Recently there has been a remarkable output of scholarship devoted to early twentieth-century histories of South Asians in North America. For the field of South Asian American studies, the history of the early twentieth century has been interpreted as minor in comparison to the mass migration witnessed after 1965 and the change to immigration policy in the United States. Without a doubt, the large influx into the United States of the post-1965 wave has garnered the most scholarly attention. While many mysteries of the first part of the century still remain, significant work by historians such as Nayan Shah, Maia Ramnath, and Vivek Bald have done much to not only uncover hidden stories but also push the archive wide open for much-needed research.Footnote 10 Seema Sohi's Echoes of Mutiny joins these works as an important historical study of radical anti-colonialism and the ensuing state surveillance in the inter-imperial alliance of the United States and Britain. Comprehensively researched and wonderfully written, this sophisticated analysis incorporates recent approaches to settler colonialism, the security state, and anti-colonial thought. This book is a model in demonstrating how what is perceived as a minor history can be brought alive to tell a larger story—in this case the fundamentally global story of early twentieth-century Indian anti-colonialism. The archive alone that Sohi has combed through is impressive and thorough. The prose lets the archive tell the story, so to speak, compelling the reader with intriguing plot changes told through a range of historical actors.
Although the main thread of this history is that of Indian anti-colonials based in North America, including the formation of the short-lived Ghadar Party alongside other radicals and anti-imperialists, the surveillance apparatus developed by the U.S. and British governments is an integrated parallel history. Often coupled with anarchists from European countries, South Asian radicals were seen in a continuum of activities and ideologies considered anathema to American and British national interests. While it is not surprising that these state views were imperial in nature, what is devastating in Sohi's analysis is the attention to how Indian radicals were racialized. This intervention provides an important genealogy of the U.S. racial formation of South Asians that drew on anti-black racism while simultaneously advancing a racial typology that framed South Asians as radicals, anarchists, and communists, in league with an anti-American ideology. Rooted in specific histories of U.S. racism, the mobilization of anti-Asian racism against Indian radicals was transnational and global. While these claims of the imperial state suited the needs of surveillance and social control through policing and deportation, the anti-colonial thinking of these Indian radicals critiqued white supremacy and the anti-democratic tendencies of the imperial state structures of the United States and the United Kingdom.
Sohi carefully addresses the historical trajectory and nuances of Indian anti-colonial thought fostered on the West Coast of both Canada and the United States to describe internal debates and the impact of these radical ideas on a larger social movement. Scholars have assumed that this small band of radicals in North America was marginal to the Indian independence movement. Sohi, instead, makes a case that the engines of state surveillance and repression imagined the activities of a range of Indian radicals and the Ghadar Party as imminently dangerous, and in doing so put in motion a movement whose impact was difficult to gauge. The historical archive of state intelligence records certainly bears this out, as this notion of anti-American threat ignited the furies of white supremacy. Such ideologies were not merely relegated to isolated actors, but were part of the position of the U.S. and British imperial alliance. It is thus that the racial representation of Indian anti-imperialists by the state surveillance and policing apparatus combined a disdain of radicalism with racist genealogies of anti-immigrant sentiment.
Echoes of Mutiny is a valuable resource for scholars and lay readers. Insightful for the histories that lay buried under the web of state repression, the story of these Indian anti-colonial radicals is something to ponder as the very democratic impulse for freedom, liberation, and modes of decolonization. Telling the stories of organic intellectuals such as M. N. Roy, Lajpath Rai, Har Dayal, Husain Rahim a.k.a. Chagan Khairaj Varma, and Bhagat Singh, among others, and the Lahore Conspiracy Trials, and providing a wonderful analysis that places the voyage of the Komagata Maru alongside other “ships of revolution” (p. 108), Echoes of Mutiny illustrates the range of impact that Indian radicalism enabled. This is a rich history that is chock-full of insight that will certainly spur further research. For historians of anti-colonialism and colonial India, this book is a must read. It is easily placed within the literature on global South Asia, and scholars will find a valuable lesson in the practices of early twentieth-century Indian radicalism and the responses of state repression.
