Asian Indian Americans

ASIAN INDIAN AMERICANS. Asian Indians in the United States boast a long history of radicalism that is often obscured by dominant perceptions of Asian Americans as passive and conservative. Between 1907 and 1914, some 6,000 Indians, mostly Sikhs, immigrated to the United States from India, the Philippines, and Canada. Most were Punjabi farmers; others were veterans of the British forces that had suppressed the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900. The tide of Indian immigration was curbed almost immediately as xenophobic sentiments rose sharply in the United States, and Indians were expelled from communities along the West Coast in 1907–1908. By 1917, following the passage of the Barred Zone Act, the US government established a total ban on Indian immigration.

The Indian diaspora was largely produced by turn-of-the-century British colonial policies, including drastic land-tenure reforms; and these reforms in combination with a devastating famine impelled many Indians to seek work abroad. Upon reaching North America, Indian migrants encountered racist policies and violent attacks that were exacerbated by the British government’s unwillingness to intervene on their subjects’ behalf. These abuses conspired to create a strong anticolonialist, nationalist sentiment among Indian migrants whose support for an independent nation-state did not evidence nostalgia but a strong commitment to the improvement of working and living conditions of Indian laborers. The establishment of these anti-imperial groups depended upon the collaboration of workers and student-intellectuals. A small percentage of Indian migrants were students, mainly Bengali, many of whom had already become involved in the nationalist movement. The British partition of Bengal and its mishandling of the plague in the Punjab fueled nationalist anger and generated protests. The British responded to this upsurge of political activism in Indian colleges and universities by expelling student activists, whereupon hundreds of young nationalists sought refuge in universities in Japan, Europe, and the United States. Despite the well-known racial prejudice against Asians that often frustrated interracial labor coalitions, Indian radicals found sympathy for their anticolonial struggle since British colonialism was decried by many Americans, including anti-imperialist liberals and Irish immigrant activists fighting for Ireland’s independence. The expanding Socialist Labor Party (SLP) and the newly founded (1905) Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) both actively welcomed Asian immigrants as members, opening up new political space for Asian American radicalism.

The Indian nationalist movement in the United States coalesced around the Ghadar Party, which was established in 1913 by two young Indian activists, Taraknath Das and Har Dayal. A former college student, Das became a political agitator in 1905. Fleeing arrest in India, he spent a short time in Tokyo before coming to the United States in 1906. In 1907 Das was denied US citizenship, but he became a translator for the U.S. Immigration Service in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he began to publish the Free Hindustan, a nationalist newspaper. Das was fired for refusing to stop publishing his paper and relocated to Seattle, where he continued to publish the Free Hindustan with the help of local socialists and Indian students. In 1909 he enrolled in Norwich University, a well-known military college in Vermont. Advocating Indian independence, he persuaded several Indian students to enroll before he himself was expelled for his political activities.

Har Dayal went to California in 1911. Unlike Das, who had come from a poor background, Dayal was from a wealthy high-caste family. Dayal taught Indian philosophy at Stanford University without pay but spent most of his time in political activity. He read Marx, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, became secretary of the Radical Socialist Club in San Francisco, and founded the anarchist Bakunin Club.

Das and Dayal organized the Ghadar Party under the auspices of the Hindu Association of the Pacific Coast and the Sikh Kalhsa Diwan, the major Sikh organization in California. The party brought together the two streams of Indian immigrants in America: Bengali Hindus, who were primarily students and intellectuals, and Punjabi Sikhs, who worked as agriculturists and lumbermen. Dayal became the first editor of the party’s newspaper, Ghadar (Urdu for revolution), which was published in Seattle and Oakland and circulated in India as well as throughout the Indian diaspora in Southern and East Africa, the Caribbean, and Central America. The newspaper linked the nationalist movement to issues of racial discrimination and mistreatment in the United States and created a transnational community of radicals, as the mobilization of Indian patriots on four continents following the Komagata Maru Incident would later demonstrate. Apart from independence from Britain, the party had broad if vaguely articulated revolutionary goals. Supported by the IWW, the SLP, and Irish American nationalists, the Ghadar Party advocated a strategy of direct action and immediate agitation similar to the strategies adopted by the IWW. The anarchist influence on Dayal could be seen in the party’s faith in spontaneous mass uprisings.

Indians everywhere were galvanized by the Komagata Maru Incident of May 1914. When hundreds of Indians aboard a chartered Japanese freighter, the Komagata Maru, attempted to land at Vancouver, they were denied entry by Canadian officials according to laws that had been enacted to curb nonwhite immigration. The standoff lasted two months, during which time nearly the entire Asian Indian population of the West Coast was mobilized in support of the would-be immigrants. After the Indian appeal to the British crown went unheeded and supplies petered out, the Komagata Maru returned to Yokohama. The incident had underscored the helplessness of the Indian community in the Americas while strengthening the appeal of the Ghadar call for revolution.

With the outbreak of World War I, more than a thousand members of Ghadar returned to India to attempt to foment a popular anti-British uprising. The British government had long since infiltrated the party, however, and upon their arrival the Ghadarites were immediately arrested; hundreds were imprisoned and dozens executed. After the United States entered the war, Das and other leaders of the Ghadar Party were arrested and threatened with deportation for their anti-imperial activities. Defending the Ghadarites still in the United States from deportation became a civil rights issue for anti-imperialists and the Left in general. The IWW, the Socialist Party, and an assortment of liberals united to organize the Friends of Freedom for India. Its lobbying efforts failed to prevent the passage of a bill in 1914 whereby aliens who advocated political change in any country were subject to deportation. Dayal was arrested soon after and deported as an anarchist. He fled to Switzerland, and Ram Chandra, a co-founder of the Party, replaced him as head of the movement and editor of Ghadar, which continued to be distributed throughout the Indian global diaspora. The Ghadar Party, its hopes for a popular uprising smashed, its leadership dispersed and relentlessly persecuted, and its organization infiltrated, collapsed as a revolutionary threat to British rule in India after Ram Chandra was assassinated in 1918.

Brown, Emily Clara. Har Dayal: Hindu Revolutionary and Rationalist. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975.

Jensen, Joan. Passage from India: Indian Pioneers in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988.

Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. New York: Penguin, 1989.