CDS (I) 2022 General Knowledge · Question 97 of 120

Correct — A, San Francisco. The party's headquarters was the Yugantar Ashram at 436 Hill Street in San Francisco, the building from which the weekly paper Ghadar was printed and shipped to Indian communities around the Pacific rim. The organisation grew out of the Hindustani Association of the Pacific Coast, put together among Punjabi farm and mill workers of the American West Coast, and it was formally constituted in 1913 with Sohan Singh Bhakna as president and Har Dayal as general secretary. Once the paper began appearing — the first Urdu issue on 1 November 1913 and the first Punjabi issue on 9 December — San Francisco was unmistakably the centre of the movement, and it is where India's Ghadar Memorial stands today.

• (b)Stanford University — A university, not a headquarters. Har Dayal's Californian academic connection is genuinely disputed — most modern accounts attach him to Stanford, while some Indian reference works place him at the University of California at Berkeley — but no version of the story makes a campus the party's office. That was the Yugantar Ashram in San Francisco.
• (c)Portland — Portland in Oregon has a real place in the story — the Hindustani Association of the Pacific Coast, out of which the Ghadar Party grew, was organised there, and the founding conference is usually placed at Astoria in the same State. But the party that emerged put its ashram and its press in San Francisco.
• (d)Florida — Florida has no connection with the movement at all. The Ghadar network ran along the Pacific — California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia — and outward to Manila, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore, not to the Atlantic coast.

The Ghadar Party was a revolutionary organisation of Indian emigrants in North America, formally constituted in 1913, that aimed at an armed rising to end British rule in India. Its base was the Punjabi Sikh farming and mill-working population of the Pacific coast, a large share of them former soldiers of the British Indian Army. Its weekly paper, Ghadar — the word means mutiny or revolt — was published from the Yugantar Ashram in San Francisco in Urdu, Punjabi and other languages and smuggled wherever Indians worked. When the First World War began the party called its members home to rise; the plan became the Ghadar conspiracy of 1915, which colonial intelligence broke, and the Lahore conspiracy trials followed.

This is a one-fact recall item, and the fact is stable: San Francisco. What makes the distractors interesting is that three of the four are not random. Portland is where the parent association was formed and Stanford is where the party's most famous intellectual is usually said to have taught, so a candidate who half-remembers the American geography of the movement can talk himself into either. The clean test is to ask what a headquarters actually is — the place with the press and the address — and the answer is the Yugantar Ashram in San Francisco. Anchoring the paper's first issue to 1 November 1913 helps too, because the press and the headquarters were the same building.

• The Ghadar Party's headquarters was the Yugantar Ashram at 436 Hill Street, San Francisco.
• It grew out of the Hindustani Association of the Pacific Coast, organised at Portland, Oregon, in 1912 with Sohan Singh Bhakna as president.
• The party was formally constituted in 1913; the founding conference is placed at the Finnish Socialist Hall in Astoria, Oregon.
• The weekly Ghadar first appeared in Urdu on 1 November 1913 and in Punjabi on 9 December 1913.
• Most of the membership were Punjabi Sikh men, a large proportion of them veterans of the British Indian Army.

• Answering Portland because the parent association was organised there — the headquarters was in San Francisco.
• Treating Stanford as an answer because of Har Dayal's teaching connection, which is itself disputed between Stanford and Berkeley.
• Dating the party to 1911 or 1912. The Hindustani Association came first; the Ghadar Party was constituted in 1913.

As a straight identification of the headquarters, as a founder-to-organisation match, or as a chronology item placing the Ghadar Party against the Berlin Committee and later revolutionary events.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The weekly newspaper Ghadar was first published in 1913 in which one of the following languages?

  • (a)Bengali
  • (b)Urdu
  • (c)Hindi
  • (d)English

  Answer(b) Urdu — the first issue appeared in Urdu on 1 November 1913, with a Punjabi edition following on 9 December.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Who among the following was the first president of the Ghadar Party?

  • (a)Har Dayal
  • (b)Sohan Singh Bhakna
  • (c)Rash Behari Bose
  • (d)Lala Lajpat Rai

  Answer(b) Sohan Singh Bhakna — a Punjabi worker on the American West Coast, president of the body from which the Ghadar Party was constituted, with Har Dayal as its general secretary.