Let my country awake : Indian revolutionaries in America and the fight to overthrow the British Raj / Scott Miller.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Miller, Scott, 1960- Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Hindustan Gadar Party.

Ghadr movement.

East Indians--United States--Politics and government--20th century.

East Indians.

Immigrants--United States--Politics and government--20th century.

Immigrants.

India--Politics and government--1857-1919.

India.

India--History--Autonomy and independence movements.

United States--Emigration and immigration--History--20th century.

United States.

Physical Description:

xiii, 345 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Other Title:

Indian revolutionaries in America and the fight to overthrow the British Raj

Place of Publication:

New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025.

Summary:

"A history of the Ghadar Party, an early-twentieth-century movement for Indian independence founded and based on the West Coast of the United States"-- Provided by publisher.

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 to put their words into action: 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 via its newspaper, 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 crackdown on the organization's leaders. 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 in the twentieth century.

Contents:

The Melting Pot

The Christmas Party

The Man Behind the Fake Beard

United States of India

Angel Island

The Hero Arrives

The Heart of the Empire

Wilson's Immigration Czar

The Trap

Time to Run

"To Eradicate This Evil"

Voyage of the Damned

The Sum of All Fears

Murder : "This Thing Must Stop"

But Can They Read?

They Return

The Spy from Hollywood

The Annie Larsen

Friends Like These

The Berlin India Committee

Weekends in Bar Harbor

"Union Jack and Old Glory Fly Together"

Tough Act to Follow

"This Means War!"

The Asiatic Barred Zone

New Help from London

Trouble from Berlin

Trial Run

Betrayal

Finally!

The Man in the Loincloth

"Simply Pro-Indian"

The Bloody Courtroom

Leavenworth

The Last Embers.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 281-326) and index.

ISBN:

9780374609672

0374609675

OCLC:

1532507101