Book Details Indian-American Lobbying Efforts By Francis C. Assisi

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That’s certainly a part of the historical confrontation between desis and non-desis in North America. It should be remembered that this was a time when the process of becoming an American citizen was one from which Indians were excluded through an increasingly complex maze of laws and regulations. Indeed, Indians were the only class of people whose citizenship was revoked because they did not neatly fit into the then commonly accepted racial categories of Caucasian, Mongolian, and Negro.

This was also a time when the chief of the bureau of naturalization notified all United States attorneys to oppose actively the granting of naturalization to “Hindoos or East Indians” and to instruct clerks of courts in their districts to refuse to accept declarations of intention or to file petitions for naturalization. Attorneys were also asked to file motions for orders to cancel declarations of intention already filed by Indians.

That’s why, in 1907, when Bengali student Taraknath Das was refused an application for citizenship in San Francisco, he wrote to the attorney general: “May I ask you if the Hindus who belong to the Caucasian stock of the Human race have no legal right to become citizens of the United States, under what special law the Japanese who belong to a different stock are allowed to declare their intention to become citizens of the United States.”

Gould’s study documents the travails of early Indian immigrants in the first half of the 20th century – that is, well before the great post-1965 immigration boom. His attempt is to capture the prolonged struggle of Indian Americans for obtaining civil rights as well as in promoting the cause of India’s freedom from British rule.

Naturally, the book is based on previous studies as well as insights drawn from not-easily-accessible sources. It is interspersed with narratives and also provides biographical sketches of the key players, both Indian and American – people like Lala Lajpat Rai, Har Dayal, Taraknath Das, Gobind Behari Lal, Maulvi Mohammed Barakatullah, Anup Singh, J.J.Singh, Haridas Muzumdar, Ram Chandra, Sohan Singh Bhakna, Kartar Singh, Agnes Smedley and scores of others.

The book also examines their role in the origin and development of the India lobby in the US and Canada via organizations such as India league of America, Friends for the Freedom of India, Indian Home Rule League and publications such as Taraknath Das’ Free Hindustan, Sundar Singh’s Aryan, Kartar Singh Akali’s Khalsa Herald and Sansar — in the face of determined racist opposition in both countries—and Britain’s efforts to disrupt their attempts to organize themselves politically.

Most of the India associations had high aims and objectives. For instance, the Hindustanee association of United States, founded in Chicago in 1913, stated its aims as follows: “To further the educational interests of the Indian students, to gather or disseminate all kinds of educational information, to seek help and cooperation from people at home and in the country.” As I.M.Muthanna observes in his book ‘People of India in North America,’ “Though outwardly it posed as a cultural organization, the real aim of this association was to preach sedition against the British.”

The ‘Hindu’ Associations organized in the U.S. had the following objectives: ‘Receipt of vernacular papers from India in order to keep Hindus fully informed of the events in their country, importation of youths from India to America for their education and for preparing them for developing their nationalist outlook, and to hold weekly meetings and discus politics.’

Apart from the Ghadar weekly, some of the pamphlets that were widely circulated include New Echo, Gadar di Goonj, Gadar di Karak, Gadhar Sandesh etc. The editor Ram Chandra wrote: “The ghadar conveys the message of rebellion to the nation once a week. It is brave, outspoken, unbridled, soft-footed, and given to the use of strong language. It is a lightning, a storm and a flame of fire ..we are the harbinger of freedom.”

Overall, in this book, the author documents in great detail the Indian American community’s journey from the beginnings of politicization to the height of political lobbying during the Second World War.

Professor Gould, who is now a visiting professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, was on the faculty of South Asian Studies at the University of Kansas from 1957 to 1959, before he moved to India for post-doctoral research for three years. He then joined the University of Pittsburgh from 1962 to 1968, before moving on to the University of Illinois for 23 years as research coordinator, Associate Director, South Asia, and Director of the Center for Asian Studies from 1970 to 1978.

After retiring in 1991, he moved to the University of Virginia, where he prefers to spend most of his time 'doing research, writing and publishing.' Apart from hundreds of articles, Dr Gould has written six books -- including Grass-Roots Politics in India: A Century of Political Evolution in Faizabad District (Oxford & IBH, New Delhi, 1994), seen as a seminal case study of how democratic politics developed and evolved over a century in the Indian grass-roots.

HAR DAYAL’S ‘INDIA IN AMERICA’

Interestingly, the title of Gould’s book derives from an article entitled ‘India in America’ written almost 100 years ago by the Indian revolutionary Har Dayal who lived in the Bay Area -- while teaching philosophy at Stanford -- and was the prime intellectual force behind the Ghadar movement.

Writing in the July 1911 issue of ‘The Modern Review’ of Calcutta, Dayal noted that those Indians who were in the America at the time represented “the best elements of the population of the mother country.” He then went on to classify them into four groups with “accidentally alliterative appellations”: Sikhs, swamis, students and spies.

Today, if the full story of Indian-Americans were to be told, one would have to include - if one were to follow Harold Gould’s alliterative sequence - slaves, soldiers, scientists and software engineers too.

Taking into account the demographics of early immigrants from the subcontinent, Dayal noted that it was the Sikhs who were the dominant group among the Indian immigrants. He did not define them in their religious context but as peasants – “timid, shabby, and ignorant.” It was no wonder, enthused Har Dayal, that in America they were transformed. He asserted that no one could live in the United States “without being lifted to a higher level of thought and action.”

He went on: “The great flag of the greatest democratic state in the world’s history, burns up all cowardice, servility, pessimism and indifference, as fire consumes the dross and leaves pure gold behind.” Moreover he hailed the United States as an “ethical sanitarium, where eternal sunshine prevails, and the wrecks of other climes are wrought into beautiful specimens of restored humanity.”

Students, according to Har Dayal, were the ones who could reap the greatest benefit by coming to America. Mostly of middle-class origin, the Indian students were endowed with energy and brains, but little money. So they worked for their support while pursuing their studies. He noted that since they engaged in manual labor, it had a “very healthy influence” on their character. Some students, Dayal admitted, sought less arduous ways of earning a living by setting themselves up as palmists or bogus Yoga professors, but, on the whole, the group was conscientious and profited by becoming self-reliant.

But then it was not long before U.S. Immigration officials viewed the student activists with considerable alarm and referred to them as “gang of Hindu agitators,” raising issues that might lead to internal discomfiture and external embarrassment.

As for swamis, after expressing contempt for those who duped and bilked ‘credulous middle-aged ladies out of their dollars,’ Har Dayal concentrated his praise on those swamis associated with the Vedanta centers founded in Boston, New York, Washington, Pittsburgh and San Francisco in the wake of Swami Vivekananda’s mission. These swamis, he said, were almost all good and sincere men. There was, he continued, a keen and growing interest in Hindu thought in the United States, and the Vedantic swamis satisfied American curiosity about India. Their missionary work, he observed, was badly needed by the “restless noisy Americans who are always hankering after some sensation” and who “have no inner life.”

In his article Dayal recounted a celebration of the birthday of Ramakrishna held at the Vedanta temple in San Francisco in which the participants had fasted the whole day and remained in one posture for fifteen hours during the service. This he counted as a “great tribute to the wisdom and moral power of the swamis that they have been able to teach even a few of these overfed self-complacent Americans the value of restraint and self-mortification as practiced by earnest Hindus…” That an American audience would fast and sit still for fifteen hours could be considered “nothing short of a miracle,” observed Dayal. As for the spies, Dayal noted that spying on Indians in the United States was a losing proposition because Indians could speak freely and openly. “We do not try to outwit them here: we bewilder them by the self-evident sincerity of our utterances.”

Nevertheless someone like India-born William C.Hopkinson, the son of a British sergeant and an Indian mother, was hired to conduct surveillance of the Indian immigrant community. Hopkinson, who spoke Hindi and Urdu, led a double life among the Indian immigrants under the alias of Narain Singh, sporting a turban and a fake beard. He attended meetings at the local Sikh gurdwara. He paid other Indians to tell him about the activities of immigrants and students he suspected. For at least six years between 1909 and 1914 Hopkinson acted as an undercover agent, reporting on many Indian activists in North America, the best known being the intellectuals Taraknath Das and Har Dayal.

As early as 1911, Hopkinson had concluded that the Bay Area was emerging as the main center of Indian activism.

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