Punjabi rebels of the Columbia River : the global fight for Indian independence and citizenship / Johanna Ogden.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ogden, Johanna, author.

Contributor:

Oregon State University. Press, publisher.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Thind, Bhagat Singh, 1892-1967.

Thind, Bhagat Singh.

East Indians--Oregon--History--20th century.

East Indians.

Foreign workers--Oregon--History--20th century.

Foreign workers.

East Indians--Oregon--Social conditions--20th century.

Ghadr movement.

Panjabis (South Asian people)--West (U.S.)--Politics and government--20th century.

Panjabis (South Asian people).

East Indians--Legal status, laws, etc--United States.

Great Britain--Relations--United States.

Great Britain.

United States--Foreign relations--Great Britain.

United States.

Oregon--Race relations--History--20th century.

Oregon.

Physical Description:

xx, 259 pages : illustrations, maps, portraits ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Corvallis, OR : Oregon State University Press, 2024.

Summary:

"Oregon is commonly perceived to have little, let alone notable, South Asian history. Yet in the early 1900s Oregon was at the center of two entwined quests for Indian independence and civic belonging that rocked the world. Punjabi Rebels of the Columbia River traces the stories of the radical Indian independence organization known as Ghadar and Bhagat Singh Thind's era-defining US Supreme Court citizenship case. Ghadar sought the overthrow of India's British colonizers while Thind utilized sanctioned legal channels to do so. Despite widely differing strategies, both the movement and the man were targeted, often in coordination, by the highest levels of the US and British governments. The empires' united message: India would not be an independent country and Indians could not be citizens. In the decades that followed, it was a verdict Indians refused to abide. Johanna Ogden's detailed history of migrants' experience expands the time frame, geographic boundaries, and knowledge of the conditions and contributions of Indians in North America. It is the story of a people's awakening amid a rich community of international workers in an age of nationalist uprisings. To understand why one of the smallest western Indian settlements became a resistance center, Punjabi Rebels mines the colonial underpinnings of labor, race, and place-making and their regional and global connections, rendering a history of whiteness and labor as much as of Indian-ness and migration. The first work to rejoin the lived experience of Thind and Ghadar activists, Punjabi Rebels complicates our understanding not just of the global fight for Indian political rights but of multi-racial democracy."-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

An introduction to an unexpected story

The promises of empire

A murder, a fair, and community building at the margins

Interlude: Wrestlers Dodan Singh and Basanta Singh

St. Johns, the "Hindu" city

From St. Johns to Astoria

The movement, the leaving, and diverging paths

The global punishment of Ghadar

Bhagat Singh Thindh and the whiteness of empire.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 201-251) and index.

ISBN:

1962645118

9781962645119

OCLC:

1416892489