The true story of an audacious international movement to liberate India from colonial rule during World War I.
WANTED: Brave Soldiers to Stir Up Ghadar in India
PAY: Death
PRIZE: Martyrdom
PENSION: Liberty
On the eve of World War I, a band of Indian immigrants living in the United States hatched an audacious plan to liberate their homeland from British control. Founded by a group of leftist students at UC Berkeley, the Ghadar Movement mounted one of the most significant challenges to the British Raj before the rise of the Indian National Congress under Gandhi—but unlike the INC, the Ghadar Movement used violence to achieve its aims. From its base on the West Coast, the movement recruited thousands of supporters via its underground newspaper and sent hundreds of freedom fighters across the Pacific in an attempt to smuggle guns and seditious literature into India—an effort abetted by the German government, which was keen to undermine an adversary. All the while, the movement was tracked by Britain's intelligence service, which eventually convinced the US government to crack down. The result was one of the most complex trials to date, culminating in a courtroom gun battle that shocked the nation. Scott Miller's That Heaven of Freedom is the first book to tell the story of this overlooked moment in Indian, and American, history—one that offers a new perspective on anticolonial struggle in the twentieth century.
