The Ghadar movement or Ghadar Party was an early 20th-century, international political movement founded by expatriate Indians to overthrow British rule in India. Many of the Ghadar Party founders and leaders, including Sohan Singh Bhakna, went on and join the Babbar Akali Movement and helped it in logistics as a party and publishing its own newspaper in the post-World War I era. The early movement was created by the revolutionaries who lived and worked on the West Coast of the United States and Canada, and the movement later spread to India and Indian diasporic communities around the world. The official founding has been dated to a meeting on 15 July 1913 in Astoria, Oregon, and the group splintered into two factions the first time in 1914, with the Sikh-majority faction known as the “Azad Punjab Ghadar” and the Hindu-majority faction known as the “Hindustan Ghadar.” The Azad Punjab Ghadar Party's headquarters and anti-colonial newspaper publications headquarters remained in the Stockton Gurdwara in Stockton, California, and the Hindustan Ghadar Party's headquarters and Hindustan Ghadar newspaper relocated to nearby Oakland, California. Consequently, some Ghadar party members returned to Punjab to instigate an armed revolution for Indian Independence. The Ghadar Mutiny, as this uprising became known, involved Ghadarites smuggling arms into India and encouraging Indian troops to revolt against the British. This attempt was ultimately unsuccessful, leading to the execution of 42 mutineers after the Lahore Conspiracy Case trial. Undeterred, Ghadarites continued underground anti-colonial actions from 1914 to 1917 with support from Germany and Ottoman Turkey, a period known as the Hindu–German Conspiracy, which culminated in a sensational trial in San Francisco in 1917.

Following the war's conclusion, the party in the United States fractured into a Communist and an Indian Socialist faction. The party was formally dissolved in 1948.

In 1918, the party split into the Kirti Kisan Sabha, which had communist and socialist leanings and later aligned with Congress, and the Babbar Akali faction, which was Sikhism-centric.

Etymology

The movement derived its name from the Punjabi word ghadr or ghadar often translated as "mutiny" or "revolution".

History

Background

Due to farming becoming more economically unviable in the Punjab, many residents emigrated overseas for other opportunities, first to East Asia. While in East Asia, they learnt about prospects in North America, leading to them moving to the United States and Canada. Many of these early migrants were Sikhs, who had no traditional taboo for travel overseas. 99% of the 5,000 Indians who moved to Canada by 1908 were Punjabis, with 80% of them being Sikhs, Many of them were illiterate farmers and laborers, students, and priests. Not only Canada, they also settled in the US. Places first settled by them in both countries include San Francisco, Stockton, Portland, Saint John, Vancouver, and Victoria. Early arrivees such Amar Singh, Gopal Singh, Tarak Nath Das, and Ram Nath Puri started promoting anti-colonial views when they got to North America, with the founding of an Urdu periodical, the Azādī kā Circular, which attempted to persuade Indians in the colonial military to oppose the British. Many migrants came to work in the fields, factories, and logging camps of Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, where they were exposed to labor unions and the ideas of the radical Industrial Workers of the World or IWW. The migrants of the Pacific Northwest banded together in Sikh gurdwaras and formed political Hindustani Associations for mutual aid.

In the United States, organisations such as the Indo-American Society and Indo-American National Association were founded to assist South Asian migrants living in New York and Chicago. These groups invited Indian students to study in the United States, especially at UC Berkeley in San Francisco, California, by providing them economic support, such as through the India House, which provided free habitation (with similar India Houses appearing in London and Paris). These student-outreach efforts were led by Har Dayal of Stanford University, Sant Teja Singh of Harvard University, and Bhai Parmanand. Some of those who arrived were rebels rather than students. According to Emily C. Brown, Indian nationalism arose amongst these early immigrants due to racial tensions and race-riots existing in North American society between Whites and Asians, with Chinese and Japanese victims being supported by the governments of China and Japan while there was no Indian government advocating for the rights of Indians abroad. The Indians were also mocked for being "slaves". Targeting Indian immigration in-particular, the Canadian government introduced the continuous journey regulation, a mandatory $200 amount per immigrant, and tried persuading Indians to move to British Honduras instead. in the United States and Canada with the aim to liberate India from British rule. The movement began with a group of immigrants known as the Hindustani Workers of the Pacific Coast.]]

Har Dayal expressed by them as follows: Whilst in the diaspora the Ghadar Party found success, in India there was a lack of popular support for the Ghadarites. The Indian National Congress, Sikh priests of gurdwaras, and nationalists in India denounced the Ghadar Party. In August 1947, the Ghadar Party ceased to exist and donated all of its property to the new state of India.

  • Amir Chand
  • Maulana Barkatullah
  • Harnam Singh Saini
  • Pandurang Sadashiv Khankhoje
  • Ganda Singh Phangureh
  • Baba Prithvi Singh Azad
  • Gulab Kaur
  • Pt. Ram Rakha
  • Sohanlal Pathak

<gallery>

File:Ghadar Party leaders.jpg|Ghadar leaders. Left to right: Sohan Singh Bakhna, Mohammed Barkatullah, Bhagwan Singh.

File:Ghadr Party heroes poster,1916.jpg|Ghadr Party heroes poster, 1916

File:The Independent Hindustan Volume I Number 4.djvu|The Independent Hindustan

File:Ghadar di gunj.jpg|Ghadar di Gunj, an early Ghadarite compilation of nationalist and socialist literature, was banned in India in 1913.

</gallery>

See also

  • Communist Ghadar Party of India

References

Citations

References

Further reading

  • Singh, Ajmer. Gadari Babe Kaun San
  • A Gallery on Gadar Party
  • Ghadar Party materials in the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA)
  • Ghadar: The Indian Immigrant Outrage Against Canadian Injustices 1900–1918 by Sukhdeep Bhoi
  • The Hindustan Ghadar Collection. The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
  • Communist Ghadar Party of India