Twenty-one presentations were presented by various Indian and foreign scholars at the
international seminar on the Ghadar Movement, which concluded at the Panjab University
(PU) on Saturday late evening.

The seminar was organised by the Indian Council of Historical Research, jointly with the
Institute of Punjab Studies and the PU Department of History.
The seminar effectively questioned several existing notions of Indian and Punjab
history, and brought out the inexhaustible potential of the Ghadar Movement for
rewriting Indian history.

        The facts that over 90 per cent of the Ghadarites happened to be Sikhs, and several
individuals and groups supported the Ghadarite revolutionaries when they came to the
Punjab explode the myth of Sikh loyalty towards the British. While coming together
against the colonial state, the Ghadarites consciously relegated their personal,
familial, communitarian and class interests, exploding, thus, the myth deliberately
perpetuated by the Cambridge School of Historiography that the Indians were incapable of
rising above their personal interests. Belying the Sub-altern Historiography, the rank
and file of the Ghadarites, who happened to be labourers in North America, presented a
high degree of awareness of the nature of colonial rule. In fact, a very high rate of
literacy in Gurmukhi and Urdu among the Sikh labourers, which was exceptional among
workers there, enabled them to respond actively to the weekly paper Ghadar.

        Questioning yet another notion that it was a ‘secular’ movement, supposedly having
nothing to do with religion, the articulations of Sikh religiosity in the poetry of the
Ghadarites reflect a sense of ‘Sikhi’ which was quite different from that of the Singh
Sabha movement in the Punjab of those days. Rather than shunning religion, the
Ghadarites used it as a cultural resource which can neither be labelled as secular nor
communal, proving the irrelevance of the two terms for the Ghadar movement.

        Again, Ghadar was the first political movement to address the basic human problems, and
envision an India free from poverty, hunger and social inequalities.Today, for the South
Asians in North America it has become a synonym for social justice. Finally, it’s so
called failure was as pregnant with possibilities as that of Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation
and ‘Quit India’ movements.


Press Release No.1149
VP/SK