Haj to Utopia. Maia Ramnath

and unified organizational model was most applicable. This syndicalist combination of libertarian and egalitarian principles strikes me as reminiscent of the Ghadarites’ tendency, albeit stemming from different situational origins. In any case Moss also points out that differences in approaches to radical trade unionism were related to differences in the specific social conditions of labor, and not indicative of a universally applicable ideological principle. Though the Ghadarites’ New World labors were of the more unskilled and alienated variety, their status prior to immigration had more resembled that of Moss’s artisans, and even in the United States many still aspired to their own landholdings.¹⁸¹

      But to return to Har Dayal’s talk: he observed that the American revolutionary movement was far less mature than that of France and could learn much from both the successes and the mistakes of the latter. The moral of these lessons was, in a nutshell, “Love one another among the labouring-class, but hate, hate, the rich.” He continued that such hatred, however, if expressed through dynamite, was liable to do more harm than good to the revolutionary movement, unless aimed very precisely at the assassination of despotic oppressors. He closed by inviting all interested attendees to come to meetings of his Radical Study Club, “which he had inaugurated in San Francisco for the purpose of teaching the people Revolutionary Methods.”¹⁸²

      One can only speculate about what might have happened had the Ghadarite radical branch remained oriented toward their lives in the United States, rather than having their attention fixed, by the war, wholly on an immediate uprising in India. What if the war had taken five to ten more years to erupt, as Har Dayal had originally thought? Would they have left a deeper trace in the record of the radical labor movement and antiracist struggle on the West Coast? Might they, for example, have played a greater role in cross-border struggles carried out by Mexican syndicalist libertarios? They would have had ample opportunity.¹⁸³ Of course, they still would have confronted the repression of the Red Scare and an exclusionary immigration policy and thus might still have formed an exodus, though under different circumstances not of their choosing. But the war did happen; and, to repeat a cliché, it did change everything.

      For one, it changed the course of revolutionary syndicalism, forcing its adherents to define their relationship to the nation and nation-state. In his magisterial Fire in the Minds of Men James Billington fits syndicalism into his overarching thesis of a rivalry between national and social forms of revolutionary thought. Of the precarious configuration of these formations on the eve of the First World War, he remarks: “Whoever controlled the banner of nationalism tended to determine the nature of the syndicalist legacy everywhere after World War One. In the United States, labor unrest was doomed by its opposition to the nationalist fervor that swept through America during and after the war. The social revolutionary intensity and the internationalism of the IWW (and the anti-war, anti-allied sentiments of many Germans and Irish in the labor movement) provoked a patriotic backlash.”¹⁸⁴ These, of course, were Ghadar’s main American allies.

      But Billington was writing about the European context. For an Asian anticolonial movement, the choice between national and social forms was less stark. The Indian revolutionary lineage of which the Swadeshi and Ghadar movements partook likewise drew upon both.¹⁸⁵ Given the unavoidable primacy of the national liberation struggle, the question facing European revolutionary syndicalists—nationalism or internationalism?—then faced the Ghadarites as well, perhaps even more acutely. How they negotiated this crossroads would determine the road home—from San Francisco to Berlin, Berlin to Moscow, and Moscow to Lahore.

      3

      Enemies of Enemies …

       The Nationalist Ghadar

      FEELING LIKE A NATION, THINKING LIKE A STATE

      It is a truism for theorists of nationalism (and even for common observers of the world) that the rhetoric of nationalism, and the emotionality of patriotism, increase drastically during war time. The Great War introduced a hitherto unimaginable scale of conflict as the great empires collided and began ripping each other apart. National identities took over for the duration, breaking up the ideal of international class solidarity to the bitter disappointment of many anarchists and socialists.

      For Indian and other anticolonial movements this effect of the war was even stronger. Nationalist rhetoric was the cornerstone of such movements in any case; besides, a colonized area is already by definition in a state of war, secured by foundational violence and subject at the best of times to conditions of low-intensity military occupation. The state’s monopoly of force and its disciplinary regime are made more explicit and acute by their obvious external origin; hence the inescapability of the need for political liberation as the dominant theme of struggle in such a region (as distinct from the struggle’s economic and cultural dimensions).

      Furthermore, the war was ostensibly being fought, or so went the rhetoric, on the principles of democracy and self-determination for all nationalities—at least for those within the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires. This was a favorable environment for nourishing the slogans of Egypt for the Egyptians, Asia for the Asiatics, Home Rule, Swadeshi, Swaraj, Sinn Fein, Ourselves Alone, each expressing the fundamental notion that its claimants constituted a People, and that a People must have an autonomous sovereign territory and a government of its own. While the war did not create such aspirations and identities, it intensified them to a pitch of influence and emotional power sufficient to absorb and bear the weight of all the other yearnings for social and economic emancipation and cultural transformation that had been on the rise over the past half-century. This was not overlooked by any of the main adversaries, who happily stoked insurgencies within one another’s imperial possessions: the British cultivated the Arabs against the Ottoman Turks even as the Germans cultivated the Indians and Irish against the British, and the Moroccans against the French. Afterward at Versailles, the language of self-determination then drove not only the hopes but the subsequent bitter disillusionment of anticolonial movements, leading directly to the postwar upsurges of nationalist activity not only in India but in China, Egypt, and Ireland.

      For the duration of the war, the strategy of the independence movement abroad, while still oriented toward armed revolt, was for all practical purposes anchored in the military and diplomatic logic of interstate power relations. Tactical realpolitik prevailed. It was a time for action, not for philosophizing. Thinking was about strategy and tactics, not about philosophy of liberation or analysis of oppression. Accordingly, propaganda was aimed more toward incitement to action than ideological persuasion, and tailored to what ever was needed to appeal to those one was trying to arouse, at least within the bounds of assuming a common immediate (though not necessarily ultimate) goal. Indeed, this pragmatism had always been characteristic of the Ghadarite approach; their philosophy of revolutionary praxis was by definition one of action, without which it made no sense.

      However, now these tactics presumed nation-state units as actors. Internationalism was relevant here less as a principled ideal than as a geography of organization involving long-distance alliances, epic travels, and many covert crossings of lines. The revolutionaries worked through the German consulate system, with its outposts around the Pacific Rim, and sought to constitute themselves formally as a sovereign nation with diplomatic recognition. With damning accusations of anarchism continuing unabated, it seemed imperative to claim legitimacy by declaring oneself a government or authorized government representative—even if this meant only a few individuals wielding fancy letterhead and official-looking seals—capable of contacting world leaders and expecting to receive a hearing. By 1914 the India that the overseas revolutionists had in mind was clearly a secular, federated republic, though discussion of its future social and economic character remained deferred.

      The revolutionaries abroad were well aware of predictions that Germany and Britain (and the United States and Japan, for that matter) were sliding glacially toward war. Indeed they were counting on it. But they had thought it would be much later, certainly not a mere nine months after the Ghadar’s debut. They had expected to have several years in which to mature the tasks of planning, educating, raising consciousness, preparing the ground. But with the conflagration unleashed in Europe, the Ghadar leadership saw a “golden” opportunity that, even if premature, could not possibly