Free Hindustan
Taraknath Das, Vancouver 1908: the paper the Raj could not seize, and the Punjabi mill workers who turned it into Ghadar
Taraknath Das trained in Bengal's Anushilan Samiti, left for America in 1906, and took a job as an immigration interpreter in Vancouver so he could recruit the Punjabi workers coming off the boats. In April 1908 he started Free Hindustan, a paper the Raj could not seize because it printed outside British law, and with G.D. Kumar he ran a press in Seattle that fed the Oregon mill towns. He was convicted in the Hindu-German conspiracy trial in 1918, later took a doctorate and taught at Columbia, and died in New York in 1958.
The Interpreter at the Immigration Shed
In the summer of 1907, on the Vancouver waterfront, a young Bengali in a clerk's jacket stood beside a British Columbia immigration officer and translated. Ships came in from Hong Kong and Calcutta. Punjabi farmers filed off them, most of them Sikh, most of them turbaned, carrying tin trunks and papers they could not read. The officer asked the questions. The Bengali turned them into Punjabi, and turned the answers back into English.
His name was Taraknath Das. He was twenty-three. He had been trained in a secret society in Bengal, he was on a British watch list, and he had taken this job for one reason. Every man who walked past that desk was a possible recruit.
The Canadian government had given him the door to India's emigrant labour on the Pacific coast, and paid him a salary to stand in it.
Within a year he was running a newspaper out of Vancouver called Free Hindustan. Within a year of that, the paper had been chased out of Canada, and a press stood in Seattle instead. What that press started ended in a Finnish socialist hall in Oregon, in a party called Ghadar, and in forty-two hangings. This lesson is the last in this book because it is the hand-off: the Bengal underground carried the fight across an ocean and gave it to Punjabi mill workers.
Bengal, Before the Boat
Taraknath was born on 15 June 1884 at Majupara, near Kanchrapara in the 24 Parganas district of Bengal. He came up in the Swadeshi years, when the partition of Bengal in 1905 turned a generation of students into organisers.
He joined the Anushilan Samiti, the older of Bengal's two secret societies. Anushilan meant training: physical drill, lathi work, discipline, and a loyalty oath. Its method was slow. Recruit quietly. Build cells. Wait.