That Heaven of Freedom

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 colonial rule. Founded by a group of student radicals 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 advocated for a violent insurrection against colonial rule. From its bases on the West Coast of the US and Canada, 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 spies working for the German government, who were keen to undermine a wartime adversary. All the while, the Ghadar 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 Let My Country Awake 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.