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233 The arc of Ghadar’s narrative paused for breath but did not stop at the threshold of the 1930s, with the Meerut and Lahore Conspiracy cases, the deaths of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, and Sukhdev, and a new round of struggle in the Chittagong Armoury raids and the Civil Disobedience movement. Although Ghadar-linked activists were doing their work through other names and formations, even in 1931 British intelligence issued an alert that rehearsed a pattern that had remained remarkably consistent for fifteen years: vague warnings were sent out that plans were afoot for a Russian-sponsored invasion of Punjab from the northwest, timed to the coordinated eruption of massive internal upheaval. And sure enough, just as so many times before, “it was noted that the Kabul branch of the Gadar party was making persistent endeavours to secure arms, large scale maps of India and adjacent countries, hatching schemes for mobilisation and concentrating on military information regarding the North-West Frontier.” The northeastern variation on the Ghadarite theme was reprised even more loudly during World War II in Subhash Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army, recruited from among the Indian POWs in Southeast Asia for an invasion of liberation across the Indo-Burmese border, after he had sought patronage from Germany and Japan. This was a tactical legacy; the ideological thread could be traced via the League Against Imperialism to the postwar Non-Aligned Movement, framing the commitment to Third World solidarity in the same logic of national liberation plus culturally appropriate socialism that had characterized the alumni of the Moscow University of the Toilers of the East. Other Ghadar veterans continued this work even more directly and immediately . One of a very few North American Ghadarites from a scheduled caste Epilogue 234 Epilogue (Chamar) background, Mangu Ram channeled his experience in a unique direction as one of the architects of the Punjabi anti-Untouchability movement Ad Dharm in the mid-1920s. In 1909 at the age of twenty-three, he took a job his father had arranged picking fruit in California through a labor contractor who paid his passage, which was to be reimbursed from his first wages, after which he would send the money home to his family. Over the next four years he spent time in various work camps throughout the Central Valley, often employed by émigré landowners from the same families who had been the zamindars of his village at home. But everything changed when he encountered Ghadar. Fired by the movement ’s dream of social equality, he became a full-time worker in the San Francisco office. In 1915 he joined the five-man team that would accompany the hazardous Annie Larsen/Maverick expedition. After an odyssey that included the witnessing of a volcanic eruption in Hawaii and two eleventh-hour escapes from execution, he made landfall in the Philippines, where Ghadar comrades kept him safely hidden until the end of the war. Though the danger had passed, he chose to stay on in Manila working for a contractor to an American garment factory. A 1920 intelligence report then identified him as one of the “leading Indian revolutionaries ” contributing to “the disloyalty of many of the Indian residents in the Philippine Islands.” At a meeting in Manila, he and other speakers predicted a Bolshevik advance on India, on which those hopes previously invested in a German victory must now rest; they also spoke of “the risings now occurring daily in Turkey and Arabia.” They agreed to collect all the available funds and literature their countrymen throughout the Philippines had received from San Francisco, to send on to the troops and peasants in India. When Mangu Ram returned to India himself in 1926, he found that his years abroad had changed his bearing to the extent that he now passed for a person of higher caste. “For sixteen years abroad he had enjoyed a life in which he was treated as an individual rather than as a Chamar,” remarks Mark Juergensmeyer, noting that while the Indian community in North America faced external racism , they were internally egalitarian to a degree unheard-of within India. Moreover , “the camaraderie of the Gadar movement . . . provided a standard of fellowship and equality that Mangoo Ram believed to be applicable to all societies. His social expectations had risen definitively.” But his individual escape from the strictures of the caste system made him even more sensitive upon his return to its collective injustices. Juergensmeyer observes: “By the time Mangoo Ram reached Punjab...

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