppression.

Sandhu further points to the influence of international socialism on the ideologies of the founders of the Ghadar Party. “A large number of its members would have been well acquainted with the Guru Granth Sahib, which speaks about working for the welfare of all. It stands for social justice and equality for all,” he says. Emancipation of the working class, he says, was the basic principle of socialism. The two thoughts fit together well. “The Ghadar Party was a beautiful synergy between Sikh thought and international socialism,” he suggests.

In 1915, fueled by the anger over the Komagata Maru incident, the Ghadar members planned an armed uprising to overthrow the British. The idea was to ignite simultaneous mutinies within the British Indian Army, particularly in Bengal, Punjab, and Burma. The plan, coordinated with help from Germany, aimed to seize key cantonments, capture arms, and trigger a nationwide rebellion similar to the uprising of 1857. However, the British found out about the plans and suppressed them before they could even begin. Hundreds of soldiers and activists were arrested, and many were executed or imprisoned in the ensuing Lahore and Mandalay trials.

After 1918, riddled with factionalism, the party split into two groups — the Kirti Kisan Party, which was moderate in its ideological temperament, inclined more towards communism with shades of socialism, and the Babbar Akali faction, which comprised Ghadarites who wanted to avenge the imprisonment of their peers and the failure of the Ghadar mutiny in 1915. In the years that followed, the Kirti Kisan faction aligned with the Congress. Enthusiasm for Ghadar kept ebbing, and after 1948, the party was finally disbanded, and its premises in San Francisco were handed over to the Indian government.

Faded from history books, celebrated in Punjab

In the years following Independence, the memory of the Ghadar movement lived on in Punjab’s cultural imagination than in its history books. In rural areas, folk songs and ballads frequently alluded to the acts of courage of Ghadar leaders, like Kartar Singh Sarabha, one of the youngest and most revered among them. Local stories mythologised the Ghadarites, celebrating the vilaithi sipahis as martyrs or shaheedis.

There were other attempts by the Ghadarites to keep alive the memory of their endeavour. In 1959, they established the Desh Bhagat Yadgar Hall in Jalandhar to serve as a memorial and an archive for literature related to the Ghadar movement. Thereafter, a fair, Mela Babari Gadri Babian da, was organised in 1992 to celebrate the memory and message of the movement. It was attended by many and soon became an annual event, attracting poets, artists, and literary thinkers from around Punjab.

The Desh Bhagat Yadgar Hall was established in 1959 in Jalandhar to serve as a memorial and an archive for literature related to the Ghadar movement. (Wikimedia Commons)

Yet, despite being entrenched in the historical consciousness and folklore of Punjab, the Ghadar movement is mentioned only in passing in the narratives of modern Indian history in school textbooks. Sandhu explains the reason for this: the left-oriented academic historians of India considered Ghadar more of a Punjab movement than an Indian one because of the large presence of Punjabis, or rather Sikhs, in it. Such an understanding often overlooked the fact that the movement consisted of several non-Sikh leaders. Har Dayal was Hindu, and so were Kanshi Ram and Rash Behari Bose. Muslim members of the movement consisted of Barkatullah and Rehmat Ali.

Moreover, the militant, revolutionary character of the Ghadar movement did not sit well with the Congress party’s narrative of the national movement being driven by Gandhian non-violence and constitutional politics.

Even in Punjab’s official historical discourse, the movement remains largely absent. After the linguistic reorganisation of the state in 1966, Punjab politics was increasingly dominated by the Sikh religious ideology of the Akali Dal. The secular, socialist nature of the Ghadar movement did not fit in with the narratives of the Akali Dal and Congress. The fact that the Naxal movement of the 1970s sought inspiration from the Ghadar movement meant that it was further marginalised from official academic discourse.

Gill, through her book, hopes to overcome this academic gap. She says that to her, what stood out the most about the movement was the resilience and courage of the members. In one of the chapters, she mentions that the “kind of passion Ghadar created in its believers was unique.” Most Ghadarites were poor peasants who had travelled far away to Canada and America, not to create revolution, but to make money and a good life. And yet, they gave up prospects of a prosperous life upon the call for liberation, she writes.