Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands by Kornel S. Chang

Author:Kornel S. Chang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

CONVERGING ON REVOLUTIONARY MANHOOD

Within IWW circles, no figure was held in higher esteem than the South Asian revolutionary. Venerated for his militant radicalism that called for immediate revolution and aggressively confronting the ruling elite, the South Asian revolutionary was held up as a paragon of virile manhood. “There may not be as much sedition among the Hindus of British Columbia as among Canadian-born Socialists who rant of the flag as ‘a bloody rag’; but our Socialistic seditionists have never yet been accused of collecting two million dollars to send home to India to buy rifles for the revolution.”81 The emphasis on militancy, confrontation, and direct action—that is, the vision of a gendered insurgency—brought virile white and Asian radicals together in moments of interracial and interradical solidarity. As a spokesperson for the IWW boasted, “Our workers—revolutionists, you would call them—are at work among the Hindu in India.”82

The rendering of the South Asian as a heroic insurgent helped to distance him from and complicate his racial identification as an “Asiatic” and facilitated an interracial alliance that brought South Asian revolutionaries in contact with white labor radicals and their aspirations and ideas, and vice versa. Leading revolutionaries Hussain Rahim and Taraknath Das cultivated close ties with intellectuals, unionists, and activists associated with the IWW and the Sociality Party in Canada and the United States. Das began publishing his anticolonial newspaper, the Free Hindusthan, with financial assistance from the Socialist Party in Canada (SPC), and when he needed to relocate to avoid government censors in 1908, the Western Clarion offered the use of its offices in Seattle. The editors of the socialist paper also furnished Taraknath Das with space in its newspaper to air his anticolonial views. In the case of Hussain Rahim, you will remember that it was his radical ties that so worried Dominion officials at the time of his entry and had them working so hard to keep him out of Canada. Confirming their worst fears, Rahim went on to engage in free speech fights, raise funds, translate organizing literature, and recruit members for the IWW and the SPC in British Columbia. His efforts earned him a seat on the SPC’s Executive Committee, which made him the first nonwhite person to be elected into the party’s leadership.83 In this capacity, Rahim was believed to be the key figure in the spread of subversive ideas among the South Asian immigrant population: “The Hindus have up to the present never identified themselves with any particular political party and the introduction by Rahim of the socialist propaganda into this community is, I consider a very serious matter, as the majority of these people are uneducated and ignorant and easily led like sheep by a man like Rahim.”84

Indeed, Rahim and other revolutionary leaders served as a bridge between white labor radicals and South Asian migrant workers. In 1913, Agnes Laut, reporting for the Saturday Night, wrote that she saw “long lists of subscriptions from Hindu workmen to the IWW strike funds” during her investigations into Wobbly activities in British Columbia.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.