Let my country awake : Indian revolutionaries in America and the fight to overthrow the British Raj /
"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.
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York :
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2025.
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| Edition: | First edition. |
| Subjects: |
| 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. |
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| Physical Description: | xiii, 345 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 281-326) and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780374609672 0374609675 |