In November 1913, a recruitment notice appeared in the first issue of an underground newspaper in San Francisco, the Hindustan Ghadar. The paper was founded by a charismatic anarchist from India named Har Dayal with the help of a group of Indian students at the University of California, Berkeley. Under the leadership of Dayal and fellow radical Sohan Singh Bhakna, this group hatched an audacious plan: they would convince other Indians, many of them Sikh lumber workers and farmhands on the west coasts of the United States and Canada, to launch a violent insurrection against the British Raj. The Ghadar movement, as it came to be known, eventually mounted the most significant challenge to British colonial rule until the rise of Mohandas Gandhi. It recruited thousands of supporters, and sent hundreds of freedom fighters across the Pacific in attempts to smuggle guns and seditious literature into India—an effort abetted by spies working for the German government, which was keen to undermine the British during World War I. All the while, the Ghadar movement was being tracked by Britain’s intelligence service, which eventually convinced the US government to crack down. This led to one of the biggest conspiracy trials in American history, culminating in a courtroom gun battle that shocked a nation already roiled by suspicion of immigrants. Scott Miller’s Let My Country Awake delivers a new account of this overlooked moment in Indian—and American—history, offering a fresh perspective on the struggle against colonialism.
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