Fighting the Raj from America

In the years before World War I, a wave of Indian immigrants arrived in the United States (US) seeking work.

- HARI KUNZRU

Many were Sikhs from the Punjab who took jobs in forestry and agriculture in the American West. Like the Chinese labourers lured to California decades earlier to help build the transcontinental railroad, Indian workers faced racism and violence. "The dusky Asiatics with their turbans will prove a worse menace to the working classes than the 'Yellow Peril' that has so long threatened the Pacific Coast," read a 1906 article in The Puget Sound American.

The next year, in the town of Bellingham, about 90 miles north of Seattle, a huge mob of white residents chased hundreds of Indian loggers out of the barracks where they lived, destroying their property and beating anyone they could catch. Once news of the pogrom spread, it inspired similar rampages across the Western United States.

As Scott Miller writes in Let My Country Awake, the story of the anticolonial Ghadar movement, Indian migrant workers soon found themselves attracted to radical labour organisations like the Industrial Workers of the World, attending meetings that put them in contact with Indian students who were beginning to appear on American college campuses, especially at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.

Along with other cultural imports, some Indian migrants brought with them an anti-imperialist fervour, and found it only further inflamed in their new country, where, Miller explains, they were derided as members of a subject people. "Many times kids will follow us in streets," one Portland millworker recalled, "shouting 'Hindoo slaves.'" It seemed that respect in America would only arrive with the end of British colonial rule in India.