Let My Country Awake: Indian Revolutionaries in America and the Fight to Overthrow the British Raj

This propulsive account from journalist Miller (Agent 110) brings to vivid life a little-known episode of WWI—the U.S. crackdown on an American-based movement to oust the British from India. Miller begins in the decades leading up to the war, when the first significant wave of Indian immigrants arrived in the U.S., fleeing dire poverty brought about by an “indifferent” British regime. Har Dayal, a young Indian lecturer in religious studies at Stanford inspired by the ideas circulating around him, from Marxism to women’s enfranchisement, began to organize his Indian students, as well as California’s Indian laborers and farmhands, into the Ghadar movement for Indian independence. When WWI broke out and the U.S. remained neutral, the revolutionaries believed they had found their moment to act, but the cadre who returned to India to “spark revolution” were immediately intercepted by British agents. When America eventually allied with the British, more U.S.-based Ghadar members were arrested for colluding with the enemy. Miller provides an eye-opening account of the arrests’ ramifications: they are among the Espionage Act cases that kicked off the era’s notorious wave of mass expulsions of immigrants and naturalized citizens; they also led to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre—a British slaughter of peaceful Indian protestors—that inspired a young Gandhi’s activism. The result is a thrilling excavation of a forgotten revolutionary moment in American and world history. (Oct.)