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34 R ADICALS Almost immediately the Ghadar propaganda tours hit the fields. Kartar Singh Sarabha was particularly inspired in generating publicity, said Behari Lal, arranging meetings such as the one in Yolo that he describes here: “A good number ” of farm workers gathered around, sitting on the ground around him and his kinsman. “They sat quietly and I said a few things. Then Har Dayal talked about the position of the Indian people in India and abroad, the need of independence.” Unresponsive silence met his finish. But after a few minutes, “one or two men came forward awkwardly, saluted Har Dayal with reverence and placed a few dollar bills before him, as they used to do when offering their contributions in a temple.” Within a half an hour, they had collected a few hundred dollars in cash and checks. Har Dayal refused to take the money himself, insisting instead that it should be entrusted to a fully transparent and accountable committee. This went over brilliantly, setting him apart from “the other Babus,” whom Sohan Singh Bhakna had accused of cheating his constituency of hard-earned money under the guise of doing patriotic work. An informant known as C later described the whirlwind West Coast “missionary tour” to his British handlers as follows: Ram Chandra, Gobind Behari Lal, and others go out to the ranches, where poor labourers are working, on Saturdays and Sundays; they preach revolution to them until these poor and illiterate people think they must drive the English out of India or kill them. It becomes a fixed idea with them. The revolutionary songs which 2 Our Name Is Our Work The Syndicalist Ghadar The Syndicalist Ghadar 35 they sing have been committed to memory, and they sing them with great fervour. They do not know the meaning of what they are singing [!], but they almost treat it as a religion. Ram Chandra and the others who visit the ranches tell these people that the British are ruining them, and keeping them poor. The great danger lies among these poor people in America. The ordinary educated man soon commits himself and is arrested, but the labourer merely goes back to India and commences to sing these revolutionary songs in his native village, and in this way spreads the movement in India. The British ambassador to the United States, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, commented after the mutiny attempt: “The truth of these statements is abundantly illustrated by the long list of returned emigrants of the coolie class which figures in India judgments.” Aside from the astounding level of contempt with which SpringRice assumed that the Indian laborers, being poor and illiterate, could have had no understanding of the very matter that so inflamed them—as if their very enthusiasm was proof of naïveté, rather than conviction!—and that any catalyzing or leadership roles would have had to come from the educated elite, nevertheless he was plainly identifying the Ghadar mobilization as a class-based mass movement of racialized, low-wage migrant laborers—in a word, “coolies.” The Ghadar Party Building on the summer of touring, a November meeting in San Francisco consolidated and extended the PCHA infrastructure set forth in Astoria six months before. This time two new vice presidents, and two more organizing secretaries were elected, plus three coordinators—Kartar Singh Sarabha, Harnam Singh Tundilat, and Jagat Ram—assigned to “secret and political work.” Bhai Parmanand made a proposal to institute scholarships, according to the logic that a free India once attained would require educated people. Har Dayal agreed, but some of the workers took offense. Bhakna and Tundilat made an alternate suggestion to prioritize “direct and effective” propaganda to the ripe constituency of Jat yeoman in their own language. This would be the Ghadar. In his autobiography Bhakna identified the opening of the Yugantar Ashram in San Francisco and the activities based there as the real start of what can really be called the Ghadar movement. But the claim to the name was and is still contested : who were the real Ghadarites? Har Dayal’s use of the word in the first issue of the paper referred expansively to all of India’s patriotic revolutionaries to date, encompassing all the Bengalis, all the Punjabis, and the activists in the London and Paris circles. Yet at the same time he was stressing the need to form a party in the more specific sense: this would be comprised of the dedicated inner core of students and organic intellectuals...

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