The Ghadar Chain
On 23 December 1912 a bomb fell on the Viceroy's elephant in Chandni Chowk. The man who planned it, Rash Behari Bose, was at his desk in Dehradun the next morning. This chapter follows the network that grew from that day: the Punjabi labourers of the Pacific coast who founded Ghadar, the ship they were turned back on, the rising they set for February 1915, the men who died when it was betrayed, the courier hanged at Mandalay, the widow who hid the survivors, and the two exiles who ran the war from Berlin and Kabul.
Lessons in this chapter
- The Bomb on the Elephant — The board in 1912: a bomb in Chandni Chowk, Bengal after Alipore, Punjab on the Pacific coast, and the war that had not started yet
- The Lumber Mill at Astoria — The indebted farmer who went to an Oregon lumber mill for wages and came back to overthrow an empire
- The First Issue of Ghadar — Lala Har Dayal, the paper called Ghadar, and the founder who later walked away
- The Ship That Was Turned Back — Gurdit Singh, the ship he chartered, and the road at Budge Budge
- Nineteen — The student who set Ghadar type in San Francisco, and hanged at Lahore at nineteen
- Ten Bombs in Meerut — A Marathi engineering student carried Bengal's bombs into a Punjabi regiment, and hanged for it at twenty-seven
- Mandalay, February 1916 — Ghadar sent a Punjabi schoolmaster to turn the Indian regiments in Burma, and he was offered his life for one written apology
- The Clerk from Dehradun — Rash Behari Bose planned the Delhi bomb, commanded the 1915 rising, and sailed out of Calcutta as another man
- The Riverbank at Balasore — Jatindranath Mukherjee, the arms ship that never came, and ninety minutes in a ditch at Chashakhand
- The Prisoner's Wife — Nanibala Devi, the widow who wore vermilion for Jugantar and became the first woman Bengal held as a state prisoner
- Berlin — Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, who ran the Berlin Committee, argued India's case at Stockholm, and was shot in Stalin's purge
- A Government in Kabul — The Jat prince from Hathras who declared a government of India in a Kabul garden, with Barkatullah and Obaidullah Sindhi as his ministers