‘The Ghadar Movement: A Forgotten Struggle’ by Rana Preet Gill: Transnational revolt the nation forgot

The Ghadar movement remains one of the most remarkable yet underexplored chapters of India’s struggle for Independence. Spanning continents and languages, from San Francisco to Singapore, Vancouver to Punjab, it was an audacious attempt by early Indian migrants to ignite a global anti-colonial uprising. And yet, despite its scale and sacrifice, it has largely faded from public memory — overshadowed by later events, miscast as a Punjabi affair, or confined to commemorative clichés.

In this context, ‘The Ghadar Movement: A Forgotten Struggle’ by Rana Preet Gill is a welcome and engaging effort to bring the movement back into national conversation. A veterinary doctor by training and novelist by instinct, Gill approaches history with a storyteller’s flair. Her narrative begins with the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and races through India’s revolutionary ferment across regions and decades. From Sohan Singh Bhakna and Kartar Singh Sarabha to lesser-known names like Darisi Chenchiah, she tracks a range of actors and regions who gave the Ghadar its truly pan-Indian character.

Gill’s strength lies in her eye for drama and her instinct for the human story. The early migrants — labourers, students, and exiles — found in Lala Har Dayal a voice that converted frustration into revolutionary resolve. As Gill evocatively writes, these were men “who went to foreign shores to light themselves up with the flames of education and ended up igniting themselves up with revolutionary fervour”.

Key episodes are vividly recounted: Madan Lal Dhingra’s assassination of Curzon Wylie in London (1909), the attempted bombing of Viceroy Hardinge (1912), and the formation of the Hindi Association of the Pacific Coast in 1913, soon rechristened the Ghadar Party. Har Dayal’s arrival in California and the launch of the Urdu Ghadar newspaper, followed in a few weeks by its Gurmukhi version, marked the start of a bold, transnational revolt articulated in poetry, polemic, and people’s prose.

Gill’s writing is crisp and accessible, with short chapters that read like newspaper columns — snappy, self-contained, and often illuminating. She covers wide ground, connecting Bengal to Punjab, Andhra to Maharashtra, without falling into regional pigeonholes. This breadth is a significant achievement for a subject so often misrepresented.

Yet, this style comes at a cost. The book’s “touch-and-go” format limits its analytical depth. The reliance on outdated secondary sources or colonial intelligence reports, without questioning their biases, weakens the interpretative rigour. A few factual slips also creep in. Har Dayal’s pamphlet Yugantar, for instance, was not a tribute to Dhingra but a response to the 1912 bombing, printed in Belgium as a pamphlet, not in The Indian Sociologist, as Gill claims. Ghadar di Goonj is presented as a single book, whereas it was a series with multiple volumes.

However, the Ghadar movement deserves renewed attention, and this book is a worthy spark.

— The writer is a Chandigarh-based publisher and author

Book Review