Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
South Asians in the U.S. and American allies played an important role in India’s freedom movement. Perhaps best known is the Ghadar Party, an organization founded in 1913 to fight for India’s independence through armed revolution. However, many other organizations and individuals across the United States were also deeply invested in fighting for India’s freedom in their own ways. In this short article, we highlight four such histories from the East Coast through materials from the South Asian American Digital Archive, which contains hundreds more historical and contemporary stories about South Asians in the United States.
Young India (January 1918)
During his extended exile in the U.S. between 1914 and 1919, Lajpat Rai founded the India Home Rule League of America in New York City with branches in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Indianapolis, and other small cities across the country,. The League advocated for “home rule,” which would make India a self-governing colony within the British Empire. The League also published Young India, a monthly journal which aimed to educate its readers about the conditions of British rule and the unfolding independence movement.
Friends of Freedom for India Dinner on December 10, 1924
Another critical organization was Friends of Freedom for India, an organization that was closely associated with the West Coast-based Ghadar Party and led by itinerant radical Agnes Smedley and Sailendranath Ghose. Their mission, according to its own membership ads, was “to maintain the right of asylum for political refugees from India” and “to present the case for the independence of India.” Many of their publications also drew comparisons to the cause for Irish freedom, and saw support from Irish nationalists.
What B.R. Ambedkar Wrote to W.E.B. Du Bois
In 1913, B.R. Ambedkar arrived in New York City from Bombay on a scholarship to attend Columbia University and pursue an M.A. in Economics. After returning to India (not before completing a Ph.D. in London), Ambedkar would go on to become the most influential Dalit leader in India in the 20th century, the chairman of the constituent assembly that drafted the Indian constitution, and one of the most incisive theorists of caste and greatest intellectuals of modern India.
In 1949, his correspondence with the African American leader, W.E.B. Du Bois, drew connections between the plight of “untouchability” in postcolonial India and racism in the U.S.
Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay
A member of Congress Socialist Party, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay spent eighteen months in North America between 1939 and 1941. During this time, she advocated for Indian independence, and spoke out against British anti-Indian propaganda in the U.S. On the tour, met with American dignitaries, but also people often excluded in a dignitary’s tour: in the South, she stayed exclusively with African Americans; in the Great Plans, she “met with the ‘Okies’”, in the South West, she visited a Pueblo reservation, and in the East Coast, she visited prisoners in Sing Sing, introducing herself to women prisoners as an “old-timer,” having been imprisoned years before for civil disobedience in India.
Gadar Party
The Hindustan Gadar Party was a San Francisco-based anti-colonial political organization, which advocated the complete overthrow of British rule in India through revolutionary means. In 1913, a group of activists based on the Pacific Coast, including Har Dayal and Sohan Singh Bhakna, were organizing migrant laborers (most of whom were Punjabi Sikhs) and helped found what would later be known as the Gadar Party. The Gadar Party published a newspaper titled Gadr in Urdu, and soon the newspaper and the party’s pamphlets were disseminated throughout the world, including Japan, China, Hong Kong, Burma and the Philippines. (The Gadar Party received considerable support from the German Foreign Office, which arranged funds and armaments in a plot to incite a pan-Indian revolution (later known as the “Annie Larsen affair”) in 1915. The conspiracy was discovered by British and American intelligence, and led to the Hindu-German Conspiracy Trial of 1917, in which 29 party members were convicted in the District Court in San Francisco.)
Har Dayal
Described as an anarchist and “an idealist of a strange type,” Har Dayal arrived in the United States in 1911, where he played an influential role in the founding of the San Francisco-based Gadar Party. During this time, in the U.S. he connected with Indian students, laborers, and radicals of all stripes, eventually founding the the Bakunin Institute of California. He served for a short time as a lecturer at Stanford University, eventually forced to resign because of his anarchist activism. Dayal also published widely during this period, including editorials that advocated the overthrow of British colonialism and that highlighted the mistreatment of Indian laborers in North America. In 1914, he was arrested for spreading anarchist literature, and fled to Berlin and eventually Sweden. He returned to the U.S. in 1938, residing in Philadelphia where he died the next year on March 4, 1939.
Taraknath Das
In 1905, Taraknath Das arrived in the U.S. at the young age of twenty-one. For the next forty years, he would become one of the most important Indian expatriates, involved in the efforts against British colonialism in India. After studying at UC-Berkeley, Das worked at the US Immigration Service in Vancouver, where he eventually founded The Free Hindusthan, the only publication of its kind in North America that advocated political, social, and religious reform in India. In 1908 he matriculated to Norwich University in Vermont, the oldest private military university in the U.S. Despite being an excellent student and popular amongst his peers, Das was suspended from Norwich University for his anti-British organizing. He thereafter returned to Seattle and became involved in the growing revolutionary activities of the Gadar Party. Das was arrested along with dozens of others in the infamous Hindu-German Conspiracy Trial.
Kartar Dhillon
“I had dreams of becoming an artist; I planned to work actively for India’s freedom from British rule. I looked upon marriage as a prison. But even though I abhorred the idea of marriage, the same year, right out of high school, I got married.” So wrote Kartar Dhillon in her autobiographical essay, “The Parrot’s Beak.” Kar (as she was known) was born on April 30, 1915 in California’s Simi Valley. Her father, Bakhshish Singh, immigrated to the U.S. in 1897 and her mother, Rattan Kaur, arrived in 1910. One of the first South Asian families in the U.S., the Dhillon family was involved in both the Gadar Party, agitating for India’s independence from British rule, and with labor organizing through the Industrial Workers of the World. When her brother Bud Dillon was just 12 years old, he volunteered to join a mission for India’s freedom, which took him around the world. Kar was herself an activist and writer, involved with India’s freedom struggle, and later supporting organizations like the Black Panthers and helping organize farm workers in California. She passed away on June 15, 2008.
About SAADA
SAADA is the South Asian American Digital Archive, the only organization that digitally documents, preserves, and shares stories of South Asian Americans, giving voice to overlooked histories and creating a more inclusive society. Learn more and visit the archive at www.saada.org
The post India’s Independence And The American Connection appeared first on News India Times.